White’s Liquors

Before White’s Liquors poured its first drink, this Tudor-style building on Montauk Highway served ice cream sodas to kids watching for strange cars rolling through town. White’s Drug Store was the hamlet’s beating heart from the 1930s through the early 1950s, complete with lunch counter and a bird’s-eye view of soldiers stumbling out of Shagwong Tavern across the street. When Dick White Sr. sold the pharmacy business to Al and Jen Rattiner in the early 1950s, the drug store carried on in that same building for over a decade before the Rattiners built its now-iconic replacement nearby. The old Tudor building eventually became Montauk Liquor Store, run for decades by Dick White Jr., who’d once worked the drugstore counter himself, cementing the family’s role in what locals call a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem.

The building outlived more than one generation’s plans for it. It survived the Depression, a side wall torn off by the 1938 hurricane, a change of ownership, and eventually the drug store’s move next door, only to keep serving Montauk under a different name and a different product. White’s Drug Store itself finally closed in 2024, just shy of its 100th year in business, but the original Tudor building it started in never really stopped operating, it just kept trading one kind of daily errand for another.