Drive past 5 Randall Road this month and you'll notice the chain-link fence looks different than it did a year ago. There's a new building where an old one used to sit, a fresh sign, and on Friday and Saturday mornings, actual cars in a lot that used to sit empty. If you've lived in Shoreham long enough to remember when this site was just "the Tesla place behind the fence," the change is real. But it's easy to misread what changed.
The building that opened this summer is not Nikola Tesla's laboratory. That building, the one designed in 1901 by architect Stanford White and his firm McKim, Mead & White, the one that survived a fire started by a nervous inventor and a J.P. Morgan loan, is still closed. It has no reopening date. What opened is something else entirely, and understanding the difference tells you more about how this site actually works than any tour brochure will.
What Actually Reopened
The new structure is called the Eugene Sayan Visitor Center, a 2,200-square-foot building on the same 16-acre campus, renovated rather than built from scratch. Renovation work on the existing structure began in September 2024, and a more formal construction phase, the one that got the press releases, broke ground a year later in September 2025. It was dedicated in July 2026, timed to land on the same weekend as the Nikola Tesla Expo, the annual event that marks Tesla's birthday.
Local coverage from the Riverhead News-Review described the Sayan Center as the first permanent public building ever constructed on the Wardenclyffe site. That's a meaningful distinction from the laboratory, which was Tesla's own building, not a modern addition. The Sayan Center exists because the lab itself is not close to ready.
The lab's story explains why. On the night of November 21, 2023, a fire tore through the building's roof and destroyed steel girders that had been part of an earlier restoration. More than 100 firefighters from eleven departments responded. The damage came to more than $3 million. TSCW's leadership at the time said the fire likely started from sparks thrown by contractors' blowtorches, though the official cause was never conclusively determined and arson was ruled out. The building's 1901 bones reportedly held up. The interior did not.
That fire didn't just delay repairs. It reset the whole capital campaign. The nonprofit had already raised roughly $14 million toward an original $20 million restoration goal, including a widely reported $1 million gift from Elon Musk, before the fire hit. Afterward, the total project cost climbed to $24 million to cover fire damage and inflation, with the raised total holding around the same $14 million mark through early 2025. A $500,000 grant from New York State Parks, awarded in February 2025, went specifically toward stabilizing what the fire had damaged.
None of that money bought a reopened laboratory. It bought a different building.
The Building Nobody Was Watching Until It Became the Whole Story
Kara Cannon took over as TSCW's executive director in January 2026, replacing Marc Alessi after nine years and a brief interim period under Douglas Borge. She's been candid about what the Sayan Center actually is right now. Calling it a "visitor center," she told the Riverhead News-Review, is something of a misnomer, because in its early phase, it's not a lobby in front of a bigger museum. It's the entire operation.
"We are not just preserving history, we are building a place where the next generation of scientists and inventors can be inspired, educated, and connected."
She's referred to it internally as a preview center, a phrase that captures the honest scale of the milestone. Inside, there's exhibition space and a small classroom and conference area, one the organization is pitching to local businesses as a meeting space away from the daily grind. Docent-led tours follow standards TSCW says are modeled on Smithsonian training. TSCW is also working with filmmaker Joe Sikorski, whose 2015 documentary on the fight to save Wardenclyffe was selected for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Core Collection, to help build the exhibits that will eventually fill the space.
That last detail matters more than it looks like on paper. Sikorski's film was about the preservation campaign, the years spent trying to keep this site from becoming a parking lot. Building his work into the new center's exhibits means the story on display isn't just Tesla's. It's the story of the fight to save this specific plot of land in this specific town, told by the people who lived through the fundraising and the near-misses.
What You Can Actually Do There Right Now
The Sayan Center's hours are limited and appointment-driven, which surprises people who assume "reopened" means "walk-in." As of this summer, the center operates Friday through Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., with docent-led tours requiring advance reservation. There's no browsing the grounds on a whim during those windows unless you've booked ahead.
But there's a second, older way to experience Wardenclyffe that doesn't require a reservation at all, and most residents don't know it exists.
| Access type | Reservation needed | Cost | What you actually see |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-guided perimeter walk | No | Free | Exterior of the 1901 lab, original stone tower base, bronze Tesla statue donated by the Republic of Serbia, two informational kiosks |
| One-hour guided grounds tour | Yes, in advance | Varies | Same exterior sites, with docent narration; subject to weather and guide availability |
| Sayan Center docent tour | Yes, in advance | Varies | Interior exhibition space, classroom, and the beginning of the museum experience |
The self-guided option is the one nobody talks about. Park on Tesla Street on the site's east side, walk the fence line, and you can see the laboratory's exterior, the base of what was once a 187-foot transmitting tower before investors pulled out and the structure was dismantled in 1917, and a statue that was a gift from Tesla's home country. Two kiosks along the fence fill in context. It's not the museum experience the capital campaign is building toward, but it's been available for free the entire time the lab has been closed, fire or no fire.
What the Money Actually Bought
It's worth sitting with the arithmetic here, because it explains the pace of everything. A $24 million project with $14 million raised is not underfunded in any casual sense. It's a nonprofit that has pulled in seven figures from a tech billionaire, state park grants, and corporate sponsors, and still can't put a date on when the actual laboratory reopens. Restoring a fire-damaged, 125-year-old building with no certificate of occupancy is a different kind of project than renovating an existing structure into a preview space. The Sayan Center could open because it was achievable within a defined budget and timeline. The lab remains closed because it isn't, yet.
That gap between money raised and doors opened is the real story for anyone who lives close enough to have watched this unfold in real time. The visitor center's arrival is genuine progress. It is also, by TSCW's own description, a preview of a museum that doesn't exist yet.
The Site Is Becoming Something Bigger Than a Museum
The clearest sign that Wardenclyffe's ambitions have shifted came in June 2026, when TSCW announced a partnership with NewYorkBIO, the statewide bioscience trade association. The collaboration positions the Sayan Center as a venue for professional gatherings tied to New York's life sciences sector, not just field trips and weekend tours. That's a meaningful pivot for a site that spent a decade being described almost entirely in terms of school programs and Tesla trivia. It suggests the people running this project see the eventual full site less as a static museum and more as a working campus, one where Suffolk County's own STEAM economy has a physical address.
For residents, that shift is worth watching independent of the museum timeline. A property that hosts life sciences convenings, STEAM education partnerships, and an annual Expo that drew sponsors like PSEG-LI, National Grid, and SUNY Farmingdale is becoming a fixture in the neighborhood's identity whether or not the lab itself reopens on any particular schedule. The Nikola Tesla Expo in July 2026 pulled in the Cradle of Aviation Museum, FIRST Robotics, and the Long Island Aquarium as exhibitors, alongside a drone light show closing out the night. That's a different kind of neighborhood event than Wardenclyffe has hosted in years past, and it's happening on the same grounds where, not that long ago, the only public access was a fence line and a couple of kiosks.
If you've lived near Randall Road long enough to remember when this was simply the overgrown lot behind the fence, the honest read on 2026 is this: something real opened, it just wasn't the thing most people were picturing. The lab will have its own moment eventually. For now, the neighborhood's newest landmark is a 2,200-square-foot preview of what's still being built, one weekend at a time.
Donna Neyland has spent decades getting to know the pace of change in towns like Shoreham, from new construction on Randall Road to the local institutions that anchor a neighborhood's identity. If you're weighing a move in or around Shoreham and want a guide who actually knows what's happening on the ground, Donna Lomenzo is a call away.
