Week 17 - Favorite Place - Long Island

Week 17: Favorite Place – Long Island

 

Long Island, New York is my favorite place  based upon great memories of an abundance of ancestors, family, friends, youthful experiences, historical places, and even the geography (beaches, beaches, beaches), and geology of the beautiful setting in which I grew up.

Geology – Terminal Moraine

Can you imagine an ice sheet 1 ½ miles thick moving southward for thousands of years like a gigantic plow? It has scraped over eastern Canada, all of New York State and New England and stopped just south of Connecticut in the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way it has gathered millions and millions of tons of rock and sand at its leading edge. When the ice finally begins to melt and retreat, it leaves all that rock and sand forming Long Island as we know it today. The north shore has high bluffs and its beaches are stony. From the center of the island southward to the salt water marshes and beaches of the south shore (outwash area) the ground is sandy. The island measures 118 miles long by 23 miles wide at its widest point. 

 

Long Island

Colonial Period

By 1624 the Dutch had established the town and port of New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. They also had expanded their colonial boundaries of New Netherlands to Long Island, Staten Island, and north up the Hudson River as far as Fort Orange (today’s Albany).

The first English colonists came to Long Island in 1640 by sailing south across Long Island Sound from the Colony of New Haven (Connecticut). They landed on the north shore of what today is Nassau County (green area of map) not far from where I grew up. Both my maternal grandparents and my parents are in a cemetery, Nassau Knolls, where these early settlers most likely came ashore. Upon landing, the English saw a sign nailed to a tree emblazoned with the Dutch royal seal. They destroyed the sign and began building anyway. The Dutch ran them off. This group of eight settler families “moved on” by sailing east around the northeastern most tip of Long Island (Orient Point today) and entering Gardiners Bay and Peconic Bay to found Southampton on the south shore. The group of settlers included some of my wife’s direct ancestors by the name of Sears. Today, Southampton is filled with fabulous homes of movie stars and wealthy business tycoons. We often joke about claiming a lot or two as our ancestral home.

 

Southampton

Genealogy

With the exception of my Mayflower line (Cook) that landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, my other three main ancestral lines (McLaughlin, Ford and Layton) had established themselves in Brooklyn by the early to mid-19^th century, after arriving in the port of New York from Northern Ireland and England. To keep it simple, my ancestors first settled in Brooklyn (pink on map), later migrating north a few miles into Queens (orange on map), then a few miles further east into Nassau County (green on map), and finally, within the last 60 years, to the eastern end of Suffolk County (yellow on map). Brooklyn, until it was incorporated into New York City in 1898, had become the third largest city in the USA. Today, as I develop a need for family certified birth, marriage and death records, all I have to do is deal with The Municipal Archives for the five boroughs of New York City. Sounds simple, but although I have a well developed family tree, I haven’t actually gone after certified proof documents yet.

My own history

I was born in 1940 in Mineola, Nassau County, Long Island, smack in the middle of the green area on the map. I was raised not far away in the small towns of New Hyde Park and Roslyn. My family members came and stayed put within an area no bigger than the western third of the island. My wife loves to tell me that compared to her family, who landed in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, migrated west to North Dakota and further on to Washington State, “Nobody in your family ever went anywhere west of the Hudson River.” My smiling reply is, “When you’ve got everything you need in one place, why move?” In fact, it has only been over the past 50 years or so, that many of us “kids” (now in our 50s-80s) have moved elsewhere for jobs and more living space.

 

So, I ask myself, what makes me remember this place so fondly?

I remember searchlights at the end of our street, playing their brilliant white beams of light across a pitch black sky looking for German bombers that, thank goodness, never came. 

At age 5, the belching, chugging, hissing steam engine of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) slowly pulling into Williston Station caused me to clutch my dad’s hand tightly and try to get behind him.

My mother walked me to the old school building on the hill and left me all alone on that first day of school. “Mom, Where are you going? Don’t leave me, please come back!” But it all turned out ok.

I remember a skinny Christmas tree, heavy with shiny, hanging ornaments and silver icicles, and that new toy train just for me.

And the music!  Joe Sharinay, Mr Dietz, Dr Listengardt, and my dad or mom spent hours playing string quartets in the middle of our tiny living room.

Along with my second-grade classmates, I printed my name on a lined piece of paper which went into the cornerstone of our brand new elementary school. Someday, when I’m long gone, someone will see that list of names. I wonder what they’ll do with it?

Like so many of my generation, I loved lying in bed listening on my old radio to The Adventures of Sam Spade, The Shadow, Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Burgan, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Jack Benny, and The Adventures of the Thin Man.

As a child, I played with boyhood friends in the potato field at end of our street, digging forts and having dirt bomb fights. Long Island still had many farms then, and I was lucky to have one next door.

Aunt Grace took me and my cousins, Joyce, Bill, and Lynne, on a great steamboat excursion from a pier in lower Manhattan, across Long Island Sound to New York’s Rye Beach Playland Amusement Park one sunny summer’s day. What a treat.

I spent hours climbing the tall Sycamore tree in our front yard, making believe I was manning the crows nest of a tall pirate ship.

One day dad and I hiked in the woods and found remnants of the Old Motor Parkway, near Herrick’s pond. It was the equivalent of finding remnants of old Route 66 today.

Long Island is where I learned to ride a two-wheel bike, play stick ball with my cousins on the street around the corner, and play cowboys and Indians with Bobby Noble.

The tinker in his old Model-A Ford truck playing music to announce his arrival to sharpen knives and scissors, and of course, the Good Humor man jingling bells to woo the kids on the street out to buy ice cream.

I remember the feel of the burning sand on my feet in the middle of scorching hot days at Jones beach or Sunken Meadow State Park.

Grandma Cook often took me riding on the subway to see The Museum of Natural History with the huge blue whale in the entrance hall and all the dinosaurs, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a troop of mounted knights in armor.

On each trip to the city, Grandma Cook took me to lunch at the Automat, a place I loved where there were hundreds of little boxes with glass doors built into the walls. I could look in, choose the sandwich and piece of pie I wanted, insert a coin and take out just what I wanted for lunch. The only problem I had was with distracted adult diners who would accidently bump me in the head with their trays because I was still too short for them to notice me. I remember feeling very put out because of their obliviousness.

I had a route delivering our local paper, Newsday, in the new community where the potato fields used to be.

I will never forget the heart-stopping minutes I sat squeezed into a cloth seat with Uncle Jim and my cousin Bill, riding 250 feet straight up in the air on the Parachute Jump at Coney Island, feet swinging free, worried about what would happen to us when we reached the top. But the view! I could see forever, and the gentle ride down made up for all the terror going up.

Parachute Jump, Coney Island, c. 1950

As a teenager, I climbed the second tallest hill on Long Island by myself and discovered the foundation of an old mansion on the top. I remember sitting on a set of steps resting from my climb and wondering what the house must have looked like and who lived there. It was the site of Clarence Mackay’s vast estate. The experience informed my imagination my whole life, and I eventually created a website devoted to the history of that magical place.

My dad and I (but mostly my dad) built a 14’ wooden outboard motor boat in our garage. I learned to water ski behind that boat near Bar Beach in Hempstead Harbor, and at the age of 15, my parents trusted me to take my new boat, along with a friend, from Sea Cliff Yacht Club, west through Long Island Sound, then through a patch of turbulent water called Hellgate, north-northwest up the Harlem River, north up the wide, imposing Hudson River to the City of Poughkeepsie and back, all in two days.

Learning to drive on a 1941 Plymouth under the tutelage of John T. Carew’s daughter Maryann was certainly memorable. She didn’t tell me to slow down from 30 mph before making a 90 degree right turn into a long driveway to deliver groceries. I can still hear the sound of screeching tires, and you can imagine how we bounced around!

We drove to Florida on two great school-sponsored adventures as members of The Five Fathoms Club, scuba diving off Marathon in the Florida Keys in 1956 and 1958.

I bought my first car, a 1950 Ford convertible, for $250, during the summer after my junior year in high school.

And that summer day in Roslyn Park that I met a girl named Joan at a picnic, who turned out to be my “steady” during my entire senior year.

I got accepted for college at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.

I took a job spraying trees on the beautiful estate grounds of Long Island’s north shore as my summertime job during college, but that was the end of my time on Long Island and the beginning of the rest of my life.

 

In 2008 I visited my cousins in Suffolk County and arriving before sunrise at Montauk Point, I found dozens of surf-casters pulling in huge striped bass and blue fish right from their casting positions on the beach. The rocks tumbled in the surf, clattering softly to themselves, an accompaniment to the rising sun.

 

None of these things, as individual events or experiences, makes Long Island my Favorite Place, but all of them melded together does and resulted in a great foundation for life and still puts Long Island miles above all the other places that I’ve experienced since. Ah, the memories.

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Afterword

My father, William McLaughlin (1908-2007), and his father, William McLaughlin (1879-1962), grew up on Long Island during the years when Nassau and Suffolk Counties were almost all rural wooded farmland. Homes were inexpensive. My grandfather’s new home in 1923 cost $6,000. My dad’s new home in 1939 (at the end of The Depression) cost $4,000. Beachfront property was still readily available and inexpensive for middle class Americans on Long Island. Many families had summer cottages along the south shores of Brooklyn and Queens, and along both the north and south shores of Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Hillside Heights, the little community I lived in during the first five-six years of my life, was surrounded by farms. But then change began.

 

I vividly remember the end of WWII, celebrated by car horns blowing, church bells ringing, and all of our neighbors, happily going nuts, running outside and cheering on V-J Day (Victory in Japan Day), August 15^th, 1945. And why not? V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day), had come just three months earlier on May 8^th. There were twenty houses on our short, dead-end street and half the men had been away in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard or Merchant Marine for several years.

 

Surrender of Imperial Japan marking the end of WWII in Sep 1945

In 1947, William Levitt & Sons began building mass-produced, affordable housing for veterans returning from World War II. Island Trees, Long Island or Levittown as it later became known, is widely recognized as the first modern American suburb. All the farms close to our house were gone by 1949 and covered with new single family homes.

 

By 1970, with the population topping 7,000,000, my parents sold their home in Roslyn and moved to Maine. They looked forward to returning to a more peaceful lifestyle, giving up the all-day traffic jams and sky-rocketing property taxes. Who could blame them?

 

In my memory, beautiful, rural Long Island was pretty much gone by the late-1950s. The population of the island has grown from 1.5 million in 1900 to a population of 7.8 million in 2020. And this dramatic growth did not occur in densely populated old Brooklyn and Queens, but in suburbanizing Nassau and Suffolk Counties, in what had been the last bastion of rural Long Island.

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I think I moved away at the right time. I was off to college in 1958 and began my twenty year Army career in 1962. But the good news for me is after all the growth that has happened on Long Island since I can remember, my memories of my favorite place  are still 100% intact.

 

Montauk Point at the extreme eastern tip of Long Island