Influences: From Hempstead Turnpike to the Information Superhighway

Such is the curious nature of the history of Long Island that the development of so many communities over decades and centuries can be seen as formulating along axis such as rail lines or major traffic conduits. There is, for example, a four-and-a-half mile imaginary line that starts 'round and about Wantagh's Cherrywood Shopping Center at Jerusalem Avenue and Wantagh Avenue, bisects Levittown, and continues north to Jericho Turnpike near Route 106 in Jericho.

This line would have been more obvious in the 1680s as it connected two Quaker settlements like two points on a piece of paper with nothing betwixt. Along this axis line, over the past three-and-a-half centuries, community development moved up and down like beads on an abbacus.    

Between 1664 and 1837, the principal influence upon the future Levittown/Hicksville area flowed inwards from the two points of the Jericho and Jerusalem (now Wantagh) settlements. It was the area where the farmers and herdsmen, whose houses and cultivated fields were in Jericho and Jerusalem, grazed their cattle and sheep in the meadows of the Hempstead Plains that would become potato fields in the 19th and 20th centuries and, after World War II, Levittown and Hicksville's winding suburban lanes.

The northern stretch of this open land was dominated by Jericho's Hicks family after the subdivision of the old Williams Purchase in 1745, 97 years after Robert Williams acquired the land from the Matenicock Indians. The southern half was dominated by the Seaman family of Jerusalem. Historian Claire Ellis estimated that by 1873 there were scores of houses in Jerusalem and "every other one was owned by a Seaman or relative".

After 1837, influence flowed from the center of our axis with the arrival of the LIRR and influx of German immigrant farmers and craftsmen. It was around this time that the lands of the original 1648 Williams Purchase began to be called Hicksville. After World War II, this point-of-influence moved southwards along the axis to Hempstead Turnpike. The Levittown area went from being a place influenced by its immediately neighboring areas to a place that would have the principal impact on surrounding communities with the Levitt Development extending beyond the present bounds of Levittown and spilling over into Hicksville, Wantagh, East Meadow, Bethpage, and Westbury and, in general, the building of Levittown marking the start of the suburban building boom that would transform the entire country.    

In recent decades, we've come to see Levittown and the surrounding towns as places where the principal influences arrive from a national or even global level. True, even before 1980, our area's shifting points along axis of influence was affected by the outside world. Early colonial land purchases were indirectly a function of Anglo-Dutch politics. The LIRR was sired by the growth of the cities of New York, Brooklyn and Boston. The suburban building boom of the 1947-80 era was affected primarily by World War II and the Cold War, providing the residents and defense industries that employed many of them.

What has happened since 1980 is that influence no longer moves up and down a geographical axis line like a bead on an abbacus. The entire axis itself no longer exists. The "information superhighway", as early 1990s cyberpunks called the burgeoning Internet, is now probably more important in the day-to-day lives of most Levittowners than Hempstead Turnpike. Television journalists, sitcom characters and professional athletes and entertainers who have never set foot in Levittown are better known to us than next door neighbors.

Levittown homes are more likely to be festooned with furniture, home furnishings, and household appliances manufactured in China and India than within a day's drive. People working in the stores, gas stations and restaurants of Levittown are more likely to live outside of Levittown than be local residents. Levittown has entered the post-modern era where physical proximity is not longer the most relevant variable.    

If it shortsighted of our grandparents to think they could live forever on a quiet suburban town free of the troubles of the larger world, it's equally myopic to think that a global technological society can continue to function without some definable cultural tradition, values infrastructure, and sense of home and hearth that can only come from being part of a real physical community.    

It's been 346 years since John Seaman became the first European to settle in what's now Levittown. We can never hope to know what things will be like around here in 2356 let alone what'll be the next set of influences. But that's the nature of history: a new chapter is always waiting to be written.

 Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org