Just a few miles east of Albany, New York, where my inlaws reside in a community I've seen transform itself over the last two decades from a semi-rural area to typical suburbia (although there are still a number of small apple orchids in the area), is the hamlet of North Greenbush.
Residents receive their mail from the Wyantskill Post Office and their fire protection for the Defreesville Fire Department. Wyantskill, address notwithstanding, as far as I can tell, too, the Wyantskill Creek, still a gushing brook, flows almost entirely within Troy city limits as it did on an early 19th Century map of the area I once encountered on Long Island by chance. This discrepancy can be understood when we consider how vague borders can be in rural areas.
This is how it is with rural areas and with areas only recently suburbanized, say over the last half-century. Levittown's boundaries are largely free of such ambiguities although Levittown Hall is in Hicksville, the public pools are jointly administered by the Town of Hempstead and Town of Oyster Bay per agreement conceived by Willilam Levitt, and the two school districts in Levittown spill over into blocks with Hicksville, Wantagh, Seaford, and Bethpage mailing addresses.
Levittown is not defined by "11756" alone. Clear-cut all the same compared to North Greenbush. This was not always the case. Jerusalem and Island Trees, the precursors to Levittown, were respectively, located in south and north Levittown but possessed no clear boundaries or legal municipal designations - the key to a geographic place-name's journey to officaldom.
The northernmost limit of what could be called Jerusalem is St. John's of Jerusalem Church built in 1856 as the German Methodist Episcopal Chruch but rechristened with the Jerusalem name around 1926. Island Trees' southernmost limit, if the namesake school district established in 1902 were to define its parameter, would have encompassed land at least as far south, at the time, as the Seaman, Miller, and Midsky farmsteads east of Wantagh Avenue and beteween Miller Road and Hempstead Turnpike.
Prior to 1947, informal and inexact names like Jerusalem, Island Trees, Central Park, Bloomingdale, and Williamsville were used to describe locations that in 2012 are clearly within Levittown. For example:
* Farmers along Hempstead Turnpike, Jerusalem Avenue, and Division Avenue had mailing addresses in the early 20th Century that listed Hicksville.
* Some 19th Century maps list Jerusalem but not Island Trees and vice versa.
* Island Trees is shown near Division Avenue in the 1906 and 1914 Belcher Hyde maps.
* Maps from the 1930's, like Hagstrom, show Island Trees as east of Jerusalem Avenue.
* Catherine Leis, born on Bloomingdale Road in 1923, once told Lynne Matarrese of the Levittown Historical Society that her birth certificate read Central Park.
* Promoters of the Vanderbilt Cup Race described the Grandstand (the vacant lot near the corner of Orchid Road and Skimmer Lane) as being "near Central Park."
*The mailing address of the Long Island Aviation Country Club, which operated from 1929 to 1950 and whose clubhouse was clearly where Blacksmith and Laural Lane are located today, was given as Hicksville.
All of this changed after Levittown was created and Willilam Levitt, consequently, clearly put us on the map.
Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org
