NOTE: As with most Internet polls, this poll is not balanced against a weighted sample. There is no statistical accuracy relating to any specific demographic of poll takers. Anyone can take this poll and the Northender collects no data about the respondents.
Oyster Bay used to be much less busy than it is today. I hesitate to use the word “crowded” because I don’t think it’s quite crowded yet, but it’s getting there. I remember being able to walk down South Street at night as a teenager in the early 1980’s and not see a car on the road. We had a nice patch of woods then too, now the site of $2,000,000+ homes in upper Brookville.
The people of Oyster Bay have a varied heritage; some tracing their roots to our founding fathers, others having arrived with whatever immigrant set was in vogue at the time – the Germans, Irish, Italians. Today it is largely El Salvadorians. For all the complaining the assimilated later generations tend to do of the newcomers, their ancestors faced the same situation: poor living conditions, language barriers, demanding physical labor for modest wages.
Historically the village itself was home to many of the blue collar workers who supported the surrounding estates of the wealthy, such as those in Cove Neck, Oyster Bay Cove, Mill Neck, Centre Island, and to a lesser extent Muttontown and Brookville. The town had an asphalt plant as well, which at one time employed a fair number of the local residents. These laborers helped dig sand out of Pine Hollow to be used in concrete on roads all over New York State during the great road building boom of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
The carved out shell of that sand mining now holds the former Hallock Chevrolet building and is a bone of contention between Avalon Bay Communities, which wants to build a high density apartment complex on the site, and a well organized group of local residents against the effort. The irony: the people that helped dig that sand to be used in roads that enabled sprawl to bring more people into the area and justify the building of a large apartment complex are the same people, or descendants thereof, that don’t want to see more people come here.
Many things have changed in Oyster Bay and the surrounding area since the 1950’s and 1960’s. For one, most of those large estates have been sold and segmented. A few remain, most of which are on the market now. In the wealthiest surrounding villages more houses were created where there were fewer, bringing in more, slightly less wealthy people. At the same time, segmentation occurred at the bottom of the market. Builders and developers, mostly locals themselves, created opportunity by seeking building variances and squeezing new houses in between older ones.
Drive or walk down any street in Oyster Bay and you can see the result of this overbuilding. Just look for the split ranch wedged in between a Spanish mission 1920’s style home and an old Victorian. Of course, today the bad taste has graduated beyond split ranches. There’s what looks like a mausoleum being built on School Street, just near the corner of Burtis Avenue. You know the one I mean.
What is it exactly that gave rise to this mixed bag of architecture? What prompted this shoe-horn construction mentality? Why a complete lack of planning or consideration for simple aesthetics?
Surely there are many reasons. A lack of a local government truly representing local interests in future planning and aesthetics is one. Another is putting the need for maximum profit above all else.
I have another theory as well: The descendants of blue collar workers within the confines of New York city’s boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn assimilated. And as they assimilated, they didn’t all want to be landscapers and busboys and day-laborers. They were educated. And after they were educated, they moved out. They moved into the heart of the city or they moved to the suburbs. And as they moved, many of the descendants of the blue collar crowds in the places the city folk were moving to were displaced.
In some cases these “townies” survived by buying mom’s house or getting a deal from an uncle. Some of these folks moved beyond the blue collar careers like their city counterparts, but in many cases, onto careers that didn’t afford them the ability to stay where they grew up. In either case, there were fewer of them and so with housing prices rising as demand from a sprawling city moved east, they moved further east where housing was more affordable, likely displacing the people in Suffolk, who, in turn, headed, and continue to head, to the Carolinas.
So now when these blue collar descendants of Queen’s immigrants educated themselves and became trades-people, or teachers, or stock brokers, or doctors, lawyers and bankers, and headed to the suburbs, they brought with them their money and their desire to live in the quaint “country”. They also brought with them their bad taste, their definition of “property” as two houses not sharing a common wall, their love of concrete, their horn honking, their double parking. They brought their monstrous HUMVEE driving while talking on a cell phone self-absorbed New York mentality.
Nothing endures but change. For better or for worse? I guess it depends on where you come from.
I could not agree with you more. And that is why I left Oyster Bay/Mill Neck earlier this year; east, to a place that still looks, feels, and sounds like the country. I am so happy to be away from the Oyster Bay carbuncles stuck on the neck of so many lovely tree-line roads.
Dr. E. Verlander
November 3, 2007, 6:18 PM
While I agree with the bulk of the comments in this article, I would like to point out one comment I disagree with. That is in regards to: "The irony: the people that helped dig that sand to be used in roads that enabled sprawl to bring more people into the area and justify the building of a large apartment complex are the same people, or descendants thereof, that don’t want to see more people come here."
I am against Avonlon Bay. It is not that I do not want to see more peop...
