West Hempstead Now and Then

Joseph H Cohen: WH School District President During Pivotal Era

2023-10-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Advertisement (Sept 17, 1935, Nassau Daily Review) for Joseph H Cohen's fruit stand

Some while ago, I had occasion to stop in at the George Washington School and noticed an intriguing dedication plaque of the building in the foyer. The plaque had a listing of names of members of the school board during the school’s inauguration, and the largest name listed on that plaque was that of the school board president, Joseph H. Cohen, the subject of the present writeup.

Born in Russia in 1886 to Nathan and Frances Cohen, Joseph Harry Cohen's journey to the United States at the age of eight, alongside his parents and three sisters, marked the beginning of a remarkable life of contribution and service. The Cohen family were among the early settlers of Woodbine, New Jersey, an agricultural community with a significant place in history. Founded in 1891 with the support of philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch, Woodbine was created with the dual purpose of settling Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who were fleeing persecution, as well as providing them with the agricultural skills to become productive members of their new host country. (In its heyday during the initial years of the 20th Century, Woodbine was 94% Jewish, and the first one of the only municipalities where its local government, from Town Hall to the school district to the fire department, was headed by Jews. The fact that the United States is the first modern democracy in the world [the oldest existing nation with a constitutional government in which the people elect their own government and representatives], would mean that Woodbine was purportedly the world’s first semi-autonomous Jewish town in nearly 2,000 years since the destruction of the Second Temple.)

Cohen graduated from the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural School and proceeded to run a poultry farm business with his father in Woodbine. In 1923, Cohen and his family moved out to Long Island when a 23-acre farm in West Hempstead on the south side of Hempstead Turnpike went up for sale. His farm focused on two products: peaches and poultry.

Upon arriving in West Hempstead, Joseph Cohen dove right into local civic leadership. In 1927 he ran for and won the office of President of the WH School Board. Throughout the 110+ year history of the WH school district, Cohen’s tenure as president occurred during the most significant and transformative era in its entire history. Until then, the district consisted of one 8-room school building on Chestnut Street. In Cohen’s initial year, an expansion of that building was completed, effectively doubling its capacity. Then, in rapid succession, two additional school buildings were voted on and built. The Eagle Avenue School opened Monday, November 5, 1928, and was dedicated on February 21, 1929. The George Washington school, (originally called the Carl Street School), was authorized by local voters in December 1929 by a 138-75 margin, at a cost of $355,000. It opened on November 30, 1931, and was officially dedicated on Monday, February 22, 1932, the date chosen to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the birth of the school’s namesake, George Washington. The rapid conversion of former farms into housing developments was transforming WH in a profound way and the district went through a period of unprecedented growth during that time. In September 1929, enrollment stood at 613 students. Just one year later, that number grew to 776, an astonishing increase of almost 27%.

In addition to his contributions to education, Cohen was actively involved in the West Hempstead community. He served as the President of the West Hempstead Civic Association, starting in 1927. A hot-button issue during that time was the question of whether to incorporate within the Village of Hempstead. Many locals actually advocated for incorporation, since it would ostensibly bring with it an increased level of municipal services that were lacking in WH. Cohen’s civic engagement also extended to the West Hempstead Fire Department, where he held the position of Financial Secretary. Meanwhile, Cohen was an active member of the Jewish Agricultural Society as well as at Temple Beth Israel in Hempstead.

The Cohen family's legacy extended beyond civic affairs. Joseph's wife, Mrs. Eva Cohen, served as the chairwoman of the George Washington PTA and on the ladies’ auxiliary of Beth Israel. Their dedication continued through their involvement in organizations like Sons of Zion.

The Cohen family's farm along Hempstead Turnpike was a hub of agricultural activity, specializing in chicken and peaches. The farm, known as Peach Grove Farm, became a local favorite for its delicious peaches, sold at the fruit stand along the Turnpike. The Cohens ran the farm and stand until 1939, when they decided to sell the property to a developer. Thereafter, the “West Hempstead Oaks” development, with its 150 homes, took root on the property. The farm was marked with two prominent, physical characteristics; its numerous peach trees toward the front of the property and the many old-growth oak trees in the rear of the property. Hence, the lasting legacy of this farm remains with the naming of its two central streets off the Turnpike – Oakland Avenue and Peachgrove Drive.

(The developer retained many of the prized peach trees to shade the backyards of his new homes. Many of the old, majestic oak trees also remained, a few of which can still be seen today along Henry, Maxwell, Bell, and Wilson [formerly George] Streets).

After it was developed, the West Hempstead Oaks neighborhood created its own identity and formed a very active civic association of its own called the West Hempstead Oaks Civic Association to advocate for civic causes. It has been a long-standing tradition of the West Hempstead Fire Department to conduct a Santa fire truck parade on Christmas Eve, and this tradition was purportedly started by the West Hempstead Oaks Civic Association in 1942. (Other organizations like American Legion Cathedral Post featured events with Santa starting back in the 1930s, but the truck parade was first introduced by the Oaks Civic).

Joseph Cohen continued to live in a house on the Turnpike for a number of years and ran a liquor store in Floral Park until his retirement. His daughter Gwen (Goldie) married Bernard Perchanok and continued to live on Elm St in WH into the 2000s.

William Balfour Ker and Mary Ellen Sigsbee – Famous Lakeview Illustrators

2020-02-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Throughout the Nineteenth and into the Twentieth Century, the West Hempstead and Lakeview area was a popular location for country homes that were kept by affluent New York City merchants. During the Summer months, these estates provided a respite from the bustle and stifling heat of the city for the well-heeled set. Two such Lakeview residents, a husband and wife named William Balfour Ker and Mary Ellen Sigsbee, both artists who were rather famous in their time, purchased a large country home in 1906 from a NYC jeweler named Henry Ginnel located on Woodfield Road, just south of where the Lakeview library is currently located.

Location of the Henry Ginnel estate along the west side of Woodfield Rd in Lakeview, from the 1906 E. Belcher-Hyde map

As far as illustrators go, both Mary Ellen and William became pretty well-known. Perhaps the most effective venue for pop art during that time was the covers and pages of well-circulated magazines and journals, such as Life, the Saturday Evening Post and Harpers. This is how Norman Rockwell became so famous. Mary Ellen and William’s art graced the covers of many of these magazines, particularly in holiday editions of these journals where, for example, they depicted scenes of families around the hearth, and various snowscapes.

Both William and Mary Ellen came from somewhat well-known families; William was the son of a wealthy Scottish businessman and banker and his mother was the first cousin of Alexander Graham-Bell.

W. Balfour Ker

Mary Ellen was the daughter of Admiral Charles Sigsbee, Captain of the USS Maine, the sinking of which was the catalyst of the Spanish-American War. When William and Mary Ellen began dating in 1898 as students of the famed American illustrator Howard Pyle, Mary Ellen’s father vehemently objected to the relationship because of Wllliam’s socialist leanings. No doubt the mysterious explosion of Capt. Sigsbee’s ship in Havana Harbor that year gave the young couple the opportunity to elope while Mary Ellen’s father was preoccupied with other matters.

Mary Ellen Sigsbee

Early in their marriage, the Kers had been part of the fast growing artist colony in Greenwich Village, but by 1906 and now with a young son to care for, they were in the hunt for a summer retreat on Long Island, and they found a lovely estate along Woodfield Road in Lakeview. At that time, Woodfield Road was still heavily wooded and undeveloped and still afforded a beautiful natural landscape. Parallel to Woodfield Road, on the eastern side, ran Schodack Brook, a shallow rivulet that meandered through the woods, as it emptied downstream into Smith’s Pond in Rockville Centre. (As late as 1930, a Brooklyn Eagle reporter visited Lakeview and described the beauty of the scene as “a slice of old Connecticut transplanted to Long Island" and "suggestive of Shakespeare's Garden of Arden").

One of Ker’s most famous paintings was a scene called From the Depths, first published in a novel entitled The Silent War in 1906. The scene was a commentary on social inequality and depicts the ballroom of a party attended by the upper class, whose floor is propped up upon the backs of the struggling masses. The party is disrupted by a fist belonging to one of the wretched souls from below, that breaks through the floor of the room, to the bewilderment of the partygoers.

From the Depths, by W Balfour Ker

A popular theme among Ker's paintings were scenes about love and heartbreak, amidst some chosen scenic backdrop, such as a seashore or a woodscape. One of the paintings that Ker rendered during his time in West Hempstead was one he titled Playing Bridge, copyrighted on March 30, 1909, and was possibly inspired by a scene across the street from his West Hempstead home. In the picture, a man carries his love interest in his arms across a shallow wooded stream, safe and dry to the other side.

Playing Bride, by W Balfour Ker. Painted during their time in Lakeview, possibly inspired by local scenery.

By 1910 Ker and Sigsbee's marriage unraveled and Sigsbee sued for divorce. Shortly thereafter, with no longer any use for their country home, the couple sold their West Hempstead estate. Both Ker and Sigsbee remarried. Ker moved to Europe but returned to the US during WWI, where he helped out in the war effort by drawing illustrations for Liberty War Bond posters, before his death in 1918 at the age of 41. One of Ker's daughters from his second marriage married into the famous Weld family of Massachusetts and was the mother of Tuesday Weld, the famous movie star from the 1960s. Sigsbee remarried and became an outspoken advocate for women’s suffrage. She continued to illustrate for various publications, including the Christmas 1934 cover of the Saturday Evening Post entitled “Christmas Peek”, depicting a little girl peeking through a crack between double doors in the hopes of seeing Santa Claus, until her death in 1960 at the age of 84.

Christmas Peek, by Mary Ellen Sigsbee. Cover of Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 22, 1934

The Beginnings of the West Hempstead Fire Department - 100 Years On

2019-08-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

Original WH Fire House, circa 1925.

The inception of the West Hempstead Fire Department began years before the adoption of it’s formal charter in 1919. Life-long West Hempstead resident Helen Duryea recalled that, in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, her father and uncle, Edwin and Frank Duryea, would organize volunteer “bucket brigades” among the local farmers to confront fire emergencies that occurred in the area.

By the end of the second decade of the Twentieth Century, a confluence of factors contributed to the formation of our Fire Department. First, the adjacent neighborhood of Lakeview had already been served since 1909 by the Lakeview Hook & Ladder Company, and West Hempstead residents looked to emulate the successes of their neighbors to the south. Second, residential subdivisions, starting with Fairlawn Park in 1906, would begin a long process whereby West Hempstead property would be converted from farmland into rows of homes upon neatly platted streets. Thereafter, fire protection in West Hempstead became a matter of safeguarding entire town blocks from destruction rather than merely saving isolated barns and farm houses. Finally, fresh from victory in Europe in WWI, scores of young, able-bodied “doughboys” would return home in the beginning of 1919 and provide a propitious pool of volunteers to join the fire department.

At the start of 1919, the Victory Chemical Engine Company was formed out of a series of meetings that were held to plan the way forward for the nascent department. On Friday, March 21, at the third meeting of the company at the home of Ed Duryea, it was reported that 36 members had already been recruited. At that same meeting, the initial officers of the Company were installed, their names comprising a veritable Who’s Who of prominent citizens of West Hempstead: Foreman William S. Stringham, who owned a general store on Hempstead Turnpike in Munson (at the current corner of Nassau Blvd.); Assistant Foreman Wallace Hill, whose day job as a foreman at the NY Telephone Company no doubt served him well in his new position; Treasurer Henry Lee, a retired Norwegian shipbuilder who lived on Chestnut Street and founded Trinity Lutheran Church, among other local achievements; President Emil Baumbach, a machinist who lived with his family on Railroad Ave (Hempstead Gardens Drive); Vice President Paul Ohrtman who had a prolific local civic career as School District 27 president, Sanitation District 6 commissioner, and Town of Hempstead Receiver of Taxes; and trustees Ed and Frank Duryea, well known farmers and builders in the area. Soon thereafter the group filed incorporation papers with the Town of Hempstead and the New York Secretary of State, as the Victory Chemical Engine & Hose Co. No. 1. On July 10, 1919, it was reported in the Hempstead Sentinel that the Town of Hempstead had given its consent to the charter; in the following month, the Secretary of State followed suit.

A suitable, centrally-located property upon which to build a fire house was chosen along Hempstead Turnpike on land owned by Alice Bailey. In February, 1921, a Ladies Auxiliary was formed with Mrs. Sadie Ohrtman, Mrs. Lillian Naumann, and Mrs. Barbara Baumbach as founding officers. The Auxiliary hosted barn dances, strawberry festivals, and various social events to obtain the requisite funds for the new firehouse, while their inaugural event held in April 1921, a barn dance on the grounds of Charles Botsch, brought in $700 for the cause. Groundbreaking for the firehouse occurred soon after on May 15, 1921 and the well known local contractor Carl Mirschel was hired to build the edifice. Another barn dance, held the following year on February 7, 1922, typified the kinds of prizes that were awarded at such events: a ton of coal, a barrel of flour, a pig, and a barrel of potatoes. The following year, on April 17, 1922, a vote held at the brand new fire house was carried for the appropriation of $5,090 for the purchase of fire apparatus and equipment, as well as a new fire alarm.

In 1927, the formation of the West Hempstead Water District had a profound effect on fire protection of the neighborhood, as water lines and hydrants were installed throughout the district. In the ensuing years, the volunteer firefighters competed in various athletic and skills competitions. The Westerners drill team went on to win numerous State Championship drill competitions, including an unprecedented "threepeat" in 1939, 1940, and 1941, as well as the National Championship in 1939. In 1952, a new modern, brick fire house was built to replace the old wooden house that had served the district for 30 years.

Many of the officers and volunteers of the West Hempstead fire department have deep roots whose families span two and sometimes even three generations of service to the district, including well known local families such as Brohm, Riesterer, and Schroeher. The Schroeher family planted roots here in the 1790s. The patriarch of the family, Louis, ran what was probably the first hotel in the area in Franklin Square. Louis’ grandson, Joseph, was a founding member of the West Hempstead Fire Dept. and his son, Keith, served as fire chief for many decades as well.

The WHCSA wishes the West Hempstead Fire Department and well deserved congratulations on this milestone. The 100th anniversary parade and celebration block party will take place on September 21, starting at the Fire House.

The Lost West Hempstead WWI Monument

2019-02-19T11:53:00.003-08:00

The following article appeared in the February 2019 edition of the WHCSA News and Views Newsletter

Image of the WH war memorial cannon that stood at the LIRR station Plaza

This past November marked the hundredth anniversary of the end of WWI, and provides an opportunity to focus upon a long lost feature on the West Hempstead Landscape, the West Hempstead WWI Memorial Monument. The following is the story of this short lived shrine.

The driving force behind this local war memorial was the nascent American Legion Cathedral Post 1087, whose charter was presented at a Nassau County meeting six years earlier on February 24, 1933. Cathedral Post 1087 was ably led by veterans who were also residents and businessman of West Hempstead, like their first commander John A. Palmer, who owned a meat store on Hempstead Turnpike and was also a founding member and Vice President of the WH Board of Trade, forerunner to the WH Chamber of Commerce. In the ensuing decade, more than 100 dedicated members of this post organized local civic events in West Hempstead, such as lectures and winter festivals complete with Santa Claus appearances, which won them multiple national awards from the American Legion for the most active post in the region. In the early years of the Cathedral Post, one of its first orders of business was to address the lamentable absence of a war memorial within West Hempstead. Other than a simple marker and flag mast to the USS Maine and veterans of the Spanish American War, located at the Church of Good Shepherd on Maple St., no other memorial to American veterans had heretofore existed in West Hempstead. (As an aside, the remaining concrete marker of this memorial still exists on the grounds of the current location of the Church of Good Shepherd on Donlon Avenue). Donations were collected and designs submitted for a worthy monument to be constructed at West Hempstead’s busiest location at the time, the WH railroad station plaza.

Finally, on a pleasant late spring Sunday on June 4, 1939, officers and members of the Cathedral Post, along with a slew of representatives of area civic groups, gathered at the railroad station plaza to dedicate their long awaited war memorial to local veterans of World War I. The chosen design was created by a WH sculptor and Post veteran named Edwin T. Howell and consisted of a boulder upon which was a plaque, tersely inscribed with the immortal phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “That this nation might live”. Next to the monument was a 12 ft long navy gun that had seen action during WWI, mounted onto a white cement base. Along with the many dignitaries who were there, some 2,000 participants and spectators joined the spectacle.The memorial was intended to primarily honor veterans of the Great War, which had ended only 20 years earlier and during which all members of the local American Legion post had served their country. However, being that WWI was at the time considered the “war to end all wars”, it was decided that servicemen of all American wars were also included in the commemoration.

Those 2,000 celebrants who came home the next day to read about coverage in the Nassau Daily Review Star of the ceremony they had just attended would have also noticed a top-fold headline on the same page that blared “Military, Economic Rearmament to Continue, Nazis Say”, which describing Germany’s belligerence less than three months before they were to invade Poland. Notwithstanding that premonition, few would have presaged that only three months later, Germany would invade Poland, setting off the tragic and costly events of World War II.

After the December 7, 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor, the US was abruptly drawn into WWII. By 1942, American resources were severely strained to support an all-out war effort that would be fought in two major theatres. Citizens on the Home Front were asked to sacrifice whatever they could to help out the war effort. These sacrifices came in the form of mass enlistments, purchasing war bonds, planting “victory gardens” to avert food shortages, abiding by strict fuel rations and donating scrap metal, among other things.

As WWII went into full gear, and in response to a plea by the War Department to alleviate a scrap metal shortage, members of the Cathedral Post did what they thought their deceased comrades for whom they erected the memorial would have have wanted them to do. They made the decision to dismantle the navy cannon and donate it to the war effort as a supreme token of their patriotism. As solemn a decision that was, they took their inspiration from those timeless words of Abraham Lincoln that graced their commemoration plaque - “That this nation might live”. At 5:00 p.m. on September 23, 1942, as the Marines were sending reinforcements to Guadalcanal and the Allies were fighting their way up the Italian Peninsula, Cathedral Post Commander Chauncey A. Rich took a blowtorch to the navy cannon to be broken down for scrap.

This Memorial Day, as we end the parade at West Hempstead’s current war monument at Echo Park, we should all celebrate the West Hempstead WWI ornamental that never had a chance to survive thanks to the patriotic spirit of our bygone members of the WH community.

Ode to the Last Great Estate in West Hempstead

2017-10-20T10:31:00.002-07:00

The following essay appeared in the Winter 2018 edition of the WHCSA News & Views newsletter

Last year’s demolition of the large estate at 764 Hempstead Avenue and subsequent subdivision provides an opportunity to reflect upon the development of West Hempstead as a residential community. At 1.66 acres, the parcel represented the last remaining large residential tract in West Hempstead, and has given way to the erection of eight homes in its place. Over the past three years, the process took on a certain inevitability ever since the place was sold to a developer in 2014, knowing that it was only a matter of time before proper permits were obtained to tear the structure down. As a historian, I view this event with the sad realization that the transformation of West Hempstead from a once sprawling rural suburb into an overdeveloped neighborhood, is now complete. This transformation began at the start of the 20th century with the development of the Fairlawn Park subdivision in 1906, and continued steadily with two notable growth spurts; one, after the West Hempstead LIRR line was electrified and the Southern Parkway was completed in 1926 and 1927, respectively; and the other, after WWII and the coming of the baby boomer generation.

To me, the moment a suburb has been denuded of its great residential landmarks and replaced with neatly packed in 60x100 cookie cutter homes reminiscent of the green and red properties of a Monopoly board, it has lost a large part of its unique identity, and in many ways becomes indistinguishable from its neighboring megalopolis to the west. In this, I am reminded of what Allen Ginsberg once referred to as the “invisible suburbs”, having fallen prey to Molloch, the pagan god of industrialized overdevelopment.

In my mind, the lovely home was emblematic of West Hempstead’s working class roots, a domicile that seemed roomy and comfortable but not overly ostentatious like the grand estates of Garden City; one that seemed to place greater value upon its expansive surrounding open spaces than its living quarters per se. The style of the house, with its stucco exterior and Mediterranean roof, perhaps reflected the tastes of the two families that occupied it over the years, both of which were of Italian extraction.

The origin of the home follows the story of American upward mobility in the 1920s, when an Italian immigrant named Joseph Cavallaro and his wife Annie moved out from Brooklyn, after Joseph built up a successful business importing fruit and other goods. He died in 1939, and Annie continued to live in the home until her passing in 1947. The following year the home was sold to Theodore Gaeta and his wife Rose. Gaeta was a well known restaurateur on Long Island who owned and managed a number of popular upscale eating spots across the Island. Early on, he managed the Cas-Albi Lounge and Restaurant, located inside the Mineola Hotel on 2nd street in Mineola. In 1966, the Mineola Hotel became victim of a terrible fire and never reopened. Thereafter Gaeta embarked upon a prolific food service career, running eateries that were well known jaunts on both the North and South shores: the Swan Bay Inn in Centerport, the Gaetway Harbour Restaurant, the West Wind Yacht Club and the Schooner Restaurant, all in Freeport, the Vernon Valley Inn in East Northport, the Gaetway North Steakhouse in Huntington, and the Gaetway South in Bay Shore. In the mid 1960s, after being inspired by a trip to Hawaii, he opened the Polynesian themed Bali Hai Restaurant in Northport. Ted Gaeta was reportedly a ubiquitous presence at all his establishments, and would often know and greet his regular patrons by name. He was an active member of the Freeport Chamber of Commerce and received numerous accolades for improving the business character of the Village and was involved in numerous toy and food drives over the years. He was well acquainted with celebrities and politicians, like Alfonse D’amato, who would frequent his restaurants. Gaeta died in 1989 at age 92, and Rose passed away in 2000.

There was a time, recently enough for people who are still alive to remember, when travelers could drive along Hempstead Ave. from Nassau Blvd. to Locust Street and spot perhaps a mere half dozen homes that lined the avenue. As they would travel north, to the left was the picturesque watering hole that was Halls Pond, and on their right, they would pass the stately home of interior designer Edith Hebron at the northeast corner of Eagle Ave, which was eventually turned into the Maison Pepi/ Gum Ying restaurant before it was knocked down and replaced by a CVS. (In that instance, the words of the Joni Mitchell song seem all too appropriate: “Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got til its gone, They paved paradise And put up a parking lot”). Further up on the right was they would pass the Cavallaro/ Gaeta home and then the large Norwood Villa Hotel at the corner of Oak(ford) St. Another 200 yards and they would see the Alexander Nelson estate at Elm st, and across the street from there they would find the Collins estate. With the demise of 764 Hempstead Ave, an irreplaceable piece of old West Hempstead has died along with it, and signaled the close an era when our neighborhood was once characterized by country homes and open spaces.

In Memory of Police Officer Matthew Giglio, Forty One Years after His Murder

2017-06-14T15:00:00.001-07:00

The following essay appeared in the Winter 2017 edition of the WCHSA New & Views newsletter

NCPD Officer Matthew Giglio

The recent deaths of two individuals with a local connection provide an opportunity to revisit the somber history of a cop shooting in West Hempstead whose effect still carries strong reverberations, despite the long passage of time. The shooting occurred on October 7, 1975 and took the life of NCPD Officer Matthew Giglio, after a courageous two month struggle for his life at Mercy Hospital. This past August 4, Giglio’s killer, John MacKenzie, died in prison after an apparent suicide, while serving a 25 years to life sentence. And more recently, our friend and resident of nearby Malverne, NYPD Detective Steven MacDonald, himself a victim of a 1986 shooting while on duty, passed away on January 10.

There are few residents of West Hempstead who have resided here long enough to remember the only cop killing to have occurred in our hamlet. Indeed, most people walk right past the scene of the crime, right in the center of town along Hempstead Avenue, with nary a clue as to what transpired there. The following is a synopsis of the incident.

Since 1948, the row of shops at the corner of Hempstead Ave and Locust St. have occupied a prominent place on West Hempstead’s landscape.

One of these stores, Filnord’s Pharmacy at 492 Hempstead Ave, was the site of WH’s first permanent post office. The 1960s saw the popular Tony’s Delicatessen as the occupant at 486 Hempstead. By 1971, Tony’s gave way to a boutique clothing store called Thelma J’s, the kind of which was more common back in those days but rarely seen today. It was outside this boutique where the shooting occurred. On October 4th, MacKenzie and his accomplice, Colleen Irby, cased out Thelma J’s in the guise of customers, when MacKenzie asked to use the bathroom in the back of the store which contained a window facing the rear of the building. On a typical cool early morning of October 7th, 1975, two Nassau County patrol officers responded to a burglary at Thelma J’s, where it was reported that hundreds of articles of clothing were stolen. At 2:30am, the two officers on the scene questioned Irby, who was sitting in a car at the back of the store and called for backup, whereafter Officer Giglio, working as a police EMT, promptly arrived at the scene. Upon arrival, Giglio spotted MacKenzie exiting the front of the store when MacKenzie fired his gun, striking Giglio in the abdomen. The two officers rushed to Giglio’s aid and drove him to Mercy Hospital in his own ambulance. At the hospital doctors made the bleak discovery that the bullet had hemorrhaged Giglio’s aorta.

Back at the scene, hundreds of police officers, as well as two police helicopters, descended upon West Hempstead and started a massive manhunt for the shooter. At 10:00am, officers found MacKenzie hiding out in a nearby garage and located the weapon nearby as well. At the hospital, Giglio underwent eight hours of surgery and received 35 pints of blood in a desperate attempt to save his life. In the first few days, Giglio was able to communicate by scribbling simple messages on a piece of paper, but then he slipped into a coma, never to recover. As weeks passed, Giglio developed an infection in his leg, which required an amputation. All the while, his comrades and family members kept a bedside vigil, praying that he might rally. Local churches and synagogues also held special prayer services for Giglio until he took his final breath after a seventy day battle, on December 16th.

Matthew Giglio was born in 1940 in Brooklyn. One might say he was a typical Italian kid who tore up the stick ball circuit on the Borough Park streets where he grew up, and savored the victory of the Dodgers’ World Series win when he was 15 years old. Giglio moved out to Long Island and chose his calling as a police officer, like his father who was a patrolman for the NYPD. Giglio was in his eleventh year of service, and lived in Valley Stream with his wife and three children in 1975. Nassau County later honored Officer Giglio by dedicating the Matthew F. Gilgio Memorial Plaza at intersection of Corona Avenue and Dutch Broadway, not far from where Giglio lived and a few blocks from the 5th Precinct headquarters where he was based. In July 1976, MacKenzie was put on trial and convicted with 1st degree murder and given a 25 years to life sentence. Four years later, the NY Court of Appeals vacated his sentence and a retrial was ordered after the US Supreme Court affirmed the decision, after it was established that MacKenzie’s confession was improperly obtained. The case established guidance for police officers that is in use to this day, that if the suspect immediately requests a lawyer, then any subsequent confession cannot be entered as evidence, unless in the presence of the suspect’s legal counsel. In any event, the case was retried and once again MacKenzie was convicted and sentenced, making him eligible for parole in 2000.

Every two years since then, MacKenzie’s parole hearing has stirred up the passions of politicians and police benevolent groups, urging that his parole be denied. MacKenzie had exhibited remorse for the killing but always maintained that he didn’t know that Giglio was a cop, and he couldn’t remember details of the incident because he was on drugs. After his last denial in June 2016, Mackenzie gave in to despair and committed suicide in his cell on August 4.

A couple years ago I had the privilege of meeting Detective Steven MacDonald after he and his wife Patty graciously offered to drive me home from Manhattan. During that ride, Mr. MacDonald gave me a copy of a book that he wrote where he outlined his remarkable journey toward ultimately forgiving his shooter and finding peace in his life. My brief encounter with Steve and his book left a deep impression on me and caused me to bring new meaning to my understanding of human strength and courage.

The confluence of MacKenzie’s and MacDonald’s deaths this past year, together with this past Law Enforcement Appreciation Day on January 9th, one day before MacDonald’s passing, gives us all cause to be grateful for the lives of our loved ones and those tasked to protect them.

May the memories of Officers Giglio and MacDonald be for a blessing.

2016-11-10T12:49:00.007-08:00

Tanglewood Preserve - Site of First Revolutionary War Skirmish on Long Island

The following essay appeared in the Winter 2016 edition of the West Hempstead Community Support Association newsletter, News & Views

Some time ago, while browsing through some of the West Hempstead Historical Society website’s growing collection of local historical material, I came across an item regarding a little known Revolutionary War incident that took place just down the road in present day Lakeview, at the current site of Tanglewood Preserve. The episode became known as the Skirmish at Hempstead Swamp. While the incident in and of itself was a relatively minor one, I decided to find out some background about it and was surprised to learn that it actually represents the first action during the American Revolution that involved bloodshed on Long Island between the warring parties.

There are scant details of the event. One of the only sources we have about it comes from a book published in 1844 entitled Revolutionary Incidents in Queens County, by Henry Onderdonk Jr.

Here is some brief background about it.

In colonial times, Pine Stream used to run free and clear from Hempstead Plains down through modern day West Hempstead, where it formed a series of ponds and swampland all the way down to the Atlantic Ocean. Part of that tributary, Tanglewood Preserve was once a swamp that sat just north of Smith’s Pond, known in those days as DeMott’s pond, named after Michael DeMott and his son Anthony, who ran a mill at the southern end of the pond, where the water crosses Merrick Road in Rockville Centre. In fact, the name Tanglewood bears an echo of testimony to the swamp that once enveloped the property.

Throughout the South Shore of Long Island, there was heavy loyalist sentiment among residents in the leadup to the American Revolution. Parenthetically, this was the apparent reason for the Break-off of the Town of North Hempstead, whose residents were frustrated by their southern neighbors’ loyalty to King George III, from the greater Town of Hempstead.

According to George Combes, historian for the TOH in the 1940s, many South Shore residents were initially sympathetic to the Patriot cause, particularly after British troops landed in Boston in 1775. But a series of actions perceived to be too aggressive on the part of the Patriots, including a raid upon Long Island by the New Jersey militia in April of 1776, crystallized sentiment in the area solidly for the British.

In July of 1776, around the time of our Nation’s independence and a full month before General Howe’s troops arrived in New York, some loyalists had tried to subvert the cause of independence by attempting to poison George Washington by planting Paris green into his soup. The attempt failed because it made the soup taste terrible, but it certainly got the attention of our founding father. It was determined that the scheme had been hatched by loyalists from Long Island and so Washington promptly dispatched troops to Hempstead to arrest the perpetrators. The loyalists were warned in advance of these troops’ arrival and so they packed provisions and took shelter in the swamps south of Hempstead village. The DeMotts were also loyalists and they agreed to hang a white sheet in the window of their mill as a signal to warn the fugitives of the troops’ impending arrival. Onderdonk Jr. recounts the episode as it occurred on the third Saturday of July, 1776:

“...a party of Whig soldiers went to Hempstead Swamp at the head of DeMott's mill pond to take
up some Tories who were hiding there. ... A party of nine of them in two sedge boats were concealed in the swamp at the head of the mill pond. Stephen Rider climbed an oak tree to reconnoiter, when a ball whistled by his head. He saw the smoke whence it came and, a loaded gun being handed him, he fired, and the ball passed through the body of George Smith.” The Tories were then cornered and soon after surrendered. They were then rounded up and taken in chains to a jail in Jamaica but were soon freed after the British had occupied Long Island. George Smith was badly wounded in the shoulder, but was treated by a local physician named Dr. Searing, and recovered from his wound.

By then the Revolutionary War was well on its way, but most of the famous battles would be fought in other parts of the country, while for the most part, Queens (Nassau) County quietly remained under British occupation.

Although the event could hardly be considered a major action in the annals of the Revolutionary War, given the impetus for its occurrence and the fact that it saw the first blood spilled on Long Island soil in the War for Independence, in my opinion, consideration should be given to add the site to the list of New York State Revolutionary War Trail Sites of Long Island.

A Brief History of 472 Hempstead Avenue - the Cong. Anshei Shalom Building

2015-07-02T12:59:00.001-07:00

The following article appeared in the Summer 2015 edition of the WHCSA's News and Views newsletter

The following paragraphs chronicle the history of 472 (formerly 318) Hempstead Ave., the subject of the accompanying photo. We begin the story in 1911, when Violet Hutcheson, daughter of Aubrey G Hutcheson, was entered into marriage with Walton McClelland Blackford, a native of Hempstead village. Aubrey Hutcheson was a very wealthy fruit importer whose name was ubiquitous at Washington Market, New York City’s most important wholesale produce market located in Tribeca. In 1890, he purchased a 100 acre country seat in West Hempstead on land that later became known as the Presidential Section, along the west side of Hempstead Avenue.

Hutcheson had nine children in all. In 1913, Hutcheson built three homes across the street for three of his children, Ralph E. Hutcheson, Howard B. Hutcheson, and Violet Blackford, shortly after her marriage. Two of these homes, those of Howard, where China Connection is currently located, and Violet, the current site of Congregation Anshei Shalom, still survive. In a sordid postscript to the original occupant of 318 Hempstead Ave., Walton Blackford remarried in 1923 whereafter he moved to Springfield, MA where he worked as a paper company executive. In May 1948 at the age of 61, he suffered a severe cerebral hemorrhage that left him paralyzed and one month later, his wife plunged a carving knife into his neck in what was described a “mercy killing”.

Some time during the Great Depression, the house was converted into St. Ann’s Health Resort, a convalescent home for the aged and infirm. In those days, such “health resorts” were common for people who were in need of extended and rehabilitative care. The accompanying picture from a 1939 postcard, was taken from the rear of the building and shows the resort’s quaint little shaded terrace in its backyard. (The postcard identifies that address at 318 Hempstead Ave., before the addresses were re-numbered by the US Postal Service in the late 1940s).

Just before WWII, the building once again changed hands and was sold to a newly married young physician named Eugene Jennings Jr. and his wife Susan. Born in the Bronx, Jennings saw action in the South Pacific theatre as a lieutenant in the the US Navy during WWII aboard the destroyer John W. Weeks. An alumnus of Columbia University and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, he was also an All-American Masters Swimmer on Columbia’s Swimming team and part of the US Masters Swimming Organization, the highest honor that can be achieved from the organization.

After the War, Dr. Jennings opened a medical practice in West Hempstead at his home. Many of our older long-time residents remember Dr. Jennings as the de facto resident physician for West Hempstead back in the days when towns all over the country had such doctors to serve them. Before the advent of urgent care and before EMS was established, Dr. Jennings’ office was the place to go locally for any medical emergencies. As well, he was the on-site first responder for all mishaps in the general vicinity that required required medical attention, such as when two Lakeview firefighters were injured when their ladder snapped during a training exercise at the Eagle Avenue school on Oct. 31, 1948. Dr. Jennings faithfully served the West Hempstead community for 27 years before retiring and moving to St. Petersburg, FL in the early 1970s. He died in 2000 at age 85, leaving a son, Eugene Thomas, two daughters, Mimsie and Leslie Ann, and many grandchildren.

In the 1980s, a young burgeoning congregation named Anshei Shalom was looking to move out of their cramped quarters on a Hempstead Avenue storefront into bigger space. When their current address became available across the street in 1985, they purchased the home and converted the main hall of the building into its sanctuary. In the early 2000s, the congregation was once again pressed for space and in 2005, they completed a new sanctuary in the rear of the building, while still preserving the front part of the house.

Norwood Chapel - First Church in West Hempstead

2015-04-17T09:07:00.001-07:00

The article below appeared in the Spring 2015 edition of the WHCSA News & Views newsletter.

From the 1906 Belcher Hyde map of West Hempstead. Woods (Halls) Pond is in the middle of the image and the Norwood Chapel, just to the north, is labeled

The following is a brief history of the first church in West Hempstead, the Norwood Chapel.

As with so many early communities in the United States, the one feature that gave our neighborhood its unique identity and distinguished it from being a mere loose collection of farms and homes was the establishment of a community church. The church was much more than merely a house of worship. It served as a central meeting house for neighbors and was where all important social and civic gatherings would take place.

Until the 1880s, farmers and residents of the area the would come to be known as West Hempstead were served by the various parishes located in Hempstead Village. Beginning in 1885, a series of meetings were held in the old District 17 schoolhouse on John St (Nassau Blvd.) for the purpose of establishing a local church. The meetings were well received and well attended. Shortly thereafter, an organization called the Young People’s Christian Association was created, with James H. Rhodes voted as president and Henry H. DuBois as vice president. James Rhodes was a member of the prominent Rhodes family who owned a large farm along the east side of Woodfield Road that comprised most of what became known as Hempstead Gardens. Henry DuBois was a well known grocer who ran a store on Hempstead Ave. near the current location of Exit 17 of the SSP.

In 1886, it was decided that the YPCA would start a fundraising campaign to build a church edifice, but a debate ensued as to where this building would be located. Two factions emerged from this debate, each favoring either of the two tiny local commercial districts that existed in our area at the time, Washington Square and Norwood. (Washington Square was located at the intersection of Hempstead Turnpike and Nassau Blvd, and Norwood was located at the south end of Halls Pond). A vote was taken and the Washington Square faction overwhelmingly won out with 60 out of a total of 72 votes cast. However, after Hempstead Town Supervisor Martin V. Wood agreed to donate some of his land at the north end of Wood’s (Halls) Pond for the project, it was decided that the church would be built there. (The exact location was along Hempstead Avenue, opposite the intersection with Oak(ford) St.)

Fundraising continued for the next couple years, and in 1890, the church was built. Opening exercises were held on Sunday, February 2. By then, James Rhodes had moved to New Jersey and Henry DuBois took over as president. The new non-denominational church, named Norwood Chapel, was a tremendous source of pride for the community, as the funds and actual construction of the building were almost exclusively the results of local efforts.

In 1892, the building was enlarged to accommodate a Sunday School. For the ensuing decade, the pastorship of the church was given to a roving group of guest preachers who were invited to address the congregation. It’s worthy to note that at times some local women also took turns to preach, including Viola DuBois (Henry H DuBois’ daughter and Josie Hull, daughter of John P Hull, a local carpenter who lived across the street from the chapel). By 1898, it seems that Rev. Joseph McCoun from Floral Park became the regular preacher for the next number of years.

The chapel also became the default location for social and civic activity in WH. Before the Chestnut Street schoolhouse was built in 1912, it was literally the only viable public place of assembly in West Hempstead. In fact, it was was where School District 27 was conceived and voted for. The chapel played host to the civic meetings of the West Hempstead, Lakeview and Hempstead Gardens Association and WH gas and lighting district was also formed from a series of meetings there.

Some time in the late 1910s, the Norwood Chapel disbanded and West Hempstead was once again left without a church, until the establishment of the Church of the Good Shepherd in 1925. The Church of the Good Shepherd currently resides in its second location on Donlon Ave. after it moved from its original location on Maple Street in Hempstead Gardens. (The original building burned down in the 1960s, however, the WH Historical Society has a nice photo of the original church in its archives.) Thereafter, in a very short period, WH gained three more churches in short succession. Starting with Union Gospel Tabernacle on Morton Ave. in 1926 (currently a Haitian church); Trinity Lutheran Church in 1927, and St. Thomas the Apostle in 1931.

Photo Essay - the Recreation at Wall's (Hall's) Pond of Yesteryear

2014-10-13T12:28:00.000-07:00

The following collection of photos below tell the story of a bygone era when kids from West Hempstead and its environs would frequent Wall's Pond year-round for an array of recreation opportunities, from swimming and boating in the summer, to skating and sledding in the winter. All photos (with the exception of the above photo, courtesy of the WH Historical Society) come from the pages of the now defunct Nassau Daily Review-Star between the mid '30s and early '50s, the paper of record for all local news in Central-Southern Nassau County during that period. As can be seen in the photos, Wall's Pond got alot of heavy use in those days as a favorite watering hole for youngsters looking for a good pastime activity, and they highlight just how rural our community was back then. In 1961, Nassau County purchased the land surrounding what was then called Wall's Pond and developed a park that they named Hall's Pond Park, to honor the family of an early owner of the property, Martin V. W. Hall. The irony contained in the County's purchase and development is that it marked a turning point for Hall's Pond Park when it was no longer used for the activities illustrated below, but was instead converted into a "passive park". A separate post is needed to explain (i.e. complain about) how that ended up happening. For now, step back into yesteryear and enjoy the photos. As a frame of reference, I left in the photo captions included in the newspaper for better explanation. BTW - virtually all references to the pond at that time had it as "Wall's Pond", not "Hall's Pond".

1) The old Boy Scout rhyme about ice-pond safety went something like this: 1 inch - stay away, 2 inches - one may, 3 inches - small groups, 4 inches - O.K. The photo below shows that back in the 1930s, winters were cold enough for a sufficiently long time to freeze over Wall's Pond and make it safe for any kind of winter activity.

2) In the summer of 1935, a 12 year-old boy named Walter Frederick, who lived just down the road from Wall's Pond on Hawthorne St, got a nasty bite on his leg while swimming at the north side of the pond. A year later, he got his revenge when his attacker was caught, a 35lb turtle who would angrily fend off anyone who dared invade his habitat. The photo below (which unfortunately got overexposed when converted to .pdf) shows the police officers in the process of corralling the turtle, to be later transported to a menagerie that State troopers maintained at Belmont Lake State Park.

3) Below is a scene that would be utterly unimaginable today; on an unusually hot spring day in April 1938, a group of four boys took the opportunity to raft out on the pond on a makeshift boat made by cutting an oil tank in two.

4) Here's another great shot from late June, 1939 of a boy paddling out with an acquaintance on a home-made boat that he christened the H.M.S. Foo.

5) June, 1940. Apparently at least some of the shoreline of Wall's Pond was sufficiently deep enough for brave divers to jump headlong into the water. Bottom image, on the shore, a sunbather smiles for the photo.

6) Most people today who would catch the scene depicted below would undoubtedly call the police - two boys, ages 9 and 8 on their skiff, getting their rods ready for a day of fishing on Wall's Pond. In 1949, it was a common sight.

7) As late as the summer of 1951, much of West Hempstead was still rural farmland. A favorite pastime of the young farmhands of the area, such as Christian Limbach, below, whose family ran a farm down the road in Lakeview, was fishing. The Daily Review-Star photographer caught the young boy napping, while holding onto his rod.

8) In 1937, the Nassau Daily Review-Star ran a contest called the "Lucky Circle" where they would publish a photo of a crowd engaged in some activity somewhere in Nassau County, and circle one face in the crowd. If the person circled in the photo would then call up the newspaper's office and correctly identify themselves, they would win a prize. The grand prize for the lucky winners? A whopping $2 (no small sum during the Depression). The photo below showing a group of ice skaters on Wall's Pond appeared on the front page of the Dec. 14, 1937 edition of the Daily Review-Star. Two days later Eileen Dillon of Rockville Centre correctly identified herself and claimed her prize.

9) Below is a photo of two girls lacing up their ice skates at Wall's Pond during a late winter cold spell in early 1950. From the newspaper's masthead, which I have included, it looked as though the snow would turn to rain the following day

10) The old conventional wisdom states that back in those days, Pine Brook, which flowed into Wall's Pond, ran clear as a mountain stream and provided swimmers with clean and sanitary conditions in the pond. The photo and article below from the summer of 1941 showed that this was not always the case. Pollutants from the Garden City waste transfer station on Cherry Valley Ave further upstream, as well as dangerous contaminants from Nassau Hospital (forerunner to Winthrop University Hospital) in Mineola further north, got into the water and forced health officials to close down Walls Pond to swimming, much to the chagrin of the young bathers shown in the bottom photo. The top photo shows the lillies that used to blanket part of the pond.

11) Finally, the terrific photo below taken at the southern end of Wall's Pond in June 1939, shows a group of young swimmers along the shore. In those days, County policemen would be stationed to protect the youngsters from traffic on Hempstead Avenue and, if needed, also assume the role of lifeguard. The photo also contains an old relic that no longer exists - the concrete and steel of the northern wall of the old bridge that carried Hempstead Avenue traffic over Pine Stream. The bottom photo puts some NCPD humor on display with a deliberately misspelled sign pointing to the Wall's Pond Swimmin' Hole

Alwyn E W Bach - Winner of Radio’s Prestigious Gold Medal

2014-06-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

The Following article, with slight modifications, originally appeared in the Summer 2014 edition of the West Hempstead Community Support Association Newsletter.

Alwyn E W Bach

The Golden Age of Radio is a term used to describe the period between the 1920s and 1950s when radio was the dominant medium for home entertainment, before it was supplanted by the television in the ensuing decades. While the technology for radio transmission had been available since the 1890s, it wasn’t until the 1920s when the seemingly boundless potential for commercial radio was uncovered. In today’s world it’s hard to imagine the impact, but at the time this technology burst onto the scene, the possibility of hearing a live broadcast of a marquis stage performance or sporting event occurring thousands of miles away from the comfort of one’s own home, was an absolutely tantalizing feat. By 1929, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in NYC began distributing Gold Medal awards to radio personalities who reached the pinnacle of their profession.

American Academy of Arts and Letters,
Gold Medal for Good Diction

To put in context, it can be said that, at the time, these Gold Medal awards were at least on par with the prestige of the Academy Awards for motion pictures which began that same year, and were given to radio actors, singers and announcers who were well known celebrities. It was in the second year of these honors in 1930 that the Gold Medal for Good Diction was awarded to a West Hempsteader named Alwyn E W Bach, the subject of our present sketch.

Alwyn Egbert Winfred Bach was born in 1898 in Worcester, MA to Danish parents who immigrated just two years prior. Eager to become acculturated to their new country, the Bachs made sure that their children gained a good command of the English language. After graduating high school, Alwyn found work in a print shop and as a proofreader, and also honed his skills as a talented baritone singer. When WWI broke out, Alwyn enlisted in the US Army and saw action in the Somme-St. Michel Offensive as part of the 44th Coast Artillery Division.

Bach (sitting, at left) pictured with his troupe during WWI.

Returning home, Bach settled in Springfield, MA and married Olive C. Murphy. In September 1921, WBZ in Springfield became the first licensed commercial radio station in the country and the following year, the station called upon Bach to sing for one of its programs. Bach’s voice and delivery impressed the producers at WBZ and he was quickly hired as an announcer for the station. In 1926, Bach followed the station in its relocation to Boston and three years later, he was hired away by WNBC, a national syndicate in New York City. Shortly thereafter, he gained renown as a top-rate radio announcer.

The Bachs were now in the hunt to find a home in the New York area. A new development of quaint, Tudor-style homes called Plymouth Colony caught their eye in the up-and-coming Long Island neighborhood of West Hempstead. As an avid tennis player, Alwyn was attracted to Plymouth Colony’s exclusive tennis courts and clubhouse. (The courts were originally located on Sycamore St. and were dedicated on Sunday October 20, 1929, one week before the great stock market crash. The dedication ceremonies included the championship tournament for Brooklyn High Schools. The courts remained for a few years before finally giving way to further subdivision). The Bachs purchased their home at 16 Lindbergh St. (still there at 243 Lindberg St) and quickly became deeply involved in their new community. As the mother of their 7-year old daughter, Joyce Elizabeth, a new student in the Chestnut Street School, Olive ran for and was elected president of the Chestnut PTA.

The following year, in June 1930, Alwyn Bach received radio’s most prestigious prize, the Gold Medal for Good Diction, and was praised for his style and professionalism. Bach had a distinctive low and commanding voice, with a measured and deliberate articulation. At WNBC, Bach offered a good contrast to his more famous colleague, Graham McNamee, who offered a more high-pitched, frenetic and rapid delivery. McNamee was known for broadcasting Yankee games and other events like Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, and his announcing style was more suitable for those types of exciting events. Bach, on the other hand, was assigned to read the intros to radio shows and sponsorship spots, as well as provide coverage to events like the Lindbergh baby kidnapping (and subsequent murder), a riveting episode that had the entire country glued to their radios for two months straight. Bach was a firm adherent to the maxim that an announcer should never interject his or her personal views or feelings when broadcasting a news story. But, as a father himself who lived on a street that, only 4+ years earlier had been renamed for America's aviation hero, he veered slightly from that principle when, after reading out Charles Lindbergh's plea for the safe return of his son, he added, "That is the plea of all of us".

(Although unfortunately most of these early broadcasts were not taped or preserved, Bach’s voice appears in the earliest known NBC station call recording, preceded by the famous thee note C A F chime that NBC still uses to this day. Bach's voice can be heard in a sound clip at a website dedicated to the NBC chime. Scroll about a third of the way down the page.). Bach’s award was celebrated across the country and his reputation spread far and wide.

Back in West Hempstead, the Great Depression was taking a heavy toll on residents. Many locals had lost their jobs and their homes went into foreclosure. As president of the PTA, Olive Bach organized a welfare fund for needy residents in WH, and leveraged her husband’s connections at WNBC to host a series of concert revues featuring well-known radio personalities, in order to raise money for the new fund. These concerts were held in the Hempstead High School auditorium so that they could accommodate the large turnout,. Though few people today would recognize the names of the featured artists, in 1931 and 1932 they represented a veritable who’s who of headline acts of their time: The Landt Trio, the famous female ukulele player May Singhi Breen and her husband Peter DeRose, The Tasty Yeast Jesters, Stebbins Boys, the famous impersonator Ward Wilson, and on and on. Admission was between 75 cents and $1 and the hundreds of tickets sold at each event raised thousands for the benefit of needy locals during the Depression.

In 1942, Bach was hired by KYW Philadelphia, ending his long run at WNBC. The landscape of broadcast radio was changing. Eight years later, he moved out west to join KNBC San Francisco, until his retirement a few years later. Alwyn Bach died in 1993 in Portland, OR at age 95, a relic from the days when whole families would stop their routines to gather ‘round a beautiful mahogany piece of furniture called the radio to listen to their favorite programs.

John A Schwarz Furniture

2014-05-14T14:22:00.003-07:00

The postcard above depicts the John A. Schwarz, Inc. furniture store at One Fulton Avenue, probably not long after their opening at that location in 1949. Actually the history of this firm begins long before that. Karen E. Wagner at My Old NY Just Ain't What She Used to Be blog has some great information about the original John A Schwarz and his furniture business. He was born in NY in the 1850s to German immigrants and clerked in a furniture store before he opened his own store in 1876 at 838-840 Broadway in Brooklyn. By the 1920s, his three sons opened an additional three locations, two more in Brooklyn and one in Jamaica. By the 1940s, they sold off their stores in NYC to another firm and moved out to Long Island where in 1949, they opened the store you see above as their only store. (A few years later they also opened a store in Centereach).

John A Schwarz furniture was a mainstay business in Hempstead for the next three decades. Their building offered full frontage on Hempstead Turnpike/ Fulton Ave with large showcase windows to display their wares. The building also offered plenty of floor space and lots of parking.

In the 1970s, John A Schwarz felt the squeeze from competing firms, coupled with a downturn in the economy, and on Sunday February 1, 1981, after 105 years in business, they closed their doors for good.

Shortly thereafter the site became home to the Nassau School for Medical and Dental Assistants. For a while, the local offices of Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy was also located there. Today, the building is called Nassau Plaza and houses medical offices, including an OB/GYN office affiliated with Winthrop University Hospital. The presence of Winthrop is ironic, because it happens to be very near the original site of Nassau Hospital, forerunner to Winthrop. Nassau Hospital opened on an estate at that location as western Long Island's first full service hospital in 1897 before moving to Mineola in 1900. I guess you can say they've come full circle.

Below is a "now" shot of the picture above.

West Hempstead's Original Post Office

2014-04-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

The image above from 1963 shows the one-story building at 439 Hempstead Avenue at the grand opening of the West Hempstead branch of the Community Bank, a financial institution that began in Lynbrook only three years earlier. The building itself was built in 1949 and started as the site of what was West Hempstead's first permanent post office. Until that point, West Hempstead residents and businesses were served by the main PO branch in Hempstead.

For the first three decades of the 20th century, mail deliveries to WH comprised of a modest rural carrier service involving mounted couriers and mail sorters trying their best to navigate confusing final address destinations that often included duplicate street names non-existent house numbers and absent postal boxes.

On June 11, 1929, the USPS awarded West Hempstead with an upgrade to the much faster and efficient system of two dedicated "city postal carriers" who were dispatched daily from Hempstead. This upgrade required that all WH residents had to ensure they had address numbers and letter boxes or slots installed at every home and business, else they would be required to pick up their mail at the Hempstead Post Office. Needless to say the vast majority of West Hempsteaders complied with this directive.

For the better part of the early 20th century, it had been customary for the USPS to set up a temporary local office during the holidays, usually in a centrally located grocery store or pharmacy, to handle the influx of mail during that time and for the convenience of customers. But by 1934, the WH Board of Trade (forerunner to the Chamber of Commerce) felt it was time for a post office of our own. In April of that year, they passed a resolution urging for a separate local post office. But it wasn't until after WWII that WH would finally get one.

On May 1, 1948, the first permanent full service Post Office in West Hempstead opened inside Filmore Pharmacy, at the corner of Hempstead Avenue and Locust Streets, and plans were announced later that year for a PO station building to be erected across the street. It was at this time that the duplicate street names in WH were eliminated by renaming them, (hence for example, Oak St. became Oakford St., Walnut St. became Walton St., Maple St. became Maplewood St. and Lincoln Ave. became Langley Ave. and Harrison Ave. became Halsey Ave.).

In 1949, the building pictured above opened as WH's first stand-alone Post Office and served there until 1962 when a larger facility was built further north at 245 Hempstead Ave, its current location. When the USPS vacated 439 Hempstead Ave., the young Community Bank selected the site as its second branch and inaugurated its opening with a ribbon cutting, pictured below.

The man holding the scissors is TOH supervisor Ralph Caso to his right is branch manager William Keilmann.

On October 1, 1970, Community Bank merged with Marine Midland Bank of New York. In order to assuage the fears of wary customers who thought that after being swallowed up by a much bigger institution, the bank would lose its local "community"-oriented approach to service, Marine Midland ran the ad below in local papers:

Shortly thereafter, in typical fashion, Marine Midland itself got swallowed up by the financial giant HSBC in 1976, which continued to run a branch at 439 Hempstead until 2006. Following a period of vacancy, a scrapbook business named Scrapaholics occupied the location before giving way to its current tenant, pictured below:

How West Hempstead almost Became the Seat of Nassau County

2014-02-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

The following article originally appeared, with minor modifications, in the West Hempstead Patch in 2011. Presented here with permission of the author.

From the 1906 E. Belcher-Hyde map of West Hempstead. Area in red shows the proposed Nassau County seat, rejected in a county-wide referendum in November 1898.

With the recent redevelopment of the old Courtesy Hotel property into luxury apartments, and some promising future plans for the surrounding area, we'd like to take the opportunity to dig into the history of a neighborhood that has had its share of ups and downs over the years. Not many people are aware that, just over a century ago, a decision was made that would forever alter the landscape of West Hempstead's eastern corridor.

We begin the story in 1898, when the western half of Queens County was consolidated into greater New York City and the New York State Legislature approved the creation of Nassau County for all the remaining territory in the eastern portion of Queens. One of the first orders of business for the new county was to find a suitable location for its seat of government. In January, a committee tasked with making preparations for the new county passed a resolution laying out some requirements among which was that the new seat must be located within one mile of a train station. Once the proposed locations were advanced, the issue would be settled by a county-wide referendum in November of that year.

That spring, the county was presented with a terrific offer of property for its headquarters. On May 24, the Brooklyn Eagle reported that the estate of Austin Corbin, late president of the LIRR, owned “several hundred acres lying west of the West Hempstead station,” and was set to donate eight acres of land “located on Hempstead Avenue, within four hundred feet of the West Hempstead station.” (Back then, the West Hempstead train station was located just north of its current site, across Hempstead Avenue. As a frame of reference, the Corbin Estate's land grant "within four hundred feet" of the station would place the site at the property bounded by the LIRR right-of-way to the east and Westminster Rd to the west, and Hempstead Tpke and Hempstead Ave to the north and south, where National Wholesale Liquidators is currently located).

(Left) Early photo of property west of the WH LIRR station, after the LI Traction Co built a trestle in 1904 over the LIRR right-of-way. (Right) Contemporary photo of property.

Residents of Hempstead, the region’s largest village, as well as those living to the south and west, received the idea with much enthusiasm.

The proposal’s main obstacle, however, was the opposition of the powerful and wealthy residents of the North Shore and the eastern region, who were unsatisfied with the location at Hempstead. In response, two additional locations were proposed, one at Mineola and a second at Hicksville. The Mineola faction secured a four acre land grant from the Garden City Company on an unused parcel of the Hempstead Plains at Franklin Avenue within “a three minutes’ walk of the railroad station;" and then as if to highlight one of the perceived deficiencies of the Hempstead proposal, they added that it was "distant enough to prevent annoyance from passing trains”.

Knowing that their plan stood little chance for success, the Hicksville committee arranged a meeting in June wherein an invited representative of Mineola argued that “in a three cornered fight Hempstead would be sure to win, but with the assistance of Hicksville, Mineola would be selected as the county seat and that would be more convenient for the people of Hicksville.” The argument must have resonated, for by October, Hicksville officially withdrew its plan and threw its support to Mineola.

In the end, it wasn’t close. In resounding numbers, voters cast their ballots for Mineola and rejected the West Hempstead site. However, not all the blame lied solely with the committeemen in Mineola and Hicksville who struck that crucial deal that helped seal their victory. In a post-election analysis by the Brooklyn Eagle, the following revealing perspective was offered as to why such a peculiarly large percentage of Hempstead voters even soured to their own plan: “People…who live in the place, because of its attractions (sic) as a residential locality, allege that they voted against bringing the county buildings to Hempstead, as they did not desire to bring a large crowd of criminals, jurors and witnesses to the place.…It would increase the business of the bar rooms and hotels, but would injure the village as a place of residence for…people who located here because of its respectability and quietness.”

The loss of the county seat wasn't the only setback from which that section of West Hempstead would suffer. Two years later, the newly established Nassau Hospital, the county's first full service medical facility located until then, just east of the West Hempstead train station at the corner of Front and Fulton Streets, would relocate to Mineola. The hospital was the forerunner to Winthrop University Hospital and together, with the new county courthouse, they would serve as a major boon to that area's economy. Buoyed by the establishment of numerous law practices and medical offices, Mineola would solidify its position as a regional center for both the medical and legal fields. In contrast, over the next 100 years, the void left in West Hempstead's business district would engender such colorful uses of property as a grazing area for horses of the Long Island Express Co, a golf driving range, an annual visit by a travelling amusement company, a series of discount big-box retailers, a car wash, and later, across Hempstead Ave., a modest four story hotel called the Hempstead Motor Inn. The Motor Inn later became the Courtesy Hotel and, over time, devolved into a magnet for crime and a thorn in the side of area residents.

How differently might our neighborhood developed had voters chosen West Hempstead as the county seat, or had Nassau Hospital had remained in its original location? Such speculation is a fruitless exercise in counter-factual history and won't do anything to accelerate efforts to improve the area's current condition; but hey, it's still fun to think about.

Robert L Smith, Early Real Estate Broker to WH and Cathedral Gardens

2014-02-21T10:48:00.001-08:00

The following article appeared in the Winter 2014 edition of the West Hempstead Community Support Association newsletter.

Robert L Smith Realty office when it stood at 30 Hempstead Turnpike

Among the objectives of this blog is to shed light on some of the bygone members of our community and pay tribute to their efforts in shaping West Hempstead into what it is today. One such resident was a man who ran one of West Hempstead’s most notable and successful real estate agencies, Robert L Smith. (Parenthetically, Smith’s son Willard recently passed away this past fall at the age of 86. A lifelong local resident himself, Bill ran a successful insurance agency and, among other civic functions, served as president of the WH Lions and the Nassau County Independent Insurance Agents Association, and as the first ever President of the Friends of the West Hempstead Library).

Robert Leroy Smith was born in Brooklyn in 1902 to a family that traced back its roots to John “Rock” Smith, one of the pioneer settlers of Hempstead who crossed over LI Sound in 1644. (In an effort to distinguish the identities of the multiple John Smiths settling on LI at the time, each was provided a unique nickname to go along with his given name. “Rock” Smith purportedly acquired his name after the plot of earth that the Stamford Colony elders assigned him to build his home, sat upon a giant, immovable rock, which he proceeded to hew into the structure of his home, part of which he formed as the backdrop to his fireplace). As a young teen during WWI, Smith tried to enlist in the Army despite being well underage. The Army discovered his true age and so rather than being shipped overseas, he served out the war as a farm cadet on LI attached to Troop C of the 101^st Cavalry Squadron.

After the War, he finished high school and enrolled in Columbia University, but quit after two years to pursue a career as a shoe salesman (imagine that!). His ultimate calling, though, came a couple years later when he became an agent in a real estate brokerage which at the time was engaged in a rather extensive development in the nascent community of Babylon, LI. Along the way, he married Miriam Fradenburgh, daughter of the Dean of Brooklyn College, Albert G. Fradenburgh. Eventually, he staked out on his own in 1924, opening a realty office in Jamaica, Queens, from where he arranged sales of properties throughout western Long Island. But the bulk of his business would eventually come a couple years later from a new, up-and-coming neighborhood in West Hempstead called Cathedral Gardens.

The genesis of Cathedral Gardens came amidst the din of track work being done on the LIRR to convert the WH line from steam to electric, and news of a new controlled-access highway that would ferry cars from Brooklyn out to Hempstead and beyond, to be known as the Southern State Parkway. These two factors alone had caused local land values to skyrocket. But nobody really realized just how high prices would go until February 4, 1926, when someone agreed to pay an unprecedented $8,000 per acre for the 70 acre estate of the late Hannah K. Van Vranken, heiress to the planner of Garden City, John Kellum. This community was named Cathedral Gardens on account of being located under the shadow of the tall spire of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City. (Edwin C. Duryea, a farmer who lived his entire adult life in West Hempstead, once remarked in the 1940s that he had lived to see the day when the same price paid for a square foot of WH land, had the purchase power for an entire acre only sixty years earlier). Robert L Smith was so enamored by the young development that he was among its original buyers for his own family, a home built at 11 Andover Place, and soon thereafter he moved his office to 30 Hempstead Turnpike, at the entrance to Cathedral Gardens.

From there, Smith’s business boomed as he became the primary realtor for buyers in Cathedral Gardens. When Adelphi College opened in 1929, Smith marketed the “Gardens” as the choice residence for its professors and staff, in an effort to establish a “Faculty Row” for the college. Already by its opening, it was reported that some 18 professors had moved out to the neighborhood, including nine from Adelphi alone. Even his father-in-law was persuaded to leave Brooklyn College and relocate to join the Adelphi Faculty. All told, of the 200+ homes built at Cathedral Gardens by 1941, Smith was reportedly responsible for arranging the sale of 80% of the properties.

But it was Robert L Smith’s involvement in civic causes that left its indelible mark on West Hempstead. Among other functions, he founded the West Hempstead Board of Trade, forerunner of the WH Chamber of Commerce (of which he was later a member), helped found the Hempstead Kiwanis Club, and served as President of the Cathedral Gardens Civic Association.

One of Smith’s greatest contributions came at the outbreak of WWII, when local residents were urged to contribute to the War Bond drive. The first drive in Hempstead, with a quota of $600K, commenced on Dec. 7, 1942, on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Schools, businesses, banks, boy scouts, and movie theaters -especially theaters, since they enjoyed the benefit of some strong war bond appeals via newsreel, sprang into action to solicit buyers. (In December, moviegoers at the Rivoli in Hempstead went to see the comedy George Washington Slept Here starring Jack Benny and Ann Sheridan, while the State Theatre was showing Somewhere I’ll Find You featuring Clark Gable and Lana Turner. It was Gable’s last feature film before enlisting in WWII.) A giant thermometer was erected on Fulton Ave to display its progress, and in just two weeks, that thermometer blew its top. The monies raised from the drive were earmarked to purchase two B-17 “Flying Fortresses”, costing $300K each. But when it was realized that such a large percentage of that total was generated in West Hempstead alone as a result of the efforts of a special committee chaired by Robert L Smith, the decision was made to christen the second bomber “Spirit of West Hempstead” in tribute to the unswerving patriotism of local residents at the time.

B-17 Flying Fortress with the name "Spirit of West Hempstead" emblazoned on its fuselage, rolls off the assembly line at Boeing Field, Seattle Wa, during WWII

Thereafter, the WH committee spearheaded its own war bond drives in coordination with the Red Cross unit associated with St. Thomas the Apostle. Its third bond drive targeted a quota of $100K. By its October 1943 deadline, WH doubled that number. In early 1944, it commenced a fourth drive of the war, this time enlisting women of the neighborhood to go door-to-door to solicit small contributions from residents. Aside from being a red-blooded American patriot, Robert L Smith had personal reasons for helping in the war effort – both his sons, Robert L Jr. and Willard had been serving in the US Navy.

After WWII, with Cathedral Gardens almost fully developed, Smith turned south toward another promising local neighborhood called the “Presidential Section”, after the presidential names of its streets. In November 1947, Smith loaded his small office onto a flatbed truck and moved it to the corner of Hempstead Ave and Coolidge St., where it can still be seen today as the small, lime-green building on the NW corner at 417 Hempstead Ave.

The former R L Smith Realty office (same building as pictured above) after it moved to 417 Hempstead Ave in 1947

Robert L Smith continued his business and involvement in his community until his untimely death in 1961 at the young age of 59 after a long illness, but not before leaving his beloved West Hempstead with a legacy of civic duty and pride.

Early Aviation History – the Tales of Two Harrowing Plane Crashes in WH

2013-10-23T14:11:00.001-07:00

The following article appeared in the Fall 2013 edition of the WHCSA News & Views newsletter

The “cradle of aviation” is a term ascribed to Long Island that highlights the important role that our island played in the history of early human flight. At the turn of the 20th century, the treeless, flat terrain of the Hempstead Plains, just a short distance from the country’s largest metropolis, made for an ideal location for the frenetic aviation activity that would take place in the region for the ensuing half-century. During those years, many triumphant and celebrated milestones in human flight would be marked on Long Island, most notably Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight from Roosevelt Field to Paris in 1927. As well, numerous but lesser known avionic tragedies and mishaps occurred in those early days. The following paragraphs recount the stories of two such plane crashes that occurred in the immediate West Hempstead vicinity.

The first incident involved a machine dubbed the “Christmas Bullet”, after its eccentric inventor, Dr. William W. Christmas. By 1918, in the aftermath of WWI, numerous enterprising manufacturers from across the country offered up radical designs for airplanes that they hoped would produce improved speed and efficiency and win lucrative government contracts to produce their planes for the US Army Air Service. Dr. Christmas theorized that the struts that supported the wings of the standard bi-plane design of that era generated a lot of wind resistance, and as a result, he pioneered a “strutless” design of the type pictured in the photograph below. Critics allegedly warned that without struts, the wings were liable to break apart during flight, and indeed, history proved these critics right; the Christmas Bullet was among the worst planes ever designed.

1918 photo of the Christmas Bullet. (photo from http://www.aviastar.org/air/usa/christmas_bullet.php via Wikipedia)

Nevertheless, Christmas went ahead with his plans and got his prototype ready at his plant in Copiague, NY. A 27 year-old Army Air Service aviator named Cuthbert Mills was hired for the Bullet’s initial test flights and her maiden voyage to Hazelhurst (later Roosevelt) Field was indeed spectacular, with unofficial reports of her breaking the existing air speed records of the time. (Reports varied from anywhere between 160mph and 197mph). Shortly after the Christmas of 1918, Dr. Christmas announced that the Bullet would shortly give a demonstration by encircling the Woolworth Building in Manhattan (the tallest building in the world at the time) before returning to Long Island.

On a crisp and clear late afternoon on Monday, December 30th, Mills took off from Hazelhurst heading due south before turning west toward Manhattan. The plane reached about 3,000ft as it headed over the Hempstead reservoir when it encountered immediate problems. Reports conflict as to what exactly went wrong, but Lakeview resident E. J Jennings who was an eyewitness to the incident claimed that one of the plane’s wings had collapsed, causing her to spiral out of control. For an instant, Mills managed to stabilize the machine by bringing her down in small concentric circles, but the area surrounding Hempstead Lake was heavily wooded and offered no good place for a crash landing. The plane came down right around the present location of Exit 18 of the Southern State Parkway (before the parkway was built), into a chestnut tree while narrowly missing the home of a man named Quinn Porsert, before dropping to the ground. Porsert, his son Frank, and EJ Jennings were on a hunting excursion in the wooded property and were the first to respond to the scene, and they cheered wildly when for an instant, it had seemed that Mills had miraculously survived the crash. But as they raced toward the wreckage, they were greeted with a loud boom that lit up the purple dusk sky, as it became evident that the fuel tank had exploded and quickly consumed the wooden fuselage. Without a water supply, all the hopeless group could do was to futilely throw gravel upon the mangled aircraft and watch her unfortunate pilot burn beyond recognition. Incredibly, in the wake of this tragedy, the undaunted Dr. Christmas produced a second “Bullet” and three months later, her initial test flight similarly went awry and claimed the life of the pilot. Such were the risks and realities of early aviation.

About three-and-a-half years later, a second incident occurred that was not quite as tragic and produced a somewhat comical unplanned meeting between a Manhattan aristocrat and a hardened Long Island farmer.

Photo taken from the DH6 wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airco_DH.6.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, June 10, 1922, a Madison Ave. socialite named Oscar Jay was soaring over central Long Island in his DeHavilland DH6 monoplane (after WWI, the Royal Air Force had decommissioned and sold off hundreds of these DH6s and many ended up in the hands of leisure pilots throughout the world) when he abruptly realized he had ran out of gas and frantically looked for the nearest clearing to bring the plane down. That clearing happened to be upon the potato field of John Jacob Rasweiler, a local farmer who owned a homestead along Dogwood Ave. (Today, the small side street off Dogwood that bears the original owner’s name along with his adjacent farmhouse is a surviving testament to this farm). Jay successfully glided his plane down upon the patch while leaving a divot of tens of dollars of torn-up potatoes in his wake. The pilot brushed himself off, nonchalantly walked over to the farmhouse, knocked on the door and introduced himself as a wealthy merchant. He asked the owner if he could borrow some gasoline and be on his way, all the while pledging that he would reimburse the farmer for his gas and for his ruined potatoes once he returned home. Rasweiler obliged and refueled the plane with some automotive gasoline he had siphoned from his car. Jay started up the machine, and after a 500ft taxi barely managed to get her off the ground before she sputtered and fell back to earth in a dive, dragging along another long divot of ruined potato crops. The apparent hard lesson learned was that automotive-grade gasoline was incompatible with the DeHavilland engine.

Shaken and exasperated but otherwise unhurt, Jay walked away from the wreckage and began looking for the closest train station to get back to Manhattan. Rasweiler caught up to Jay and yelled, “Hey, what about your plane!?!?”.

“You can go ahead and keep it!”, was the response.

“Well, what in tarnation will I have any use for a wrecked plane!?”, the old farmer quizzed, “And besides, how can I be so sure that you’re gonna repay me?”

Jay then gave the farmer his coat as a pledge along with his calling card, and headed off to the train station for Manhattan. Rasweiler went home, but then became suspicious of his uninvited visitor’s story, thinking instead that the plane might have been stolen, and he promptly called the local sheriff. The police made inquiries and found out that Jay’s story was completely legitimate. But the aftermath of this mangled heap of metal, with its nose firmly planted in the ground and its tail up in the air,made for a curious sight that Summer for passersby along Dogwood Ave before Rasweiler was finally able to extricate it from his farm.

Ode to the Courtesy Hotel - on Its 50th Anniversary

2013-06-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

The ad above that appeared in Newsday in 1963 heralded the opening of the Hempstead Motor Hotel, later to become the infamous Courtesy Hotel, at 130 Hempstead Ave. Believe it or not, at the time of its opening 50 years ago, the Hotel was actually a comfortable and classy option for visitors and tourists who wished to stay local. Aside from offering a good central location in Western LI, the hotel was conveniently located adjacent to the WHH LIRR station, was across the street from some great shopping at S. Klein and within short walking distance to a number of good eateries including the West End Tavern. The hotel featured well-appointed rooms (for 1960s standards), a spacious lobby, a steak pub called Winston's, a rooftop swimming pool and sun deck, and an underground bowling alley. These photos below in full 1960s Technicolor appeared in some promotional postcards for the hotel, and give a sense of what the hotel looked like in those early days ---

A front view from Hempstead Ave

A view of the lobby

The rooftop pool and sun-deck

Interior of a room

In the 1960s and into the '70s the hotel played host to numerous conventions, job fairs and merchant shows. In June 1964, that sunny rooftop sun deck pictured above was the site of the Miss Long Island beauty pageant, a contest that selected LI's representative for the Miss New York pageant later that year.

In 1971, Winston's reopened as the popular eatery Steak & Brew. That decade was a period of transition for the hotel, and not in a good way. By the end of the '70s the hotel's reputation started a long downhill slide that led to its ultimate demise a couple years ago. In 1978, Nassau County DA Dennis Dillon, predecessor of current DA Kathleen Rice, ran his own version of Operation Flush the Johns with an undercover sting that nabbed a number of area motels, including the Hempstead Motor Hotel, for offering their guests pornographic films on pay-per-view. Management began advertising "hourly rates" and thereafter the hotel became a magnet of crime with murders, rapes, drug busts, you name it. The place caused a major strain on emergency resources for both the 5th Precinct and the WH Fire Dept.

In 1989 ownership changed hands and the place was renamed the Courtesy Hotel. The community came out by the hundreds that year to oppose new owner Frank Zwelsky's plan to expand and enlarge his operation, and that episode galvanized the neighborhood's 20+ year long effort to shutter the hotel. Indeed, one of the main issues at the forefront of the creation of the WH Civic Association in 1995 was to force the closing of the Courtesy. By the mid 2000s the owners of the hotel found a firm willing to buy the property and develop an apartment complex that won the approval of WH residents, but it took a few years and a number of Mother's Day rallies before the Town of Hempstead finally agreed to rezone the property into "transit-oriented" status in order to accommodate the developer's plans. In May 2011, the wrecking ball dealt the final death-blow to the Courtesy and, roughly 16 months later, arose West 130, the luxury apartment building pictured below that took its place.

Front view of West 130

Highlights of Early Horse History in West Hempstead

2013-05-30T09:34:00.001-07:00

The following article appeared, with slight modifications, in the Summer 2013 edition of the WHCSA News & Views newsletter.

The grand opening of the revamped New York Equestrian Center on Eagle Ave provides an opportunity to highlight some of the more illustrious moments in horse-riding history in West Hempstead. That history dates back to time when the horse was still the preferred mode of travel to get around. Some time around 1910, the first riding school in WH was started by famed equestrian circus star Josephine DeMott Robinson on her farm on Hempstead Avenue near Johnson’s Lane. Robinson knew a little something about riding, as she was purportedly the first woman in the world to perform backwards somersaults on a moving horse. Robinson continued this operation until 1917 when she sold her farm and moved to Hempstead Village.

In 1922, WWI veteran Paul C. Lienhard moved to WH and opened the Lake View Riding Academy at the corner of Oak(ford) St. and Woodfield Rd. Lienhard was a captain in US Army cavalry division and after the War, he had been working as an instructor at the US Army’s cavalry school in Ft. Riley, KS before moving east. In the 1920s, members of the military community had increasingly viewed the use of horses in the Army as outdated and questioned their usefulness in battle when tank divisions (“mechanized cavalry”, as it was called then) were the order of the day. Ever the horseman, Lienhard sought to prove the usefulness and durability of the cavalry by embarking on a solo cross-country horseback ride, literally cross-country, from New York to Los Angeles.

On a warmer than usual winter day on December 13, 1927, the 37-year old Lienhard mounted an Army mare named Black Bess and left the Malverne train station for a 3,700-mile ride to the West Coast. Twenty five days into his trip, after averaging about 42 miles a day, he paused briefly in St. Louis to talk to a United Press reporter about his expedition and continued on his way. After 102 days on the trail, while cantering through the Arizona desert outside Yuma, Black Bess was bitten by a huge rattlesnake. The old mare wavered but within 20 minutes, she dropped dead, 180 miles short of Lienhard’s goal.

In 1931 Lienhard moved his riding school to Mill Road (Peninsula Blvd) in Hempstead to be closer to the bridle trails that were laid down in the new Hempstead Lake State Park. His was but one of half a dozen riding academies and stables that sprouted up along Mill Rd. in those days. Lienhard counted among his prize students Gen. Chen Cheng, Chief-of-staff to Chiang Kai Shek and his representative at the UN, and two-time Academy Award winning actress Luise Rainer. (Parenthetically, Luise is still alive today and at 103 years young, she is currently the oldest surviving Oscar-winning actor).

The current stables on Eagle Ave. dates back to 1926, according to County records, shortly after the deal was announced to develop Hempstead Lake as a state park.

In that year John Wellbrock opened the Paramount Riding Academy. In the 1930s, ownership was turned over to Charles Heinsohn who renamed it Lakeside Riding Academy, a name that survived until about six years ago, and ran it for the next number of decades.

Aerial photo of Lakeview Riding Stables on Eagle Ave, circa 1947. The stable houses that flank the entrance at he upper left of the photo are all that remain of the original complex. Eagle Ave. cuts horizontally along the photo and Park Ave. runs vertically at the right of the image.

Though by WWII, the use of horses in a military capacity was all but obsolete, the cavalry would have one more opportunity to prove their efficacy in the war effort, and Lakeside Stables played a central role at the time. In June 1942, Americans were shocked to learn of a botched Nazi infiltration at Amagansett by four German saboteurs who had swam to shore from a U-boat, a plot that would later be known as Operation Pastorius. The incident set the entire region on edge and highlighted the need for a civilian patrol along the hundreds of miles of Long Island coastline. On August 3, in response to a call by the Coast Guard to set up regular patrols along LI’s shores, a group of 50 expert horsemen, many of whom were WWI cavalry veterans, met at the Lakeside Stables and set up a staging area there. These patrols were an important component in defending the Homeland from any further enemy infiltrations.

Like a candle that flickers bright before it burns out, the beginning of 1943 brought conventional transportation-by-horse into major prominence one last time, after fuel-rationing during WWII was the cause of a pleasure driving ban in the East Coast region. Long Islanders had to get creative to get around. So, following the lead of the Hempstead High football team, many local schools hired out horses and wagons to transport their sports teams to their games. Theaters, restaurants and bowling alleys built hitches out in their parking lots for their horseback-riding customers. It would be the last time that horses would be used for conventional transportation to that extent in our area, before finally giving way to motorized vehicles, and the numerous stables on LI at the time played a major role in providing horse-transportation during the WWII fuel shortage.

In 1954, Peninsula Blvd. was laid out between Hempstead and Rockville Centre and thereafter, one by one, the old stables and riding academies on the eastern side of Hempstead Lake closed down, while Lakeside on the western side remains as the only riding stables left from that bygone era.

In later years, Suzanne Benedict and Brian McTigue partnered to run the Stables, until they sold it in 2006 to the current owners, Alex Jacobson and Benjamin Haghani. The initial plan was to redevelop the 1.2 acre site into condominiums, but after recognizing the value of the stables to the community, Jacobson and Haghani opted instead to rebuild the riding academy into a world-class facility, as the newly minted NY Equestrian Center.

The WHCSA and the West Hempstead Now and Then blog wish Mr. Jacobson best of luck and continued success in preserving one of West Hempstead and Lakeview’s prized local treasures.

100th Anniversary of School District 27 and the Chestnut Street School

2013-02-27T07:48:00.000-08:00

The following article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 edition of the WHCSA News & Views newsletter.

Early photo of Chestnut St School. (Courtesy of the WH Historical Society)

Last month, February 3^rd, 2013 marked the 100^th anniversary of the opening of the Chestnut Street School, West Hempstead’s first schoolhouse and purportedly the oldest school building still in use in Nassau County. This edition of A Look Back in Time examines the beginnings of School District 27 and the Chestnut Street School.

The origins of public education in the West Hempstead area stretches back to the 1820s when district 17 was created to serve children who lived in an area covering a large swath of rural countryside west of Hempstead Village. The first schoolhouse built for this district was a one-room affair crowned by a bell tower, erected at the southern corner of Dogwood Avenue and John Street (now Nassau Boulevard). The building was known then as the Trimming Square School, taking the name of the tiny village centered at the intersection of John Street and the Hempstead & Jamaica Plank Road. Perhaps the most significant historical tidbit about the Trimming Square School was the brief stint that a young 20 year-old Walt Whitman spent there as schoolmaster in 1840, right around the time that he introduced the world to the sublime poetry that would solidify his renown as “America’s Poet”. (When Whitman penned the lines -

The noble trees, the sweet young flowers,
The birds that sing in forest bowers,
The rivers grand that murmuring roll,
And all which joys or calms the soul
Are made by gracious might

published in the May 1840 edition of the Long Island Democrat during his tenure at Trimming Square, could it be that he drew his inspiration from the idyllic scene across Nassau Blvd. where a crystal-clear Pine Brook once gently meandered south through the woods and emptied into a lily-blanketed Hall’s Pond?)

The schoolhouse continued to serve the needs of local children until 1894, when an addition of a second room was necessitated. A decade-and-a-half later, a couple of neighborhood subdivisions, starting with the Fairlawn Park section in 1906, brought numerous new residents to West Hempstead, and once again, SD17 faced a shortage of space at its aging schoolhouse. By April 1911, the 29 families of SD17 from West Hempstead openly discussed forming a new school district to commence in the Fall of 1912, and thereafter they arranged a series of meetings to work out details including boundary lines, location of the new school, and the election of a new board. On Wednesday, August 9, 1911, a vote was held in Norwood Chapel (WH’s first church located at the corner of Hempstead Ave and Oak[ford] St.) where residents of West Hempstead passed a resolution to authorize the establishment of a Union Free School District. Later that Fall, on October 7, voters gave almost unanimous approval to Proposition 3, to raise $3,000 to purchase a centrally located school site at Chestnut Street. That vote, however, was declared illegal due to its short and inadequate notice, and another vote was scheduled for November when once again, Prop. 3 was carried. Hempstead architect I.B. Baylis was then promptly chosen to design a four-room school building.

The first ever school taxes for SD27 were scheduled to be paid in December 1911 and a paltry rate of 44 cents per $100 of assessed property valuation was set. (To give you an idea of how different a world we live in and how far our school taxes have come since then, consider the case of Robert Wilcox, who at the time was about to begin construction of a new home at 555 Cedar Street. Using his actual purchase price of his lot at $1,600 and his actual construction cost of $3,200, Wilcox’s annual tax bill would have come to $21.12. Factoring for inflation, in today’s dollars that would have been like paying $462. And this, mind you, was before the implementation of a Federal income tax, which would not come until the following year!)

Title of the Chestnut property was acquired by the district on June 1 and shortly thereafter notices requesting sealed bids were sent out for the construction of the schoolhouse. A vote at the Chapel on the 21^st elected the district’s first trustees, whereupon a local real estate man named Paul Ohrtman was chosen as President of the Board of Education. (Ohrtman went on to have a prolific local civic career where, in addition to SD27 Board President, he served as Fire Commissioner, Sanitation Dist. 6 Commissioner, and TOH Receiver of Taxes. He died in 1967 at age 91). An Irish teacher from Upstate New York named Mary Davern, a veteran of 32 years who had previously taught the upper grades at Trimming Square, was chosen as Principal of the new school.

In August, the winning bid for the building of the school went to a local contractor named Carl Mirschel, whose yard was located in WH on the Turnpike and who had built extensively throughout the area. Construction hastily commenced, but in the interim a home on Woodfield Road was leased from Franklin Duryea to be used as a temporary school until the Chestnut building was ready. This home hosted the first ever day of classes for the nascent district on Monday, September 9^th. Meanwhile that Fall, contractor Mirschel was working at a fever pitch and by November, he had enclosed the outer structure of the Chestnut building.

Monday, February 3, 1913 was chosen as the move-in date despite the fact that the interior of the school was not quite finished, and on that date, without much fanfare, the Chestnut Street School was inaugurated.

Over the years, Chestnut underwent two significant expansions to meet the needs of the growing district: the first when a south wing was added in 1925 and a second when a north wing 1947. However, the original building with its distinctive bell-tower remains intact and is a testament to its sturdy construction, over 100 years ago.

A&P - Western Beef

2012-11-28T13:04:00.001-08:00

The photo above (courtesy of Dave over at the Pleasant Family Shopping Blog) shows the A&P supermarket that was built at 103 Woodfield Rd, shortly after it opened in 1968. In 1965, the owners of the home and flower shop on that property, Emil and Sophie Baumgartner, began proceedings to have their lot rezoned from residential to business to develop a supermarket and mini-strip mall at the location. Despite some opposition from neighbors, given the fact that the property was flanked on either side by commercial businesses (on the north by the Hempstead Seed Co. and on the south by the Nassau County Mental Health Assn. rehabilitation center), the TOH granted the request and shortly thereafter ground was broken on the development. At the same time, the Baumgartners had their home moved further south so that it would front Cedar Street while they continued to run their flower shop for a while in the new strip mall.

Throughout the '60s, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (a.k.a. A&P) embarked on a strategy to stem the tide of its slow decline as a supermarket chain. The company faced stiff competition from newer and bigger stores that left most of the existing A&P chains feeling small and dated. Part of this strategy was a blitz of new "centennial stores" to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the company, where the buildings would be designed in the "early American style". The West Hempstead A&P was opened in 1968 (photo depicted above. The photo shows a checkout attendant helping a lady load her bags into what looks like a new '67 or '68 Ford Country Squire Station Wagon, the way they used to do it in the "old days").

Sometime in the mid '90s, A&P vacated the location and it was taken over by Western Beef. Below is a "now" shot, taken roughly at the same angle as the photo above, showing the monstrous Western Beef sign that just about obscures any vestige of the building's original architectural features. (Note the iron fence along the roof is still there).

Over the years, the adjacent mini-strip mall has seen many tenants come and go. However, one of them, Fel's Hair Creations, has been in business at that location for forty years, since almost the beginning of the mall's inception.

Comparing the then and now shots below, the old triangular pediment from the original design still peeks out above the new sign, as well as the original cupola and weather vane.

To me, shopping today at this Western Beef has kind of a retro feel to it, since very little changes have been made to modernize the interior, and I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but they always seem to pipe through what sounds like Greatest Hits of the 70s over the store loudspeakers. I almost feel like I'm in a time warp over there, bargain hunting for food deals with my mom, pushing a half-broken shopping cart with wheels that never seem to all roll in the same direction. Western Beef also plays host to the "Pickle People", an old West Hempstead business held over from the old Shoppers Village days back in the 80s.

Hempstead Gardens LIRR Station

2012-11-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

The above photo looks northeastward showing the Hempstead Gardens LIRR station some time after the platform and station house was moved 350ft to the north in December 1933. Before that time, the station was located south of Chestnut St. and the crossing at Chestnut, the only one for nearly a mile north or south, made a precarious single lane "elbow route" from one side to the other where motorists and pedestrians had to navigate a dangerous sharp turn across the tracks. (Keep in mind that until 1956, the LIRR also ran freight service along the WH line with no stops or slowdowns at the passenger stations). For years, residents and civic groups petitioned the LIRR to fix the crossing, particularly for the benefit of school children who walked to and from the Chestnut St. School, and the WH Fire Dept. who could barely manage to fit their fire apparatus through the bend that was a mere 12ft wide. These petitions fell on deaf ears at the LIRR until August 1933 when the Public Service Commission ordered the railroad company to fix the crossing in the interest of public safety. The LIRR made an additional improvement by building the new station so that Railroad Avenue (now called Hempstead Gardens Drive) would be unobstructed, whereas the previous station jutted out into the street.

In the ensuing years, the LIRR's improvement did little to increase safety. In fact, the direct, unguarded crossing made the situation much worse. The site became the scene of some fatal and near fatal collisions. Among them:

In November 1941, James Moores' vehicle was struck by an oncoming train and burst into flames when it hit the third rail. A brave bystander rescued Moores from the inferno before his car was reduced to a charred skeletal heap. (Following the accident, when a reporter from the LI Star Journal questioned the LIRR about the dangerous conditions at Chestnut St, which lacked any gates, lights or warning bells, an LIRR spokesman assured him that Chestnut was a "protected crossing". When probed further about what features qualified Chestnut as a "protected crossing", the spokesman pointed out with a straight face that there was a sign there that read "Watch out for the train".)
In March 1942, Christoph Koenig's milk truck was struck by an eastbound train. (The driver escaped unhurt).
Most tragic of all, on the night of Jan. 14, 1947, a train struck the car of a 21 year-old WWII Navy veteran and WH resident named Richard Stanley and his fiance Jane Alford, killing him instantly and critically injuring the young woman. The couple was to be married that March. A day later, Alford too succumbed to her injuries and died at Meadowbrook Hospital.

In 1956, there was a proposal to eliminate the Hempstead Gardens station altogether, but at an LIRR meeting on Jan. 9 of that year, residents voted overwhelmingly against the proposal. (197 against vs. 67 for).

It wasn't until March 1966 when the LIRR finally got around to installing automatic crossing gates at Chestnut St. Below is a photo of the Hempstead Gardens Station as it looked on Jan. 1, 1972 (Photo taken by Dave Keller at roughly the same angle as the above photo), with Hempstead Gardens Drive running behind it. (The street was officially renamed Hempstead Gardens Dr. by the TOH board on Jan 4, 1955).

The photo shows a station that was built at ground level, 22 months before the LIRR raised the platform five feet to accommodate their new "metropolitan trains". The WH line was the last of all the LIRR branches to continue using the old MU trains (shown in the picture), where passengers had to navigate a flight of stairs to board and disembark their train.

Below is a "now" shot of the two photos above, (photo courtesy of Jeremiah Cox, a.k.a the Subway Nut).

Notice the white three story home at 347 Hempstead Gardens Dr. built in 1908, is visible in all three photos.

Marian M. Delaney (Eagle Avenue) School

2012-11-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

The picture above comes from the front page of the Hempstead Sentinel from February 28, 1929 and is a front view of a newly built school on Eagle Avenue. The building was District 27's second school to be built, following the Chestnut Street School in 1912. During its first decade, the WH school district experienced a steady increase in its student population and by 1924, a four-room addition was built at Chestnut to accommodate the influx of students. But very shortly, even that proved inadequate. A series of meetings was then organized with the purpose of selecting two additional sites for schools, one in the southern section of the district, and another in the northern section. A 3-4 acre parcel was chosen on Oak(ford) St. with a purchase price of $15,000 and its acquisition would be decided by a voter referendum on March 1, 1926. In one of the most closely contested votes in District 27 history, residents rejected the proposal 113 to 110. Owing to the closeness of the vote, the school board decided to resubmit the proposal again the following month. Again, voters rejected it, this time by a count of 92 to 73.

The following year, on March 31, a vote was passed to acquire a $25K parcel on Eagle Avenue near the corner of Woodfield Rd. After a heated meeting, on April 26th, 1927, two bond proposals were floated, one for a $400K 16-room school house and the other for a $260K eight-room school to be built at that site. Both were soundly rejected. Finally on August 16, a $200,000 bond issue was approved and work commenced on the new school in the fall. A local firm from Hempstead, Kirwin Estabrook Construction Corp. was awarded the contract for the work. The firm specialized in school construction and had just recently completed the Fulton Ave School and Garden City School, among others. Ground was broken on Nov. 14. In a rare example of public works efficiency, construction of the eight-room building came in under budget at $185,000 and on Monday, November 5, 1928, nearly a year after work had started, students moved into their new school. The date for a formal dedication ceremony was chosen to coincide with Washington's Birthday and on February 21, 1929, the new building was dedicated amid much fanfare.

Among the faculty that first year was a sixth-grade teacher named Marian Delaney, who soon worked her way up to assistant principal and eventually principal of the school. In 1963, she retired and the following year, in appreciation of her 35 years at the school, the district decided to rededicate the Eagle Avenue School by renaming it the Marian M. Delaney school. Below is a photo of district officials conferring the naming of the school after Ms. Delaney (right), who is visibly moved by the gesture.

On November 6, 1949, an east wing addition to the building was dedicated, but by the 1970s, a declining enrollment forced the district to consolidate the student body of the southern section with the Cornwell Ave School. Parents petitioned the State Supreme Court unsuccessfully to keep the school open and by the 1981-82 school year, the district vacated Eagle Ave. For a time thereafter, the building was rented out by Adelphi University to run adult education programs. After that, Nassau County has since utilized the school for its BOCES program, but it was announced this past year that the County would not extend its lease beyond 2013, leaving the building's future in doubt.

Below is a "now" shot of the Eagle Ave "Marian M. Delaney" School.

1875 Woodfield Train Disaster

2012-10-17T14:08:00.003-07:00

The following article first appeared in the Fall 2012 edition of the WH Community Support Association newsletter.

Wreckage of the South Side Railroad disaster at Woodfield, purportedly the oldest surviving image of a train wreck on LI. The Wreck occurred on the David Bedell farm, currently the site of the former Stop & Shop on Woodfield Rd. From the WH Historical Society archives.

Here’s a pop question: name the worst ever human disaster in the history of West Hempstead? One would have to go all the way back over 137 years for the answer - the South Side Railroad train wreck at Woodfield on February 3, 1875. (Update: Ironically at the same time this article went to print, West Hempstead learned about an awful car crash on the Southern State Parkway that killed four teenagers, matching the human life toll suffered in the Woodfield train disaster). The following is a brief recap of that calamitous incident and the events that lead up to it. But in order to understand what happened, some background information is necessary involving two important geographical features of West Hempstead that have long since disappeared – the headwaters of Schodack Brook and the path of the Hempstead-Valley Stream branch of the Southern Railroad.

Schodack Brook and the David Bedell Farm

Schodack Brook is a small rivulet which runs southward through Lakeview and empties into Schodack Pond in Hempstead Lakes State Park. The brook can still be viewed today running though the residential section of Lakeview, just east of Woodfield Rd., but years ago it extended further north through what is now the site of the former Stop & Shop property. In the late 1800’s that property was part of a large farm owned by David Bedell, who moved there with his wife Ruth (Rhodes) Bedell shortly after their marriage in 1843. (That marriage brought together two of the more prominent families of West Hempstead whose roots in the local community date back to the very founding of Hempstead Village. David was a son of Hiram K. Bedell who had lived on a farm on the north side of Hempstead Turnpike. Ruth was the daughter of William Rhodes whose large homestead sprawled along the east side of Woodfield Road and occupied much of the land that would become known as Hempstead Gardens. The sole remaining visible legacy of the Rhodes estate is what is purported to be the oldest standing house in West Hempstead in its original location, the modest home at 419 Woodfield Rd, circa 1839).

The above map, circa 1873, shows the route of the South Side RR's Hempstead line through Woodfield at the bottom, with David & Ruth (Rhodes) Bedell's home just north of the tracks. Further north along Woodfield Rd. are the homes of three of Ruth Bedell's Brothers, William L., Jacob and Isaac Rhodes.

Southern Railroad

In the mid-nineteenth century, Hempstead Village was displeased with being bypassed by the Long Island Railroad’s main line which ran three miles to the north, despite being one of the largest villages in western Long Island. Though since 1839 Hempstead was provided a shuttle train that connected to the LIRR’s main line at a depot called Hempstead Branch (later Mineola), villagers were looking for a more direct and reliable connection to points west. By 1868, they found their answer in the South Side Railroad, a competing line to the LIRR that targeted the growing but underserved communities of Long Island’s South shore. The South Side RR laid a single-track route from Valley Stream to Hempstead which was completed in 1870 and service began in September of that year. (The branch should not be confused with the path of the existing WH branch of the LIRR built some 23 years later). The route spurred off at Valley Stream and ran northeast, paralleling Cornwell Ave. until it crossed at Franklin Ave. in present-day Malverne where a station called Bridgeport was located. Thereafter, it headed on a virtual straight path to Norwood station, located just south of Hall’s Pond (site of the St. Thomas Chapel parking lot). Proceeding northeastward, the track passed Woodfield Depot at the intersection of Woodfield Rd. and Oakford St., and then over an embankment and culvert at Schodak Brook (at the present site of the old Stop & Shop). The line then turned slightly northward where it ran through the woods and finally terminated in Hempstead Village. No trace of this old line exists any longer, with the possible exception of a small access road that runs behind the WH Water District’s Birch St. Plant.

On January 31^st, 1875, the area experienced unusually strong rains that swelled the ponds and brooks of Long Island. At Woodfield Depot, the water backed up behind the culvert, and flooded David Bedell farm. Bedell’s house was located just 70 yards north of the railroad bridge over the brook, and when the water level came within inches of the top step of his porch, he directed his family to roll up the rugs on the main floor so they wouldn’t get ruined. On the evening of February 3, the managers of the South Side RR instructed an eight man crew to run a single engine and passenger car to Hempstead to verify the safety of the road and make any necessary repairs. The crew proceeded slowly over Schodack Brook without incident and reached the terminal in Hempstead. At around 8 PM, on the return train, the weight of the engine undermined the bridge, sending it backwards into the flooded creek and causing an enormous explosion that could be clearly heard as far away as Garden City. The engineer, James Scott of Hempstead, was killed instantly. Benjamin Carman, the brakeman and Eli Thorpe, trackmaster, were also killed. Bernard Callahan, the fireman, survived the blast but was pinned down by the debris and drowned to death in the water. Three of the four others on the train were severely injured. The dead bodies were brought to David Bedell’s barn where the Hempstead coroner examined their cause of death. A photo of the incident remains as the oldest surviving image of a train wreck on Long Island.

In the following months, an investigation of the incident revealed that the South Side Railroad was responsible for the shoddy construction of the Hempstead Branch and they were ordered to make repairs and pay for damages. A couple of other fatal incidents sealed the fate of the South Side. On April 30, 1879, less than ten years from when the line was opened, the last train rode the Hempstead - Valley Stream branch. The South Side went bankrupt and its assets were sold at auction. Locals had always hoped that another concern would purchase the Hempstead line and reopen it. Instead, the buyer tuned out to be Henry Hilton, manager of the Garden City Company, who had no intention of reopening the line. In all likelihood, his purchase was an attempt to protect his Garden City line from nearby competition. West Hempstead would have to wait 1893 before it regained rail service, when the LIRR built the existing branch.

David Bedell continued to live at Woodfield until 1896 when he sold his farm to Edwin C. Duryea. The Bedells lived to celebrate their 63rd wedding anniversary in 1906. That year, Ruth passed away at age 90 and David was called to Heaven a few weeks later on July 4th, at age 93.

David and Ruth (Rhodes) Bedell at their 60th wedding anniversary- owners of the farm where the 1875 Woodfield train wreck occurred.

Freddie Voelpel's

2012-08-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

The photo above depicts Freddie Voelpel's restaurant as it stood at 372 Hempstead Avenue between the years 1950-1957. Freddie Voelpel was a bowling legend who at one time captured the Long Island bowling championship in 1944. The following year, Voelpel was on track to win a second championship before he suffered a serious mishap. At his day job in the NY Daily News print room, he lost the tips of a couple fingers on his bowling hand when it got caught in a print roller. He managed to continue to bowl competitively after that, but he never returned to the top of his game.

Freddie Voelpel was part of a pretty substantial bowling culture that existed on Long Island back in the '40s and '50s, wherein names like George Young, Andy Varipapa, Joe Falcaro and Tony Sparando would compete in tournaments and bowling halls like Mid Isle Lanes (formerly Heinemen's) on Peninsula Ave in Hempstead (now the site of a public storage facility) and Falcaro's own hall in Lawrence (Falcaro's closed down only about ten years ago).

In 1944 Voelpel took his winnings and bought a stake in a bowling venue called Baldwin Modern Lanes, but then he made a business decision that would later come back to haunt him, one that he would later regret. Thinking that there was no commercial future in bowling, in February 1950 he sold his stake in Baldwin Modern and bought the restaurant you see pictured above. (He named it after himself because, well, he couldn't find a better name for it). This was right around the time when the deployment of automatic pin-setting machines was about to revolutionize the sport by obviating the need to rely on "pin-boys" to reset the pins. (Voelpel never gave these newfangled machines a chance but was the first to admit his mistake years later in an interview). As a result, commercial bowling would enjoy a huge upswing in the coming decades.

On the other side of the coin, around the same time that he got bought his restaurant, those local, family-run eating establishments such as Voelpel's were getting crowded out and losing business to cheaper fast-food joints that were popping up all over Long Island.

Freddie Voelpel was simply a victim of bad timing. Aside from that, the combination of his day job and managing the restaurant left him averaging around four hours of sleep a night with no time for any leisure activity. In 1957, he sold the tavern and moved to the South Shore where he bought a boat and lived his life in semi-retirement.

Empire State Diner

2012-08-10T10:31:00.000-07:00

The photo above c. 1949 looks south across Hempstead Turnpike and shows the Empire State Diner, a West Hempstead landmark during the '40s '50s and '60s. The diner was owned and operated by a Cathedral Gardens resident named Charles Efthinion, along with his brother Phillip who lived in nearby Hempstead Gardens.

The Efthinion Bros. ran the restaurant until 1963, whereafter they relocated down the road to the southwest corner of Hempstead Turnpike and Nassau Blvd (current location of a Sleepy's), and opened a restaurant called "The Country Gentleman". That restaurant was built on a site that for years, dating back to the 19th century, was occupied by William Stringham's general store and was once the central location of the long-forgotten Hamlet of Munson. Below is a "now" shot of the old Empire State Diner location.

In 1964, the diner was demolished and in November of that year, ground was broken to build the first of many IHOPs on Long Island. That restaurant continues to operate at the same location, nearly 50 years later, one of the few original businesses from that era. (Below is an ad that appeared in the May 13, 1965 edition of Newsday).

The vacant building in the "now" shot was built in 1966 and represented S Klein's first foray into the automotive and tire business. The building boasted 12 bays and the operators originally envisioned a capacity of servicing up to 280 cars per day. What they did not envision was that S Klein wouldn't last another 10 years after that.

The S Klein Tire & Auto Center became Korvette's Tire & Auto Center which then became Tires Incorporated. This building may well be the record-setter for the duration of a vacant commercial building in West Hempstead. (No, the temporary occupancy as the campaign headquarters of former Town Supervisor Greg Peterson's failed election bid for County Executive in 2005 does not count for filling the vacancy).