Chapter 9: Long Island Transformed

Beyond the Boom

For Long Island, 1973 marked the end of the post-war suburban explosion -- and the beginning of a quarter-century when the Island became defined less by its promise than by its limitations.

Land of Limits

One summer day at the end of June, 1972, a stream of cars got on the Long Island Expressway in Queens and got off in Riverhead, a 91-mile journey from the city to the country. It marked the culmination of an 18-year effort to extend the expressway from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to the heart of the last concentration of farms on Long Island. The roadway was now in place to bring the west end to the East End.

The Horrors In Amityville

In the middle of the night of Nov. 13, 1974, a 23-year-old, disaffected, recovering teenager, Ronald (Butch) DeFeo Jr., who by using drugs, stealing outboard motors and posturing pathetically in a local saloon already had demonstrated that he was hell-bent on becoming a loser, sneaked around the rooms of his parents' handsome Dutch Colonial house at 112 Ocean Ave. in Amityville, brandishing a .35-cal. rifle, with which he shot to death every member of his immediate family: father, mother, two brothers and two sisters. His siblings were 18, 13, 12 and 7.

Fighting for School Dollars

It was a basic premise of suburbia: the right to a good education in a neighborhood school. And few communities prized their schools more than Levittown.

They Shoot, They Score!

We can say with certainty that Long Island put the map on the New York Islanders. But besides the design of the hockey team's logo, the converse is also true: When Bobby Nystrom scored an overtime goal on May 24, 1980, to secure the first of the Islanders' four consecutive hockey championships, the only surviving big-time sports team east of the Queens-Nassau border left its mark on Long Island as well.

More Than A Troubadour

Once upon the 1970s, Harry Chapin did a concert at a high school in Patchogue. It was like many other Chapin appearances -- equal parts hoedown, pep rally, political seminar, kaffeeklatsch and sensitivity session.

Physty, the Big, Brave Whale

He swam to us, sick and foundering, out of the deepest deeps and for one shining moment he called to what is good in all of us. We named him after the Latin for his species, Physeter macrocephalus, the largest of the toothed whales.

The Fall of Joseph Margiotta

GOP-1. The license plates of the chairman of the local Republican Party told who was boss.

Life in the Wake of Gloria

Eleven days and eight hours after Hurricane Gloria knocked out their electrical service, the lights finally went on in Richard and Carol Mogil's Centereach home.

Barging into a Trashy Saga

It was 1987 and America was awash in trashy news, most notably the sex scandals involving former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart and television evangelist Jim Bakker.

Grumman in Decline

On a cloudy day in the nation's capital in April of 1989, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney sat behind a dark wooden table in an ornate hearing room in the House of Representatives and made an announcement that would strike at the heart of the Long Island economy.

Lights Out at Shoreham

It was only concrete and steel, after all. A tangled mass of pipes and circuitry wrapped around a cavernous core of superheated water. A machine to harness the breakneck energy released when atoms are split in chain reactions, and to channel that energy into the prosaic chore of lighting lights and heating homes.

The War of the Woods

It is an Everglades with humility, a Yosemite without the grandeur. No sea of grass, but shallow ponds and reed-choked swamps. No redwood canopy over a rich forest floor, but spindly pines and bushy scrub oaks pushing up through parched sand.

Gunfire on the 5:33

The commuter train pulled out of the station carrying people of all kinds home from work on a Wednesday evening -- secretaries and stockbrokers and sellers and buyers and students, and in their laps were bags and bundles, and in their heads were all the thousands of threads of unfinished business that is human life in progress.

A Long-Running Morality Play

Long Island has been center stage for some of the most heated social controversies of the past quarter century: civil rights, abortion rights, freedom of speech, the right to live and the right to die.

Crime in the Suburbs

For the postwar generation of baby boomers and their parents, Long Island was seen largely as a refuge, away from the big city and, of course, away from crime. "I never thought anything like that would happen here," reporters covering crimes would often hear. "That's why we left the city."

Moving Ahead, Looking Back

When I was a child in Queens, my family used to go on Sunday drives through our own borough and Brooklyn. As our Packard or Studebaker -- there was even a Buick with a rumble seat -- purred along the city streets, my father would glance at a store or a factory or an apartment building and turn to my mother. "Look, Anna," he would say, "remember, it was just a lot. We could have bought it for a song."

E P I L O G U E

Struggling to Keep the Past Alive

A lover of his town's rich past, Thomas Twomey knew there were gaps in the story of East Hampton -- letters, diaries, journals that would complete the history of a people and a place. He wanted to find them.

E P I L O G U E

Long Islanders Pull Together

F rom where he stood on the Sunrise Highway overpass, it seemed to Fred Daniels that the world was ablaze.

E P I L O G U E

Concluding a Journey Into the Past

We're history.