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The New Frontier

Veterans head east to claim a home of their own, creating a place called suburbia

By David Behrens | Staff Writer

In the years after World War II, Long Island had become a frontier once again.

In the 1950s, builder Andrew Monaco would stand on the edge of the frontier looking across a vast expanse of farmland. Fields of potatoes, corn and wheat. He could almost see the future in as-yet unbuilt subdivisions: New homes. Men going to work. Children on their way to school. Little League fields. Nearby shopping centers.

``We had a vision of it,'' Monaco, now 80 and still involved in the business of building homes, recalled a few days ago.

Soon, an entry road into the property would be built and utilities run to the edge of the tract. Then two or three model homes would go up. A split-level, a ranch, a Cape Cod. Modern kitchens with built-in ovens. ``On opening day, you usually got the feeling whether you had a success or not -- which of the models would sell,'' Monaco said. ``Then you'd extend the roads as the lots were sold.''

Along this new frontier, a generation of settler-families transformed many of the villages and hamlets of Nassau and Suffolk -- for better or worse -- into a predominant American form: the sprawl called suburbia.

These settlers would establish patterns that reverberate profoundly into the present -- a preoccupation with home ownership, a veneration of local government, an acceptance of pervasive racial segregation, and a toleration of jumbled residential and commercial development.

The 1950s and early '60s were a time of familial togetherness and social homogeneity, a time when most women stayed home to raise children and men found new fields of combat on the traffic-jammed highways of the expanding look-alike suburbs. There was also something Jeffersonian in the air.

``It was an old ideal,'' says Long Island historian Barbara Kelly, ``a return to Jefferson's vision of the yeoman-farmer owning his home and a piece of land of his own.''

The image of the yeoman-commuter was etched everywhere, in newspaper and magazine ads, on television and in motion pictures. The message sounded loud and clear -- and inexpensive: You too can own a single-family home in the suburbs. Then you can hop on the Long Island Rail Road or zip down the nearby highway to your job in the city.

It was the right message for thousands of returning servicemen in search of a decent place to begin long-delayed family life.

When Bill and Marie Baum moved to Long Island in 1949, they were surrounded by young people. ``It seemed wonderful to have so much support,'' Bill Baum reflected. ``We were all the same age, with the same situations, the same backgrounds. Looking back, maybe it did influence our lives. But at the time, we weren't even aware of it.''

Pat and Kay Catapano waited until the late '50s to make their move to the suburbs, buying a house in East Northport on the eastern fringe of suburbia.

``I was making a good living as a civil engineer,'' Pat, now 79, said recently. ``We had watched the transition: a lot of couples moving from Brooklyn to Queens, then from Queens to Valley Stream and Malverne and the like. I said to my wife, `Let's wait and make one big jump and then everyone else will have to catch up to us.' I knew what I wanted and I didn't want a Levitt house for $7,999. I didn't want to move once and then move again.''

By the time they did move, the Catapanos would add a pair of 8-year-old twins and a 10-month-old girl to the Baby Boom on Long Island.

Through the years of the Great Depression and the war, America had placed its biological urges on hold. By the late '40s, the number of marriageable people had swelled with men and women from age 20 into their early 30s. Predictably, says historian Kelly, ``The nation's dammed-up reproductive cycle just burst.''

By the 1950s, Long Island's rate of growth was the highest in the nation. In 1960, Nassau County's population rose to 1,300,171, compared to 406,748 in 1940. In Suffolk, the 1960 figure of 666,784 was more than three times the prewar total of 197,255.

After Levittown, there were babies everywhere. By the '60s, children abounded, with 40 percent of Long Island's citizens under the age of 21.

The focus was on the care and feeding of children. Adults devoted long hours to attending PTA meetings, organizing Little League. Fathers managed teams, mothers chauffeured kids from ballet to ballfield. Hundreds of new schools opened, and neighborhood playgrounds were built throughout Nassau and western Suffolk.

New York City native Pat Catapano recalls the stunningly different street scene. `'In Brooklyn or Queens, there were always kids out on the street, playing by themselves no matter how bad the weather. On Long Island, everything was organized in leagues for the kids.'' There was little attention paid to facilities for older people. ``There were just young people with children in the neighborhood.''

There was also traffic everywhere. Construction of the Long Island Expressway had begun in 1953 and crossed the Suffolk border in 1962. Ten years later, the road reached Riverhead. The expressway and the Northern and Southern State Parkways had heightened the suburban dream: A working man could move swiftly along new roads between work and home.

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The New Frontier

Veterans head east to claim a home of their own, creating a place called suburbia

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