Horsepower Ruled the Road

Long Island Maritime Museum/Benjamin T. West

Some big event bought out this parade of horse-drawn vehicles and well-dressed pedestrians filing past the Western Union Telegraph office. Photographer Benjamin T. West caught the late 19th-Century scene. West had his headquarters in Bay Shore but was in demand everywhere on the Island. His glass-plate negative, damaged at upper left, wound up in the archives of the Long Island Maritime Museum in Sayville.

The Jan. 21 "history mystery" photo of a U.S. Customs and Immigration post in the 1930s has been solved. Richard L. Boyle of upstate Norwood, a retired Port Washington high school math teacher, e-mailed us that it was the American Customs Canadian Border Crossing at Rouses Point, N.Y., near the Vermont border. "Not quite," Rouses Point agent-in-charge Mike Bridgeman said when he received the photo. He faxed it to 12 other border crossings and all agreed, he said, that the station was Highgate Springs, Vt., near the New York border. Boyle, whose father was an immigration agent at the Fort Covington, N.Y., crossing, conceded -- the border crossings look pretty much alike, he said. Incidentally, he saw the Time Machine page while visiting his daughter, Anne Kelly of East Northport, who gave birth to his eighth grandchild.