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Island Park

It Took Lots of Mud to Make It a Home

Beginnings: Rockaway Indians raised pigs and cattle and made wampum from clam shells on the island until Europeans arrived in the mid-1600s and the Indians moved eastward.

Revolution: Patriots viewed Hog Island, as the future Island Park was known from 1665 until 1874, as a strategic stronghold for keeping the British away from Long Island's southern shoreline. After the British captured Long Island in 1776, the Patriots made repeated raids on the Tories camped at Hog Island, and on July 11, 1780, the British warship Galatea pursued a Patriot sloop through Jones Inlet and forced it ashore on Hog Island.

Turning Points: In 1870, the New York and Long Beach Railroad, later part of the Long Island Rail Road, laid tracks from Lynbrook to Long Beach across the island. At the time, the island was known as Barnum Island, for the man who owned most of it: P.T. Barnum, though not the P.T. Barnum, the promoter and circus owner. In 1910, two developers, Frank Lawson and William Austin, bought Barnum Island, with plans to make it the "Venice of the United States," complete with canals. World War I killed their idea, and in 1921 they sold the island to the Island Park-Long Beach Corp., and the island was renamed Island Park. The corporation brought in a giant dredge that for more than a year pumped mud five feet deep on the undeveloped island to allow development. An electric plant and waterworks were built, followed by the first 15 houses along Kildare Road. Between 1922 and 1926, so many homes were built on the southern end of the island that the railroad station was relocated from the north end of the island to the south. A business district developed along Long Beach Road. The village was incorporated in 1926, when there were fewer than 1,000 property owners. What was a summer resort for city residents became primarily a middle-class, year-round community with a large Italian and Greek population.

Claim to Fame: In 1945, Alfonse D'Amato, at age 8, moved from Newark, N.J., to Island Park with his family. The Republican U.S. senator still calls Island Park home.