Brentwood

A Place Built on Dreams

By Tom Morris | Staff Writer

Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews were brilliant and idealistic men, social reformers whose dream was to create a utopia where everyone would live in harmony, where profit would be a dirty word and absolute personal freedom - including ``free love'' - would be the ultimate goal.

So it was almost 150 years ago that Warren and Andrews founded Modern Times, a social experiment that occupied, for a volatile 13 years, the land that now is part of Brentwood. Short-lived though it was, Modern Times left its mark as a place whose time had not yet come: Its maverick residents, who never numbered more than 150, were free to cohabit with or without marriage. To be sure, this was what gave the place its reputation as a ``Sodom of the pine barrens,'' but it was only part of what Modern Times was about. The village operated harmoniously for several years without police, courts or crime. All residents were allowed total personal freedom as long as their actions hurt no one else. Food, clothing, land and housing - all the necessities - were sold at cost.

The experiment, like several others that surfaced in mid-19th-Century America, was aimed at revolutionizing human society. Warren provided the impetus. A low-key inventor and social philosopher, he had served at New Harmony, a radical experiment in communism established in Indiana in 1824 that turned out to be quite disharmonious after a couple of years. Warren put his central credo this way: ``Man seeks freedom as the magnet seeks the pole or water its level, and society can have no peace until every member is really free.'' At 59, he wanted to set up a model village near an eastern city, and the sparsely settled woods of western Suffolk County were just right.

Modern Times was hacked out of Islip Town's pine barrens in 1851 by Warren and Andrews, an unconventional radical lawyer and ardent women's rights advocate. It was Andrews who, in 1853, drew the backing of radical free-love advocates Thomas Low Nichols and his wife, Mary Gove. Gove and Nichols, New Yorkers who lived for a time at Modern Times, were nationally known for their strident demands for total sexual freedom in or out of marriage - including a woman's right to choose the fathers of her children.

Roger Wunderlich, editor and founder of the Long Island Historical Journal and the author of a 1992 book, ``Low Living and High Thinking at Modern Times, New York,'' says Modern Times' sexual-marital experiment overshadowed its other goals and exposed the young village to public censure it could never live down. ``The translation of free love to free lust ... was the heaviest cross that the village bore,'' Wunderlich wrote. As to its legacy: ``The hot light of marital reform seared Modern Times' reputation but pointed the way to the future.''

Modern Times was one of the last of about 50 experimental American communities in the mid-1800s. In a 1945 magazine article, Helen Beal Woodward wrote, ``Those towns stood for everything eccentric - for abolition, short skirts, whole-wheat bread, hypnotism, phonetic spelling, phrenology, free love and the common ownership of property.'' The others were in decline when Modern Times started, and on Sept. 7, 1864, faced with national scandal, the Civil War and internal dissension over the ban on profit-making, villagers ended the experiment. They renamed the place Brentwood, after a more decorous place in Essex, England. Eventually, the town changed ``from a bastion of radicalism into a sleepy village with a shady past,'' wrote historian John C. Spurlock.

Soon after the name change, modern Brentwood began to emerge. The school district was expanded, churches, farmers' clubs and a cemetery association formed. And the face of early Brentwood continued to change as the century turned. The magnificent old home of capitalist Robert W. Pearsall became the 125-room Austral Hotel, which failed, its 350 acres bought in 1896 by the Sisters of St. Joseph for a motherhouse, novitiate and academy. It's been a landmark local institution ever since. The state in the 1930s built Pilgrim State Hospital (in West Brentwood), which was to become the world's largest mental institution. Meanwhile, the famous Long Island Motor Parkway was built through Brentwood, en route to Lake Ronkonkoma, in 1908.

Brentwood's population exploded with the postwar building boom, from 5,000 in 1950 to about 45,000 now, making Brentwood Islip Town's most populous place, and in recent decades it has become a gateway to Long Island for waves of people of Hispanic heritage, most recently from Central America and the Caribbean. They followed the tide of Italian, Irish and Puerto Ricans who flocked to Brentwood from the 1940s to the 1960s. About 48 percent of the school district's students are of Hispanic descent.

``It was primarily cheap land that brought Modern Times to Long Island, and in a way has been the economic motivator for bringing so many people to modern Brentwood,'' Islip Town Historian Carl A. Starace said. He thinks the social radicals who founded Modern Times would be pleased to know that the land in which they incubated their utopian dreams has offered opportunity and promise to so diverse a population 147 years later.

Where to Find More: ``Low Living and High Thinking at Modern Times, N.Y., by Roger Wunderlich, 1992; ``A Century of Brentwood,'' by Verne Dyson, 1950, at Brentwood Public Library.