Roosevelt

Developers Opened Door to Blacks

Icehouse Lakes, Roosevelt (Photo from "Long Island To-day" by Frederick Ruther, 1909)

Beginnings: In the centuries before European settlement, Roosevelt was a part of the great forest separating the Hempstead Plains from the meadows and marshes along the South Shore. Indians used the woods for hunting, and even after Europeans arrived it was decades before anyone lived in the area. After the colonists came, the stagecoach route from Hempstead to Babylon passed through the area, and in the late 1700s some entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of the potential business by building taverns. Thus, the community got its first name - Rum Point. The more genteel Greenwich Point became the community's name about 1830. In 1902, when a post office was established, residents renamed it in honor of the current president of the United States, fellow Nassau County resident Theodore Roosevelt.

Turning Points: The railroad didn't serve Roosevelt, causing its development to lag behind other parts of Nassau. After the turn of the century, however, a trolley line from Jamaica to Freeport passed through Roosevelt, and that spurred the first suburban development. Farms became neighborhoods. Neighborhoods became business districts. The post-World War II building boom affected Roosevelt in much the same way as the rest of central Nassau, but with an important difference. Unlike in Levittown and elsewhere, Roosevelt's developers did not discriminate against blacks. Indeed, they advertised in black publications and neighborhoods, and by 1957 the community was 20 percent black. After a court battle about racial segregation in Roosevelt elementary schools, many white families left in the late 1960s, tipping the racial balance.

Claims to Fame: Basketball great Julius Erving, author David Halberstam, comic Eddie Murphy and radio star Howard Stern all grew up in Roosevelt. Since the 1950s, the United Cerebral Palsy Center there has been recognized as the foremost treatment center for the disease in the world. Igor Sikorski, founder of the helicopter company that bore his name, built a helicopter in a house on Clinton Avenue in 1923.

Where to Find More: In the Roosevelt file at the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University, Hempstead.