The 1950s: The age of suburbia

In the postwar years, the march onto Long Island intensified. The success of Levittown prompted other areas to ease their building codes, and city dwellers yearning for backyards and bedrooms flooded in. By the end of the 1950s, Nassau's population doubled to 1.3 million; Suffolk's rose 150 percent, to nearly 667,000. The era of the suburbs had begun.

Transportation for all these new residents became the next challenge. The LIRR, bankrupt and mismanaged, was careening toward disaster. Two train collisions within nine months in 1950 killed 107 people, injuring 203. The disasters horrified the nation, eventually prompting the overdue modernization of the railroad and its incorporation into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The roads, too, required an overhaul to accommodate the new suburbanites. Under the stewardship of the so-called Master Builder Robert Moses, the Meadowbrook and Northern State parkways were extended. The Long Island Expressway, which had opened in Queens in 1940, began a huge extension to the East End, and its first Nassau section opened in 1958.

Now Long Islanders needed places to go, and shopping centers and schools sprouted rapidly. Roosevelt Field shopping center, one of the first in the nation, opened on a former airfield in 1956. C.W. Post College opened in Brookville in 1955, and philanthropist Ward Melville donated land that would become Stony Brook University in 1962.

The growth had its dark side: a rise in crime. The nation was riveted by the kidnapping of 4-week-old Peter Weinberger, grabbed from his family's porch in Westbury on July 4, 1956, and left to die nearby. Five years earlier, 12-year-old Lyde Kitchner was found strangled in the woods near his home in Smithtown and in 1957, Benny Hooper, 7, fell into a 21-foot well. That story had a happy ending, when Benny was rescued just 10 minutes before his air ran out.

The world beyond beckoned. Less than a decade after World War II's end, more men were called to serve in Korea. Familiar faces flickered on new television screens: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe and, increasingly, a young and dashing politician named John F. Kennedy.

This was the calm before the storm.

-- Melanie Lefkowitz