The 2000s: Heartbreak and hope

The new millennium dawned on an age of wealth and optimism. The dot-com bubble was still buoyant, and Y2K had failed to bring disaster.

Disaster arrived a year later, with the devastating 9/11 attack that killed 2,976 people as well as hundreds more at the Pentagon and on hijacked jets - a heartbreaking 455 of them from Long Island - and ushered out an entire way of life.

The age of terror was here to stay, with new, stringent security procedures and thousands of local men and women sent abroad to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. The economy, however, bounced back in a big way, as real estate soared to unprecedented values that filled wallets, bank accounts and even county coffers.

Long Island's latest growing pains took the form of anti-immigrant tension, aimed at the Latinos who had poured into the region to work as laborers. The decade started with a premeditated attack on two laborers lured to an abandoned house in Farmingville; it ended with the killing of an Ecuadorean man attacked in Patchogue by a group of teens who, police say, made sport of beating Hispanics.

In a region where Catholics represented more than half of Long Island's 2.8 million residents, the priest sex-abuse scandal hit hard. A report issued by Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota in 2003 made scathing allegations, charging that children were raped, molested and psychologically abused by priests that the church then protected.

The LIRR kept making headlines. In 2006, a young woman visiting from Minnesota fell through a gap between an LIRR train and the track and was hit by a train. Her death sparked a Newsday series on gap problems and an MTA campaign to educate the public and repair the problem.

With the rest of the nation, Long Islanders learned that what goes up must come down, as real estate prices crashed and the economy plunged into the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The region suffered further with the unraveling of Bernard Madoff's $64-billion Ponzi scheme, with nearly a quarter of his victims from Long Island.

Dissatisfaction with the economy and two lingering wars helped Barack Obama become the nation's first Black president. On Long Island, where property values were down and unemployment up, families watched closely to see if Obama would deliver on his ringing promises of hope and change, eager to learn what the future would bring.

-- Melanie Lefkowitz