The land of limits: In the past quarter century, LIers learn to cope with the end of unbridled growth

This originally appeared in the book "Long Island: Our Story," on Nov. 15, 1998.

One summer day at the end of June, 1972, a stream of cars got on the Long Island Expressway in Queens and got off in Riverhead, a 91-mile journey from the city to the country. It marked the culmination of an 18-year effort to extend the expressway from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to the heart of the last concentration of farms on Long Island. The roadway was now in place to bring the west end to the East End.

But only a year later, the explosive growth that had driven Long Island for a generation sputtered to a halt. Coming just as the LIE finally made it all the way east, the timing couldn't have been more ironic - or symbolic.

That year, 1973, marked the end of the Island's long history as an inviting frontier - first for the Indians who lived here for 500 generations, then for the Dutch and English who arrived to build new lives, and finally for the Levittowners, who almost instantly created a vast suburb atop thousands of acres of old potato farms. As a national recession bloomed and housing construction plummeted, Long Island began a transformation that would come to shape the next quarter-century.

It was as if a curtain had been dropped. For 25 years, Long Island had been a region of seemingly boundless growth and unbridled optimism. Now, it was suddenly defined less by its promise than by its limitations.

The history of the last quarter-century will not be found in dusty archives or in the attics of historical societies. It is in the collective memory of the 2.5 million people who lived the flip side of the suburban dream as Long Island moved into middle age.

Like so many city dwellers before them, Judy and Barry Shivak left Queens for a suburban home in a good school district. They found a four-bedroom house in a new Stony Brook development, and bought it for $35,000 in 1972. "But within a year the economy went bad," recalls Judy Shivak, "and there were 'For Sale' signs all over the neighborhood. Then interest rates began to go up. It was a very scary time." By the early '80s, house prices began to soar, and new home buyers like the Shivaks could not find a house they could afford.

"We were certainly a more cynical place after that," said Roy Fedelem, a demographer with the Long Island Regional Planning Board. "You can see a measure of bitterness beginning at that time." It would take the better part of 25 years for the mood of the region to rise again.

For latter-day Long Islanders - an older and more racially and culturally diverse population than the generation before - the postmodern era has been a time of soaring costs and diminished expectations. The urban expatriates of the late '40s, '50s and '60s had little more than crabgrass and late trains to worry about. But life changed in the '70s, '80s and '90s.

Property taxes rose to keep up with the costs of education and municipal services - and it began to dawn on many people that perhaps they could no longer afford the schools that had been one of the foundations of suburban life. After years of work and an expenditure of approximately $5 billion, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant was shut down. And Long Islanders watched - helplessly, until the recent state takeover of LILCO - as their electrical rates rose to the highest in the continental United States.

Grumman Aerospace, for so many years the great engine of the Island's economy as well as a major component of its identity, laid off more than 22,000 workers and was sold. And in perhaps the ultimate indignity, Long Islanders came face-to-face with their inability to figure out what to do with their own garbage: landfills overflowed and a barge of Long Island trash sailed the Eastern Seaboard, rejected by four states and three countries - including the tiny republic of Belize - as Johnny Carson quipped on late-night TV, "Why not send it to Iran?"

And life got more crowded still. As more and more cars choked our roads, the most basic issue of transportation - how do we get to work and home again - grew considerably worse. Between 1973 and 1997, the number of passenger cars in Nassau and Suffolk grew by nearly 50 percent: from about 1.2 million to nearly 1.8 million. Add a smaller percentage increase in Queens, and that means an additional 674,000 cars in the three counties during these last 25 years - more than the total number of cars in Suffolk in 1973.

Almost overnight, Long Island was no longer a place where the environment was seen as purely an attraction. Now many people worried about the safety of their drinking water, the pollution of the Island's clam-rich bays and the question of whether something in the environment was causing what struck many as an alarming incidence of breast cancer.

The landscape changed, too, if in a more subtle way than in the years of the postwar boom. Shopping centers kept creeping across the land, virtually doubling their space in Suffolk, from 17 million square feet to 33 million square feet since 1973. There wasn't much room for new roads, but the Long Island Expressway expanded to include the modern symbol of traffic bursting at the seams - the high-occupancy lane.

But the transformation of Long Island from a land of opportunity to a land of limits transcended even these particular episodes and developments. It was the Island itself that changed - not so much the way it looked as the way it felt.

As Long Islanders became increasingly preoccupied with such fundamental issues of modern suburban life as taxes, traffic, garbage and electric bills, they also became gripped by a loss of communal confidence. The Islanders hockey team brought a measure of civic pride with their four straight Stanley Cups in the early '80s, but it was eclipsed by a series of image-tarnishing events - first the garbage barge and then Joey Buttafuoco: Somehow, a Baldwin auto mechanic and the teenage girl who shot his wife, had come to represent Long Island beyond the boom. It seemed that any number of our crimes had something to say about the underside of life in this particular late-century American suburb.

"I think the thing about Long Island is that we spoiled it more than it spoiled us," said Barbara Kelly, curator of the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra. "The landscape changed all around us . . . Life seemed to get away from us."

But while these years have been a period of constriction and struggle, they also arguably provided a new opportunity: a chance for Long Island to take a collective breath and begin to redefine the region as it prepares to move into the next century.

After 1973, Long Island was no longer a place where government agencies rubber-stamped development projects; now they slowed them down. Lot sizes grew to reduce density. The rapidly dwindling supply of farmland was saved from further uncontrolled development, and so was Long Island's last great forest - the Suffolk pine barrens, formed by the glaciers that created the Island 20,000 years ago. "As everything was slowing down and the recession kicked in, I took a helicopter ride to the East End," remembers John V.N. Klein, who was elected Suffolk County executive in 1971. "It was late November. I looked down over this incredibly beautiful scene of winter rye grass. I thought to myself, this stuff will disappear just like it did in Nassau and western Suffolk. I grew up in Smithtown. I had seen prime farmland disappear."

As the economic door shut, the environmental door opened even wider. Klein noticed that land speculators who'd bought up property on the East End were now stuck, and began a county program to buy development rights to farmland. As a result, thousands of acres of farmland on the East End were spared the bulldozer. Today, these same East End farms grow more products than any other part of New York State. "Had the boom continued unabated, we would have lost all that farmland," Klein said.

"The '60s were growth, growth, growth," said Lee Koppelman, executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board, recalling the decade when Suffolk was the fastest growing county in the United States. "Certainly, the recession, and a tremendous change in attitude by Long Island, allowed for open space to be set aside."

There were also the beginnings of changes in the Island's social makeup. With an increasing mix of cultures and races, and a population that was aging, it was less strikingly the prototypical suburb of young, white, middle-class families. Just as it did in the previous generation, Long Island reflected a version of the demographic patterns of the city. In 1970, Nassau County was 95 percent white. In 1996, it was 86 percent white. The largest increases were in blacks and Latin Americans. In Queens, the percentage of the borough's population that was white dropped from 85 percent to 58 percent between 1970 and 1990.

Meanwhile, just as all those years of frenetic development led ultimately to preservation, it was the sudden decline of the defense industry in the late 1980s and early '90s - triggered by major cutbacks in federal spending - that forced Long Island to move toward a more dynamic economy for the millennium.

"The defense build-up of the 1980s served to delay the maturation process of Long Island from a post-World War II economy," said James LaRocca, former head of the Long Island Association, a business group, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor. "We were still on a government-financed, defense-based mindset past the point where we should have been. The economy that has evolved from this, which we see in computers, software and biotechnologies, is the path to the future. And very importantly, it is an economy built up by our own assets - a high-quality education system, a labor force that is highly educated and that demands a solid quality of life."

Long Island lost 100,000 jobs during the recession of the late '80s - half in the defense industry - but with a healthier national and local economy, it's gotten back approximately 73,000. Meanwhile, the real estate market has come back strong, and with the partial state takeover of LILCO, there is even some good news in electric bills. "There is still a high capacity for good living here," says LaRocca.

Has the curtain gone back up? If it has, the stage is looking different. Call it a revival.