Driving to the Island
I’ve driven down to the Island twice recently, once in October, and again in November.
If you are asking which island, you are not from New York.
The Island is a land mass that stretches one hundred eighteen miles east from Manhattan into the Atlantic running parallel to the southern coast of Connecticut. It is shaped like a crustacean with elongated claws, its southern claw plumper and longer than its northern one. The southern claw is where the billionaire stock brokers and tech executives have their beach houses next to movie stars and famous writers. The northern claw is where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby stood at the end of his dock staring at the green light to the south that was the symbol of his hopeless dreams of love and acceptance by “respectable” society.
The other end of Long Island, the one closer to the mainland, looks like the heart-shaped uropods that cover the anus of a crustacean, but to my non-naturalist’s eyes just looks like a rump. This rump is part of New York City, the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens crouching next to one another east of Manhattan.
My father was a rump person. He was born in 1921 in Hollis, Queens twenty-five years before another rump person, Donald Trump, was born ten minutes away.
“Sure, the Trumps,” my aunt used to say. “We knew who they were. They lived in Jamaica Estates.”
Jamaica Estates was, and still is, a well-to-do enclave of large homes and quiet streets lined by Faux Tudor and colonial mansions. Hollis didn’t, and doesn’t, have mansions, just a lot of tightly-packed houses, one street after the next.
When, in October of last year, my sister, my husband, and I were invited to brunch down in Queens, we decided to divert in order to make a quick visit to Hollis. My sister and I had never been to the house that my father and my aunt grew up in, and we didn’t even know its address until I found it by digging out my father’s dog tags from the Second World War. We had only ever seen the house in old family photographs from the 1930’s and 40’s, small black-and-white squares that curled in on themselves and had to be smoothed and weighted at the edges. One photo that my mother had put in an album was of my father in his army uniform and her in a fancy hat posed on the front steps of the Hollis house with my grandmother. Though the house was painted dark brown then, and is light gray now, we had no problem finding it. The property was the same, the same driveway we had a picture of someone shoveling, the same one-car garage in the far back, the same multi-windowed front room that jutted forward from the first floor of the house. There was now a gray walled rose garden in front of this room with stern-looking eagles flanking a weighty front gate. There was an even weightier gate at the entrance to the driveway and fences all around the property with grills on the windows of the ground floor. It was the last house on 202nd Street before a brick warehouse which fronted Jamaica Avenue. Even though its stern, fortress-like appearance was a bit off-putting, my sister and I were pleased that it was still there and that it looked so well-cared for. We didn’t knock on the front door and identify ourselves as the daughters of a child of the original owners. We bowed to the chilly vibe of the place and left the present inhabitants, if they were home, alone. But though we didn’t go inside and most likely never will, 9353 202nd Street still felt like a part of us, part of the history of our family that came before we did, and that we wished we knew more about.
The second time my sister and I drove down to the island, in November, we were headed farther east, to Nassau County, only a few towns over from the house where we grew up. Our parents moved out to Wantagh in the early 1950’s. They had married in 1949, lived in the city for a while, and then, with the help of the GI bill, bought a small ranch house in what was still a relatively rural area. Their house had a stream and woods behind it. These woods would be torn out within a decade when the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway was put in.
We weren’t headed to this house. We were meeting our Island cousins for brunch in Rockville Center, but we could have gone. It was only twenty minutes away.
A quick search online, however, revealed the property looking pretty sharp, painted robin’s egg blue with a healthy green lawn. There were no fences, no grills on the windows. The small brick patio where our mother used to sit when it was hot was still out in front. If we had driven there, I think we might have gone up and knocked on the front door, just to tell them who we were and why we were out front taking pictures.
In the house shots on Zillow, the backyard was as we remembered it, large by Island standards (the house was on a corner lot), bounded by the high hedge my father grew to block the view and noise from the expressway. The deck roof that he had also built was still there attached to the back of the house although the brick patio he’d laid beneath it has since been covered by a raised wooden platform. We recognized the rooms inside, our old bedrooms, the fireplace in the living room I used to sit next to with a book or with the hair dryer on my head, the dining room where we sat for countless holiday meals with one of the cousins we were meeting that day.
According to Zillow, the house, tiny and with only a one-car garage, cost more than either of our considerably larger properties in Connecticut. We laughed and shook our heads. 1524 Wagner Street. Another address from the past, another part of our Island story.
None of our people live in either Queens or Nassau anymore. Our cousins live up in Connecticut, or Texas, and those who’ve stayed on the Island have moved farther out to Suffolk County. When the weather is better, we don’t drive to the Island. We take the ferry from Bridgeport to Port Jeff. An hour and fifteen minutes across the Sound where we sit up on the open deck and feel like we’re traveling much farther in distance and back in time, back to the days of those childhood vacations in Maine, or Upstate New York, or Canada, each summer’s destination a multi-day drive north into cooler temperatures and open spaces, and a multi-day drive home to the tight packed neighborhood Wagner Street became, to the humid heat of an Island summer, and to the beds we were used to sleeping in.
We left the Island for Connecticut in 1971 when I was seven and my sister was twelve, but for the next twenty years, driving to the Island remained an important part of our lives. Every Christmas, every Easter, every Mother’s Day, birthday, or summer picnic. My aunt continued to live in Williston Park and it was to her house we went to gorge ourselves on too much food and to come home with too many presents.
My father was the one who drove to the Island, at ease with the heavy traffic, zooming in and out of lanes thick with cars. These were the roads of his youth and young adulthood: the Belt, the Cross Island, the Southern State, Sunrise Highway. He was our hero. Neither my mother, nor my sister nor I were comfortable on such congested roads. Yet it is now I who drive to the Island, thinking of my father, amazed at myself and at how the traffic no longer bothers me.
You can take the girl off the Island, but you can’t take the Island out of the girl.
My sister and I both lost our Island accents years ago, and we have since grown used to open spaces and the calls of wild birds rather than the roar of the expressway or the planes overhead, but the Island is still with us. It still furnishes our memories, forms our ways of thinking, and, I’m told, often manifests itself in our edgy humor and abrupt way of speaking. We remain the daughters of rump people, not the wealthy folks out in the claws who’ve made it or are pretending they have, but the people staying closer to the city, people who are perhaps only a generation or two away from their family’s arrival in this country, or are staying put in neighborhoods where their families have lived for generations.
“It feels like going to another country,” we often say to one another as, out on the Sound, we watch the Connecticut shore recede and the sandy bluffs of the Island come into view. It is another country: the country of our childhoods, still available for adventures, full of memories and desires.
Glossary for Non-New Yorkers!
The Island = Long Island
The City = New York City with its five boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island
The Sound = Long Island Sound, the body of water between Connecticut and Long Island.
The Belt = The Belt Parkway, a highway that runs along the perimeter of Brooklyn and Queens.
The Cross Island = The Cross Island Parkway, a highway that extends from the Belt Parkway north-south across Long Island.
The Southern State = The Southern State Parkway, a highway that runs east from the Belt and the Cross Island into Suffolk County.
Sunrise Highway = runs 120 miles east from Brooklyn to the tip of Long Island at Montauk Point
Another great read. I enjoyed how you reflected on a time gone by with eloquence.
Thx!
Wonderful memories. And yours stir up mine. Amazing how at a certain older age or experience can provoke echos of childhood.
I was born in Queens, and grew up in West Babylon, just south of the Southern State. This has brought back many memories.
I went to college with many students from Long Island. Their pronunciation tended to blend the two words into one: Longisland, with a very hard g. Hence, we referred to it as The Giland.
Love the glossary, by the way!
Absolutely. Long Island with a hard G!