The Rise and Fall of America's Richest Suburb: Long Island, New York

Long Island was once the richest suburb in America — a place where Gilded Age financiers built hundred-room castles on the North Shore, where Charles Lindbergh lifted off from a grass airfield on the Hempstead Plains, and where Grumman Aircraft employed tens of thousands building the fighters that won World War II and the lunar module that carried men to the moon. After 1947, William Levitt paved over the potato fields and built the most famous planned community in history, turning Long Island into the template for postwar suburban life across the country. This is the story of how all of it came together — the Gold Coast mansions, the aviation industry, the Long Island Rail Road, Robert Moses's parkways, the great suburban boom — and how the very decisions that made Long Island prosperous eventually locked it into a crisis of property taxes, housing costs, and outmigration that the island still hasn't solved. From Otto Kahn's Oheka Castle to the Grumman Superfund site, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby to the young families who can no longer afford to live where they grew up. Sources "The Controversial History of Levittown, America's First Suburb" — Untapped New York (2024) "Bethpage Residents: Grumman's Toxic Legacy Scars Our Community" — amNewYork / Newsday investigative project (2020) "Nassau County: Jazz Age Enclave Hits the Fiscal Skids" — NPR, Jim Zarroli (2011) "The Aviation Heritage of Long Island" — Joshua Stoff, Curator, Cradle of Aviation Museum "How Robert Moses Shaped the Long Island He Misunderstood" — ClassicNewYorkHistory.com (2024) "Oheka Castle History" — oheka.com and the National Park Service / Olmsted Archives