The Long Island History Project

Gil Bergen was the long-time superintendent of the Connetquot River State Park Preserve in Oakdale. His association with the park goes back to 1945 when he started working at what was then the storied South Side Sportsmen's Club. This intervew, recorded in 2007 at the Park, includes Sallie Kachell and Rhoda McManus of Oakdale. You'll hear Gil describe the men who made up the membership of the club...

Mary Lou Cohalan and friends bought the Suffolk County News in the late 1960s. Hear about the trials and tribulations of running a hometown paper on Long Island, from the every day of school votes and local government to the extraordinary catastrophes that drop out of the sky. Further Research The Suffolk County News   Sayville Cabinet for the Sick

Chris Bodkin concludes his visit to Sayville past with this third installment. We talk about his mother's trips out here during the Great Depression, Father Divine and the African American community, and Dr. Bard, dentist to the stars and first ladies.    

Longtime Sayville resident Chris Bodkin continues his look back at Sayville's history. Today we talk about his time as a captain on the Fire Island Ferries and his move into local politics.  Then we look at a few of the stories behind Sayville's war veterans memorialized in Sparrow Park. Chapter 3 of Chris' story is coming soon.

Long-time Sayvile resident Chris Bodkin discusses his childhood in 1950s Sayville: life on the bay, Main Street, and the unexpected thrill of the first pizza store.

Special feed-only episode! Six stories of learning to drive on Long Island. 

Henry Livingston came to Babylon in 1869 and founded the South Side Signal . He made an immediate splash advocating for Babylon to split from the town of Huntington and went on to lead the paper into the 20th century. On this episode, Babylon Town Historian Mary Cascone relates the history of the paper: its influence, evolution, and style. We also trade stories of newspaper research, microfilm rea...

Mark R. Smith saves time in a bottle, literally. His antique bottle collection preserves the memory of local dairies, pharmacies, hotels and more. It also tells the story of a time when milkmen roamed the earth, when an outhouse was a man's castle, and when just about anything could be labeled "medicine." Listen as Mark walks us through the history of bottle making, the local businesses of Sayvill...

The 1989 fire that nearly destroyed the Terry-Ketcham Inn brought Bert Seides to tears but it also set him on the road to saving the historic Moriches landmark. Building from a small group of volunteers meeting around Mary and Van Field's kitchen table, Bert marshaled support and learned to navigate a maze of regulations, paperwork, and government agencies to bring the 1693 Inn back to life. In th...

Bob Keeler wrote the book on Newsday , a candid history detailing the origin story of Long Island's original tabloid. On this episode we discuss that history, including the relationship of Alicia Patterson and Harry Guggenheim, the rollicking newsroom of the '50s and '60s, and more.   Bob also relates his own history at the paper, including his atypical Pulitzer Prize and his trip to see the Pope....

Imagine a city rising from the fields of Suffolk County in the early 20th cenutry, a wooden metropolis covering almost 20,000 acres. It has its own post office, theater, library and fire department. The place could fit close to 40,000 people with room for 15,000 horses. Imagine that and you've got Camp Upton. Today our guests Suzanne Johnson and David Clemens discuss the history of Camp Upton, the...

Few authors are more synonymous with a place and point in time than F. Scott Fitzgerald. His Great Gatsby came to define the 1920s and cast a golden aura across Long Island's North Shore for all time. On today's episode, Charles Riley guides us through the birth of The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's struggle to make it into a masterpiece. Charles is the director of the Nassau County Museum of Art a...

Melanie Cardone-Leathers is the Local History Librarian at the Longwood Public Library. Today she regales us with tales covering three centuries and many locations. There is Benjamin Tallmadge burning the British hay at Coram during the Revolution. And the boot-strapping of Gordon Heights by African Americans from Harlem and beyond. How about Camps Siegfried and Upton, the former a 1930s, Nazi-inf...

Carol Gilliam is the Black Heritage Librarian at Roosevelt Public Library where she oversees a collection dedicated to black culture and history. On this episode we discuss the growth and use of the collection as well as the Harlem Renaissance, Chuck D and Julius Irving. We also cover the history of Roosevelt, known as Rum Point for most of the 19th century, as well as the challenges and opportuni...

Bill Bleyer has a knack for finding history - or maybe it finds him. He had front row seats for Woodstock, did battle with Robert Moses, and got tear-gassed at the 1972 Republican National Convention. Now, after a decades-long career in journalism at Newsday , he writes books about the history of Long Island. Today's interview covers Bill's career, his love for rock and roll, and the interesting c...

It's the summer of 1885 and an industrious and itinerant hotel man named Frank P. Thompson is making history on Long Island. Working for the season at the Argyle Hotel in Babylon, Frank forms a baseball team for exhibition games and barnstorming through the area. Some say they formed as the Black Panthers but they went on to become the Cuban Giants, the first professional African-American team in...

We're looking back to the Hurricane of 1938 on this episode. Called "The Long Island Expresss" by some, "The Great New England Hurricane" by others, remembered by all who lived through it. Today you'll hear five people, recorded back in 2008, recalling their experiences from Brooklyn out to Orient and up into Massachusetts. Children at the time, they all remember that day as if it just happened. S...

Sarah Kautz, preservation director of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, joins us to discuss their new list of most endangered historic places on Long Island. From the homes of African American and Native American workers to the grand estates of the Gilded Age, each site offers a window into the Island's past and to the complex challenges of historic preservation.   Furth...

Apologies to all of our listeners for the lag between episodes! It's been a combination of factors and circumstance but new content is in the works. Connie and I will be back soon with interviews with more authors, researchers, and others involved in uncovering and preserving Long Island history. In the meantime, if you know of anyone who you think has a great Long Island history story to tell, dr...

Jeremy Dennis is in pursuit of the past, intent on documenting the historical and sacred sites of indigenous people on Long Island. His project, On This Site , restores a map of an old heritage. Jeremy has walked forests, railroad tracks, and backyards to uncover and photograph the often overlooked and forgotten landscape of his Shinnecock ancestors and other Native Americans on Long Island. On th...

Today we talk with Sandi Brewster-walker about her life and her family's history. Not only do the Brewsters have deep ties to North Amityville and the Native American community on Long Island but their story is intertwined with American history on multiple levels.  You'll hear about early slavery on Long Island, letters from John Brown, spying in West Africa for the OSS during World War II, the pe...

If you needed a house built in Sayville around the turn of the last century, Isaac H. Green, Jr. was your man. To attest to this fact, you can still see many of his buildings on Main Street, off Brook St., along Middle Road, down into Oakdale and beyond. He designed churches and carriage houses as well as summer estates and farm buildings. His client list included the Vanderbilts, the Bournes and...

If you were to name the most famous Floyd on Long Island before the outbreak of the Revolution, chances are it would not have been William Floyd. His cousin, Richard Floyd IV, cut a more striking figure: generous, hospitable, refined - with a thriving Mastic estate and powerful connections. Yet today, William has a parkway named after him and his home is part of the National Park system while Rich...

Can vegetables go extinct? Not if the Long Island Regional Seed Consortium (LIRSC) has anything to say about it. They are dedicated to preserving and propagating those crops that few have even heard about, the types of things that have fallen out of favor or been crowded out of today's agricultural landscape. Today we interview Steph Gaylor and Cheryl Frey Richards, two of the founders of LIRSC (a...

Frank Knox Morton Pennypacker was many things: author, printer, collector, antiquarian, and...godfather of AMC's hit Long Island historical drama Turn ? It was, after all, Pennypacker's diligent research into (and just as diligent promotion of) the Culper Spy Ring in the 1930s that led to a resurgence and new understanding of George Washington's spy ring on Long Island and in New York City. To lea...