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Inspired by the McMansions thread....I found these old pictures of Wantagh & North Wantagh on the website linked below last year. They're from 1961, the newer shots are from 2005. I wasn't alive when they were taken but it's pretty interesting to see how dramatically things have changed in only 44 years...I'm sure Wantagh was considered "way out on the island" back then! The older cars were definitely a lot more stylish, wish there were more of these pics.
I moved to Wantagh in '64 when I was 9 years old and those pictures bring me back. It was a great place to grow up in, with woods, lakes and close to the canals and beach. Wantagh Ave was a truly impressive street, with great trees shading it for miles. They were removed to make way for sewer construction in the early '70s, and never regained its former glory. The elevation of the LIRR tracks and the wholesale demolition of many charming old victorians in the late '60s also contributed to the loss of charisma. The church exterior was rather drab, but inside was a different story. A shame it burned.
Terrific photos! My family moved here when I was four years old (1952), and I live in Wantagh today. There used to me a water meadow where the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway now is south of Jerusalem Avenue, and there were sites here where horses and even burros grazed. I used to find box tortoises every summer back in the 50s. Very different world back then...
By the way, I used to have a Long Island Daily Press paper route in the Flower homes part of Wantagh (across Jerusalem Avenue from the condos behind what is now the Wantagh Commons area) from 1960-1962. That whole area was totally built up by then, but some of the cars imprinted themselves on me, especially one 1960 white Cadillac convertible that just about filled the driveway from the garage door to the sidewalk. Mind you, those people never gave a kid a tip for two whole years...
Terrific photos! My family moved here when I was four years old (1952), and I live in Wantagh today. There used to me a water meadow where the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway now is south of Jerusalem Avenue, and there were sites here where horses and even burros grazed. I used to find box tortoises every summer back in the 50s. Very different world back then...
That's cool, never knew that! Can you imagine horses and donkeys in Wantagh today? That explains why the street grid was always cut off between Wantagh and Seaford in that vicinity even before the 135 was built. I can remember (maybe you can too) when I was very young someone who lived in one of those big houses on Wantagh Avenue kept turkeys in their yard and they would sometimes get loose and hold up traffic!! That wasn't even that long ago, it was in the 80s haha.
Do you happen to have any old pictures around town from back then? I love finding these, they're so hard to come by.
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Originally Posted by OhBeeHave
Great pictures.
Now if you came up with one for Captain John Seaman's estate (where the Cherrywood Shopping Center is located) I would be VERY impressed!
I think that would require a Delorean with some very special modifications. I don't believe that structure even made it to the 19th century....I actually live almost exactly where it was located though. Maybe one day some artifacts will turn up in my backyard. I also saw a sketch of it once in a book at the Wantagh Library. Just north of where Cherrywood was located, there is an insanely old cemetery buried in the woods....I think I might go take some pictures of that later today and see if I can find any "Seaman" headstones, I'm sure there are a few.
In the meantime, how about the other home that was built in 1644 in Wantagh?
When that house was built it was probably one of only 30 or 40 structures that existed in what is now Nassau and Suffolk. The closest populated areas were Hempstead and Southampton!!
I may be able to access some photos from the 50s -- my brother may have them. And, yes, I remember the turkey incident. There were turkeys and guinea fowl parading across my front lawn, and turkeys roosted for a while in the trees in the arboretum down by the creek just west of Wantagh Avenue. My fondest memories of life in the 50s centered on the Good Humor ice cream trucks during the summer. As a youngster, I used to sit on the curb with a dime in my hand and just wait for that truck on warm summer evenings...
You Wantagh guys might know - but isn't there an old farm house on Wantagh Avenue right before the Southern State? Across the avenue there is a park where you can almost imagine what it looked like when it was just a farmhouse and open fields.
There was a similar old farm house on Searingtown road in Herricks but I think it was torn down and the land was wasted.
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Does anyone know anything about Riverside Drive ? My grandmother lived there on a canal when I was small. It was all countryside, then.
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