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Old 01-13-2012, 10:34 PM
 
Location: Islip,NY
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My husband and his 2 brothers grew up in West Islip. My husband graduated in 1990. My MI has been living in WI since 1967
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Old 01-02-2013, 12:30 AM
 
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The Union Blvd strip was the hub of West Islip. Yes the P.O., you had to walk up a set of steps to get to the counter. I remember mailing my draft card info. off there in 1980. The Carvel was owned by the Holgosh family. The Long River kitchen was the best and so was the Pizza Place.
I rented my Trumpet from Amatos music store in 1974 & 75'. I can remember my parents cashing checks at King Kullen on the weekend before ATM machines came along in 1980.

Suffolk Stores was great, I used to buy those light wood planes that with the rubber band for the propeller. They had Christmas stuff too. The Movie theatre started off at $1.50 and I saw Grease, Rocky, Blues brothers, Alien & The Lords of Flatbush to name a few. The entire junior High would see what ever new movie was released on Friday nights.

I worked at the Pioneer diner in 1978 as a busboy and made enough money to buy my first car. The place was a blast at 3:00 in the morning when the bar crowd would start rolling in...What an education that was. There used to be this old scary broken down mansion on the opposite corner.

Sally's bike shop and the unmistakeable smell of new rubber tires. I used to buy HO slot cars there in the late 60's..

Oh well, that was a whole other time ago,,,,
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Old 01-02-2013, 05:38 AM
 
Location: Lake Grove
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Manatuk (forgot the correct spelling) School bordered Udall Rd Junior High School. A little further south on Udall Rd (just north of Sunrise Hwy) is the former Paumanok School, renamed in the late 1980s to Emil D. Mesera School, for the principal who died of cancer. I went to Paumanok, worked there for 3 summers in the late 80s, and still remember quite a lot. And, I worked with someone who lived across the street from Paumanok, remembered it being built (I think it opened in 1956), and remembered alot of the staff. It made for a little bit of interesting conversation.
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Old 02-13-2014, 10:59 AM
 
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Just read through this. I grew up in WI from 1955 till 1973 (grad '71). A few notes:

The Carousel diner was originally Lee's Diner.
I lived right across the tracks from Captree Bowling Alley (near Dzus). I can remember the day it burned - a sad day. They dumped a lot of the burned up pins, etc into Willets creek (the creek that ran through the field that turned into the Stop & Shop and continued behind Beach St & the HS (the 'bridge(s)'). This was a log time before the 80's, as someone stated. I'm not sure of the exact year, but it had to be closer to 1968.

WI was a wonderful place to grow up in.
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Old 02-14-2014, 10:40 PM
 
Location: Long Island, NY, USA
148 posts, read 246,447 times
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I love the retro feeling of West Islip, but what I don't like is the exclusiveness of it. I worked a Summer in West Islip a year or two ago and some of the most LOVING people I've met I met in West Islip.

Now on the flip side of the same coin of truth, there's something stale that just won't rot away there in WI. In the short summer spent there, I've seen enough to know that. In just two small incidents I witnessed were a group of white 20 somethings harassing an Indian 7-11 clerk, and a car full of high school kids who slowed down on Higbie lane to honk our attention and shout out derogatory slurs at my darker skinned brother only to then speed on by...

Minus those things and the Mosquito infested Summers' West Islip is beautiful. It's just exclusive, though I'm glad you were able to find comfort in coming back to your home town after so many years.
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Old 06-03-2014, 06:21 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sands123 View Post
the yankee clipper was torn down in the late 1980s; a huge doctor's office (south shore gynecololgy) was built on that spot.

The pioneer diner was replaced by the delphi diner.

The old carousel diner at the corner of higbie and union is still there, though.

The german restaurant was herman's captree house on montauk hwy just east of 231. Closed in the early 1990s (?) and is now the parkwood cafe with boring generic food.

The day camp on snedecor & montauk was turned into that little housing development cul-de-sac in the late 1980s.

Other fyi for west islip:

Bell's nursery went out of business 3-4 years ago. The land was sold to petrelli builders who put about 8 new homes on it. The houses started at $700k.

The moose lodge which has been in disrepair for years was finally torn down about a week ago.

The captree bowling alley was what burned down in the early 1980s. It was replaced by a stop & shop which right now is being partially torn down and renovated into a "super stop & shop".

Sorry i can't recall the name of the store but it was on union blvd at the keith lane end of the strip of stores where the post office is. Everyone used to go into it for odds and ends like school supplies, etc etc. It was what my parents used to call a "five and dime". You could usually find anything you needed there. ("south something-something????") sad day when it went out of business in the late 80s/early 90s. It's now a big cardiology practice. Like we need more doctors in west islip?

The west islip movie theatre went out of business in the mid 1980s and stood empty for a long time. Then it became a long john silvers/a&w restaurant for several years before going empty again. Because the strip of stores next to the stop & shop was just torn down, union wine & liquors has now moved into the movie theatre location.

The ford dealer on montauk hwy was torn down this year.

It's not west islip but fyi the bay shore roller rink was finally torn down recently after being a vacant crumbling eyesore for years and years.
** i lived right behind captree bowling alley,,i learned how to skate at the roller rink, by a older man we called 'whitie' because of his hair, i went to 'secatogue elementary'
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Old 12-02-2014, 05:24 PM
 
Location: Glenbogle
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I still have friends in West Islip and visit occasionally.

The old King Kullen on Union Blvd was converted to a Wild by Nature supermarket (which is owned by KK so no surprise there) taking about 2/3 of the building. The other 1/3 of the original KK, where the front doors used to be, is now a Dollar Tree store.

The LaGrange Inn is now up on blocks about 10' off ground level, waiting to be moved to a different part of the same corner property (Higbie + Montauk) so that it will eventually face Higbie and the library. The western half of the original LG Inn lot is going to have a CVS built on it.

All of the new additions to the old LG Inn were ripped off and removed. It's now the original building again. There was a huge problem with debris removal because all the new parts were loaded with asbestos.

When the new CVS is built, the existing one on Montauk Hwy (which is where Gristedes used to be, back in the day) is going to be converted to something else. Probably 2 or 3 small stores. Rumor mill doesn't know which.
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Old 02-23-2015, 12:37 AM
 
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The 5 & dime on Union was Suffolk Stores. I GRADUATED in 1981 (when your husband was BORN) so I go back a little further. Suffolk Stores was originally the West Islip Public Library until the library moved to its then brand new digs on Higbie Lane in the late 1960s. The original anchor store in the shopping center where the WI movie was a Grand Union (that later became a Stop and Shop). The other main anchor in the plaza between the theater and the grocery store was a Consumer's Distributors Outlet. There was also an indoor mini-golf place for a while though that may have been in the same store before the CDO opened. The Pioneer Diner, on Mtk. Hwy, at the end of Route 231, was either modified or torn down and rebuilt and the Delphi Diner now sits in that location (FYI the "other" Pioneer Diner, which was originally owned by the same family and sat at the corner of Rt. 111 and Rt. 347 in Hauppauge is also still there but operating under a different name now). The nursery that used to run along the Causeway (bells?), south from Montauk Hwy., was built out into Pace Landings - a 90+ home housing development in the late 1970s (new homes sold for $90,000+ then and people bitched about how expensive they were) but I went camping in the nursery as a Webloe back in 1974-1975 before the development was built. The old Lennie's Clam Bar, across from Babylon Bike, burned in the early 1980s and was rebuilt into its current form. The Sizzler is still there, though i'm not sure if its still The Sizzler. I seriously doubt anyone rode horses down Montauk Hwy. in the late 1980s with any regularity - it was already a four-lane 40+mph main road in 1981 when I left for college. The other nursery that was torn down for new construction was Eppig Florist, right behind Chapey's funeral home. Captree Elementary has closed, re-opened, and served 2-3 different functions since I graduated from Mrs. Ratushny's 6th grade class in 1975. But what I've noticed the most when I was last out there a year or so ago is that the streets all seems so much smaller, the homes so much closer together, and the neighborhoods so much less overgrown with trees and vegetation. I guess we're just older and bigger now.
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Old 02-23-2015, 12:45 AM
 
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Pholtor - what you describe is not "exclusive" - it's racist and bigoted. I grew up with that in West Islip - we are Jewish - our home was repeatedly defaced with Swastikas, my mother was denied work as a teacher in the district b/c we were Jewish, and I was constantly harassed and beaten because of my faith. I hated living in WI and that's why I live in the Hudson Valley now. I would NEVER raise my kids in the environment I grew up in. For three years in HS I never once used the bathroom during school b/c I was afraid I'd get my ass kicked.

My kids have friends from all over the rainbow but they only know them as their "friends" (and not as their black friends or Hispanic friends or Chinese friends, etc.). And WI is still the same today - all the surrounding communities (Babylon, Bay Shore, Deer Park, North Babylon, etc.) are fully integrated. But as of the 2010 census, WI was still 96.5% white. That's why it was and still is called "White Islip" or "Waste Islip" by so many of my generation who grew up there.
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Old 02-23-2015, 04:10 PM
 
Location: Islip,NY
20,821 posts, read 28,141,533 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lived On McCall Ave View Post
Pholtor - what you describe is not "exclusive" - it's racist and bigoted. I grew up with that in West Islip - we are Jewish - our home was repeatedly defaced with Swastikas, my mother was denied work as a teacher in the district b/c we were Jewish, and I was constantly harassed and beaten because of my faith. I hated living in WI and that's why I live in the Hudson Valley now. I would NEVER raise my kids in the environment I grew up in. For three years in HS I never once used the bathroom during school b/c I was afraid I'd get my ass kicked.

My kids have friends from all over the rainbow but they only know them as their "friends" (and not as their black friends or Hispanic friends or Chinese friends, etc.). And WI is still the same today - all the surrounding communities (Babylon, Bay Shore, Deer Park, North Babylon, etc.) are fully integrated. But as of the 2010 census, WI was still 96.5% white. That's why it was and still is called "White Islip" or "Waste Islip" by so many of my generation who grew up there.
You might know my BIL I think he graduated either 81 or 82. He's 50 now.
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