My first trip to East Hampton, by train, was a revelation. Even though I had grown up in New Jersey, I had only a vague idea of what Long Island was. I had been to Coney Island by elevated subway and after World War Two, when my father was able to get his old Chevy fired up again, we made at least a few expeditions to a place called Kew Gardens to visit an uncle. I had an aunt, too, who owned a vacant corner lot in a mispronounced Babylon, a corner lot, one understood without its having to be said, being a great deal more significant than just a lot.
My uncle, whose name was Manny, lived in a kind of semi-urban neighborhood of identical, single-family, attached houses that I had never seen before and that have been, for some reason I couldn’t explain, lodged in my memory next to those little Heinz-pickle pins that were given away at the 1939 World’s Fair. I am told that the reason for the connection is that the World’s Fair was held at Flushing Meadows, obviously another of the few lasting impressions I had had of Long Island.
Imagine my shock in 1958, equipped with only these few memories, when the Long Island Rail Road trip to east Hampton took half a day and when the Island, which I had expected to be covered with Kew Gardens houses, became an open landscape that went on and on and on. That barn-red barn near the Speonk station stands as a symbol to me of the Long Island I discovered that day. For many years, after East Hampton became my home, I had little or no connection with the rest of the Island, learning as I lived here to understand how it had been possible that so many natives, even in recent times, had never been to New York City, how it had been possible that one family having sold the kitchen stove to go to that same World’s Fair had got as far as Riverhead and come back because “the city” was too crowded.
Now, like so many others, I have begun to travel the Long Island Expressway and have found my sense of place changing. Except that one can live here and almost ignore it, the Long Island between Kew Gardens and Speonk has something to tell us about who we are and what our aspirations as a region can be.
On whim, I took Exit 56 north one day, looking vaguely for the Smithhaven Mall, and found myself studying Hauppauge instead — a mish-mash of confusing highways, County buildings, and rows not of houses but of what we would call shopping centers, which incidentally only seemed to contain “discount” stores.
Here, I thought, is where our County Legislators spend half their time. Here, I thought, one could easily become inured to environmental rape in the same way that TV audiences are said to become inured to the real thing from too much exposure to violence. Here, I thought, is America.
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This is Helen S. Rattray's first "Connections" column for The East Hampton Star, a column she continued to write weekly until 2020.