List

An immersive account of a tragedy at sea whose repercussions haunt its survivors to this day, lauded by New York Times bestselling author Ron Suskind as “an honest and touching book, and a hell of a story.”

In March of 1984, the commercial fishing boat Wind Blown left Montauk Harbor on what should have been a routine offshore voyage. Its captain, a married father of three young boys, was the boat’s owner and leader of the four-man crew, which included two locals and the blue-blooded son of a well-to-do summer family. After a week at sea, the weather suddenly turned, and the foursome collided with a nor’easter. They soon found themselves in the fight of their lives. Tragically, it was a fight they lost. Neither the boat nor the bodies of the men were ever recovered.

The fate of the Wind Blown—the second-worst nautical disaster suffered by a Montauk-based fishing vessel in over a hundred years—has become interwoven with the local folklore of the East End’s year-round population. Back then, on the easternmost tip of Long Island, before Wall Street and hedge fund money stormed into town, commercial fishing was the area’s economic lifeblood.

Amanda M. Fairbanks examines the profound shift of Montauk from a working-class village—“a drinking town with a fishing problem”—to a playground for the ultra-wealthy, seeking out the reasons that an event more than three decades old remains so startlingly vivid in people’s minds. She explores the ways in which deep, lasting grief can alter people’s memories. And she shines a light on the powerful and sometimes painful dynamics between fathers and sons, as well as the secrets that can haunt families from beyond the grave.

The story itself is a universal tale of family and brotherhood; it’s about what happens when the dreams and ambitions of affluent and working-class families collide. Captivating and powerful, The Lost Boys of Montauk explores one of the most important questions we face as humans: how do memories of the dead inform the lives of those left behind?

Nicknamed "Liquor Island," Long Island was rumrunner's paradise during Prohibition.

With its proximity to major markets and coastal communities for easy transit, Suffolk County was awash in illegal hooch. Smugglers bringing cases of booze from offshore often secretly hid product temporarily in local garages and sheds, leaving a bottle as a thank-you. Coded communication crisscrossed the county on shortwave radios arranging sales and logistics. Violence from criminal outfits disrupted previously quiet towns, as locals too often were swept up in dangerous unintentional engagements with bootleggers.

Pour one out and join author Amy Kasuga Folk as she recounts stories from Suffolk County's Prohibition era

New York is filled with forsaken buildings, each ravaged by the exploits of modernization, each having fascinating histories. This photographic essay explores over 40 of the most evocative abandoned sites in the Empire State and puts their individual stories in the larger context of New York's historical legacy. Photographer and author John Lazzaro traveled the state, capturing what's left of such places before they are inevitably swept away by time. Divided by region, these sites, ranging from the Catskills' once-vibrant vacation destinations to Long Island's melancholy psychiatric centers, reveal deeper social, cultural, and political changes that led to their decay. These abandoned hospitals, schools, churches, railways, and estates offer us a view into a past rapidly dissolving before it disappears completely. With a foreword by architectural historian and author Thomas Mellins, this is a valuable meditation on the nature of decay and progress, remembrance and forgetfulness, past and present.

Discover the history of the development of Long Island and its intimate relationship with New York City.

Beginning in the Roaring Twenties, Wall Street money looked eastward to Nassau and Suffolk counties looking generate wealth from a land boom. After the Great Depression and World War II, Long Island was the site of the creation of the quintessential postwar American suburb, Levittown. Levittown and its spinoff suburban communities served as a primary symbol of the American dream through affordable home ownership for the predominately White middle class and established a core attribute of the national mythology. Starting in the 1960s, the dream began to dissolve, as the postwar economic engine ran out of steam and Long Island became as much urban as suburban.

Author Lawrence R. Samuel charts how the island evolved over the decades and largely detached itself from New York City to become a self-sustaining entity with its own challenges, exclusions and triumphs.

Named one of the best nonfiction books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly!

There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow tells us there’s more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Tim Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation—and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality.

Keogh focuses on the suburbs of Long Island, home to Levittown, often considered the archetypal suburb. Here military contracts subsidized well-paid employment welding airplanes or filing paperwork, while weak labor laws impoverished suburbanites who mowed lawns, built houses, scrubbed kitchen floors, and stocked supermarket shelves. Federal mortgage programs helped some families buy orderly single-family homes and enter the middle class but also underwrote landlord efforts to cram poor families into suburban attics, basements, and sheds. Keogh explores how policymakers ignored suburban inequality, addressing housing segregation between cities and suburbs rather than suburbanites’ demands for decent jobs, housing, and schools.

By turning our attention to the suburban poor, Keogh reveals poverty wasn’t just an urban problem but a suburban one, too. In Levittown’s Shadow deepens our understanding of suburbia’s history—and points us toward more effective ways to combat poverty today.

The history of infamous witch trials and witchcraft accusations is deeper than just those most often discussed at Salem. The Empire State has had numerous moments of pandemonium over the potential existence of witches. From Native Americans viewing European colonists as witches in the Mohawk Valley to witchcraft hysteria among early Long Island colonial settlements, the history of New York state's witchcraft accusations encompases all regions and communities in the state. Join author Scott R. Ferrara as he presents harrowing narratives of those who were accused of witchcraft, the feverish community dramas that resulted and the lives of those who faced their community as an outsider.

From sprawling potato farms and incredibly lavish estates, to whaling ships and early race cars, Long Island has an incredibly rich history often lost through the generations. In the world of racing, Long Island was once the horse racing capital of the state and hosted the nation's first professional auto races. Though farming still thrives in Suffolk County, there are only a few working farms left in Nassau County, where hundreds of farms dotted the landscape generations ago. Cold Spring Harbor, Greenport, Sag Harbor and Southampton were centers of the whaling industry in America and maintain a whaling heritage today. Author Richard Panchyk reveals fascinating narratives of Long Island's lost history.

The Bayman's Daughter is a time-slip novel that takes place in the quaint seaside hamlet of Sayville, Long Island. Once the playground of families like the Roosevelts and Vanderbilts, Sayville was also the home of the famous Blue Point Oyster. Although the main characters, Hannah Trumball and Philip Ferrara, are fictional, they interact with people who lived and worked in the Sayville area. The Bayman's Daughter is a story that intertwines the history of Long Island with a love story that crosses time, itself.

The film documentary "A World Within a World: Bay Houses of Long Island" documents the history and traditions of Long Islands South Shore bay houses in the Town of Hempstead. The film profiles Long Island families who have owned bay houses for over 100 years including the Muller, McNeece, Burchianti, Warasila, and Jankoski families. Based on fieldwork by folklorist and maritime ethnographer Nancy Solomon of Long Island Traditions, local filmmakers Barbara Weber and Greg Blank capture the essence of how bay house owners have persevered and endured through severe storms and hurricanes, as well as eroding marshlands, while preserving traditions that began in the early 19th century. Funding for the film was provided by the Robert L. Gardiner Foundation.

The patchwork of beach towns, villages and hamlets that make up Islip Town represents some of the most historic communities on the whole of Long Island. Local Secatogue Native Americans harrowingly saved the Dutch survivors of one of New York's first shipwrecks in 1657. New York City's infamous Tammany Hall leased an entire summer resort island in Islip Town for decades. In 1912, a young woman from Sayville sacrificed her own life for another on the RMS Titanic. Islip Town's founding father, William Nicoll, owned the largest parcel on Long Island's South Shore but was blocked from owning even a grain of sand on Fire Island. A penniless Dutch immigrant to Islip Town became the world's "Oyster King." Join author and historian Jack Whitehouse as he reveals buried stories from Islip Town's past.

Long Island was transformed from a pastoral rural community to a modern suburban behemoth by playing an integral role in the homefront of World War II. Dozens of Nazi spies infiltrated industry throughout the island and communicated industrial secrets back to Germany as the FBI chased them down. Long Island held the record for producing the most fighter planes in the country with the rapid rebirth of its aviation sector. Five Medal of Honor recipients called the region home. At the close of the war, the United Nations established itself in a weapons factory in Lake Success. Author Christopher Verga charts the rise of Long Island and its role in World War II.

In 1778, two years after the British forced the Continental Army out of New York City, George Washington and his subordinates organized a secret spy network to gather intelligence in Manhattan and Long Island. Known today as the "Culper Spy Ring," Patriots like Abraham Woodhull and Robert Townsend risked their lives to report on British military operations in the region. Vital reports clandestinely traveled from New York City across the East River to Setauket and were rowed on whaleboats across the Long Island Sound to the Connecticut shore. Using ciphers, codes and invisible ink, the spy ring exposed British plans to attack French forces at Newport and a plot to counterfeit American currency. Author Bill Bleyer corrects the record, examines the impact of George Washington's Long Island spy ring and identifies Revolutionary War sites that remain today.
 

In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just twenty-two years. Leaving behind a small child she had little hope of ever seeing again, Elizabeth was faced with the stark reality of being sold south to a life quite different from any she had known before. She had no idea that Robert Townsend, a son of the family she was enslaved by, would locate her, safeguard her child, and return her to New York--nor how her story would help turn one of America's first spies into an abolitionist. Robert Townsend is best known as one of George Washington's most trusted spies, but few know about how he worked to end slavery. As Robert and Elizabeth's story unfolds, prominent figures from history cross their path, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benedict Arnold, John André, and John Adams, as well as participants in the Boston Massacre, the Sons of Liberty, the Battle of Long Island, Franklin's Paris negotiations, and the Benedict Arnold treason plot.

From the North Shore to the South Shore and out to the East End, Long Island is home to a nationally recognized and historic boat building industry. The Steiger Craft boats of Bellport are a local household name, trusted for their ability to navigate the shallow bay waters of the South Shore. Freeport legend Al Grover sold boats around the world for generations, built Verity skiffs for gas-conscious consumers in the 1980s and holds the Guinness World Record for the first outboard motorboat crossing of the Atlantic. The Hanff and Clarke boat yards in Greenport are more than just world-class boat builders--at more than 150 years old, they are historic landmarks. Author and folklorist Nancy Solomon shares the history and stories behind Long Island's traditional boat yards and boat builders.
 

During World War II, a group of potato farmers opened the first migrant labor camp in Suffolk County to house farmworkers from Jamaica. Over the next twenty years, more than one hundred camps of various sizes would be built throughout the region. Thousands of migrant workers lured by promises of good wages and decent housing flocked to Eastern Long Island, where they were often cheated out of pay and housed in deadly slum-like conditions. Preyed on by corrupt camp operators and entrapped in a feudal system that left them mired in debt, laborers struggled and, in some cases, perished in the shadow of New York's affluence. Author Mark A. Torres reveals the dreadful history of Long Island's migrant labor camps from their inception to their peak in 1960 and their steady decline in the following decades.

Saved at the Seawall is the definitive history of the largest ever waterborne evacuation. Jessica DuLong reveals the dramatic story of how the New York Harbor maritime community heroically delivered stranded commuters, residents, and visitors out of harm's way. Even before the US Coast Guard called for all available boats, tugs, ferries, dinner boats, and other vessels had sped to the rescue from points all across New York Harbor. In less than nine hours, captains and crews transported nearly half a million people from Manhattan.

Anchored in eyewitness accounts and written by a mariner who served at Ground Zero, Saved at the Seawall weaves together the personal stories of people rescued that day with those of the mariners who saved them. DuLong describes the inner workings of New York Harbor and reveals the collaborative power of its close-knit community. Her chronicle of those crucial hours, when hundreds of thousands of lives were at risk, highlights how resourcefulness and basic human goodness triumphed over turmoil on one of America's darkest days.

An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of May 2019A TIME Magazine Best Book of May 2019
A Cosmopolitan Best Book of May 2019An Oprah Magazine Best LGBTQ Book of 2019
A gripping portrait of life in a Montauk summer house--a debut memoir of first love, identity and self-discovery among a group of friends who became family.
They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer thirty one people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house's octagonal roof resembled a bee's nest. It was dubbed The Hive.
In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day Weekend, he prayed for clarity. At 27, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember. John didn't understand the loneliness. He just knew it was there. Like the moon gone dark.

OUT EAST is the portrait of a summer, of the Hive and the people who lived in it, and John's own reckoning with a half-formed sense of self. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Hive was a center of gravity, a port of call, a home. Friendships, conflicts, secrets and epiphanies blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond.
Blending the sand-strewn milieu of George Howe Colt's The Big House, the radiant aching of Olivia Liang's The Lonely City, OUT EAST is a keenly wrought story of love and transformation, longing and escape in our own contemporary moment.

"An unforgettable story told with feeling and humor and above all with the razor-sharp skill of a delicate and highly gifted writer." --Andre Aciman, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name
"Out East is full of intimacy and hope and frustration and joy, an extraordinary tale of emotional awakening and lacerating ambivalence, a confession of self-doubt that becomes self-knowledge." --Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner

Colleges, schools, libraries and military bases in the US and abroad have been searching for ways to celebrate notable persons of color and to provide positive programs to promote racial harmony in our communities. "America's First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island," published by Outskirts Press in 2020, includes his poems, prose pieces and new information about Jupiter Hammon's life, including photos of the homes where Hammon lived. While Hammon is the first black poet to publish his own verse, this book also includes recognition of Phillis Wheatley as the first female black poet to publish her own works. It includes "Hammon's Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley," both his poem and a four part Gospel Choir arrangement available for use. This book informs readers about what life was like in the 18th century, and how Jupiter Hammon, a slave, was able to travel at will, publish his poetry, and be a preacher to his intended audience, "the brethren," his fellow slaves, at a time when few slaves could travel. "Celebrating Black Poetry Day," offers suggestions for October 17th programs or observances. A list is given of the 34 noted black poets who have spoken and given readings at Plattsburgh, NY, State University since 1984 as part of their ongoing Black Poetry day celebrations.

With the publication on Christmas Day, 1760, of the 88 line broadside poem "An Evening Thought," Jupiter Hammon became the first published African American contributor to American poetry. A natural intelligence and a deep religious fervor led Hammon to publish additional poetry and prose, and his "Address to the Negroes of the State of New York," which first appeared in 1787, was later reprinted and distributed by the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Jupiter Hammon spent most of his long life on Lloyd Neck, later a part of Huntington, Long Island, where he was a slave to the Lloyd family. Some of his most productive years were spent in Hartford during the American Revolution. With newly found genealogical information on Jupiter, this present volume with new found poems has become the most complete and authoritative work on this early American black poet.

Hammon's poetry reveals his joyous intoxication with religion, and in this vein he precedes the composers of those Black spirituals which are today an integral part of American culture. This collection of his poems and writings now includes two newly discovered poems found in New York Historical Society Library and in the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University. Ransom notes that Hammon used several codes and indirect ways to let his fellow slaves know his real feelings about slavery. He used his Biblical knowledge as a cover.

The first book devoted to this landmark of architecture, urban planning, and social engineering

Situated in the borough of Queens, New York, Sunnyside Gardens has been an icon of urbanism and planning since its inception in the 1920s. Not the most beautifully planned community, nor the most elegant, and certainly not the most perfectly preserved, Sunnyside Gardens nevertheless endures as significant both in terms of the planning principles that inspired its creators and in its subsequent history. Why this garden suburb was built and how it has fared over its first century is at the heart of Sunnyside Gardens.

Reform-minded architects and planners in England and the United States knew too well the social and environmental ills of the cities around them at the turn of the twentieth century. Garden cities gained traction across the Atlantic before the Great War, and its principles were modified by American pragmatism to fit societal conditions and applied almost as a matter of faith by urban planners for much of the twentieth century. The designers of Sunnyside-- Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Frederick Ackerman, and landscape architect Marjorie Cautley--crafted a residential community intended to foster a sense of community among residents.

Richly illustrated throughout with historic and contemporary photographs as well as architectural plans of the houses, blocks, and courts, Sunnyside Gardens first explores the planning of Sunnyside, beginning with the English garden-city movement and its earliest incarnations built around London. Chapters cover the planning and building of Sunnyside and its construction by the City Housing Corporation, the design of the homes and gardens, and the tragedy of the Great Depression, when hundreds of families lost their homes. The second section examine how the garden suburbs outside London have been preserved and how aesthetic regulation is enforced in New York. The history of the preservation of Sunnyside Gardens is discussed in depth, as is the controversial proposal to place the Aluminaire House, an innovative housing prototype from the 1930s, on the only vacant site in the historic district.

Sunnyside Gardens pays homage to a time when far-sighted and socially conscious architects and planners sought to build communities, not merely buildings, a spirit that has faded to near-invisibility

The story of a bayman's life of hard work and interesting adventures. Written and self published by Steve Kuhn.

Small coastal communities stand up to the giant of mid-20th century urban development in this chronicle of a true David and Goliath drama.
 
With its unspoiled, tranquil shorelines, Fire Island has been an oasis for vacationers for well over a century. But from the late 1930s into the early 1960s, it was an obsession for Robert Moses, the political power broker and "master builder" who reshaped much of New York. His urban development projects helped create Long Island’s suburbs, and he dreamed of turning Fire Island into an extension of Ocean Parkway.
 
Standing up to those ambitions were the seventeen individualistic communities of Fire Island, unified in their love for their sun-washed sandy beaches. To maintain a traditional way of life with limited access to motor vehicles, the community began the fight for federal protection through the creation of the Fire Island National Seashore.

When the Revolutionary War broke out and New York City had fallen in 1776, the forces of the king of Great Britain developed a network of forts along the length of Long Island to defend the New York area and create a front to Patriot forces across the Sound in Connecticut. Fort Franklin on Lloyd's Neck became a refugee camp for Loyalists and saw frequent rebel attacks. In Huntington, a sacred burial ground was desecrated, and Fort Golgotha was erected in its place, using tombstones as baking hearths. In Setauket along the northern shore, the Presbyterian church was commandeered and made the central fortified structure of the town. Author David M. Griffin uncovers the lost history and harrowing stories of Long Island's British forts.

"After being elected president, George Washington set out to tour the new nation, which was desperate for a unifying symbol. He spent five days on Long Island in April 1790, an area recovering from seven years of devastating British occupation. Washington saw it all, from Brooklyn to Patchogue to Setauket and back. He was honored at each stop and wrote extensive diary entries about his impressions of the carriage stops for food, overnight stays at taverns and private homes, as well as his vision for the future of the region. Author Dr. Joanne S. Grasso traces this momentous journey"--Back cover.

Profiling owners, winemakers, and personalities from around the country and the world, Behind the Bottle is a fun and intriguing look at the people who have made Long Island into one of the hottest wine regions in the country.

Long Island has been a leader in winemaking since 1975. In the last forty years, Long Island's rise has been meteoric. Long a rural region famed for their duck and their potatoes, Long Island, now visited by 1.3 million people each year, has carved out a wine country second to none. With highly acclaimed wines garnering rave reviews from Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications, Long Island wines have been celebrated around the country and across the Atlantic ocean. Here, Edible East End editor Eileen M. Duffy profiles winemakers and wineries that have received this high acclaim, and shares their stories. Men and women from as far away as California, France, even New Zealand have come here to create a wine country whose wines, including Chardonnay, Sauvingon Blanc, Merlot, and Meritages among others, are second to none. BEHIND THE BOTTLE illustrates the fascinating story from the region's birth to its zenith.

Women have been part of Long Island's past for thousands of years but are nearly invisible in the records and history books. From pioneering doctors to dazzling aviatrixes, author Natalie A. Naylor brings these larger-than-life but little-known heroines out of the lost pages of island history. Anna Symmes Harrison, Julia Gardiner Tyler, Edith Kermit Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt all served as first lady of the United States, and all had Long Island roots. Beloved children's author Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden here, and hundreds of local suffragists fought for their right to vote in the early twentieth century. Discover these and other stories of the remarkable women of Long Island.