East of Queens and far South of a City Pace

Aside from those who have lived here or visited, most people think of Long Island as the little cluster of identical suburbs east of Queens, culminating in Montauk and the Hamptons. One would be a bit hard pressed to find the same sort of diversity and intensely wonderful cultural flavor so readily available in the boroughs, but the neighborhoods of Long Island are not without their quirks and cultures.

Wantagh is no more than an hour outside of the heart of Manhattan, but you wouldn’t know it by walking through. Such is the nature of most neighborhoods along the South shore of eastern Nassau County on Long Island. People from “the city,” as it is referred to on the island, look at these neighborhoods with an indifferent sort of disdain, as though they are too blase to warrant much investigation.

I will admit, Wantagh is not a large, bustling neighborhood. At 18,971 people in 2000, 96.75% of whom were Caucasian, it is also not a town many would consider diverse. It is, however, incredibly close knit.

People don’t use the sidewalks very often here- unless they’re teenagers without cars or they’re jogging- and so on any given day you’re likely to come across two or three sets of SUVs, soccer moms at the wheel, chatting away about their kids and their husbands and their gas prices. Gossip seems to spread like wildfire in Wantagh- over fences where neighbors chat in the morning in between mowing their lawns or shoveling their walkways, across bleachers at the High School football and lacrosse games, through text messages that mothers (yes, mothers) send one another and their kids, albeit a bit more clumsily than the younger crowd.

But Wantagh is not a place populated exclusively by gossips and faux-Coach toting women driving their kids to dance class. There are different worlds here, some hard to locate in a brief survey of the place. The woods around Mill Pond and Twin Lakes are frequented by teenagers looking for something “dangerous” to do on weekend nights. They leave their mark in the beer bottles and cigarette stubs which litter the paths. A new tag has appeared on the trees and abandoned buildings in the wooded nature paths- “the Wantagh Bandits” is sprayed everywhere, alongside of a stylized Warner Brothers logo.

Wantagh Park, once marshland, ends in a beach overlooking the bay, with the Jones Beach water tower far in the distance. It is there that the town gathers for Fourth of July festivities, and it was where hundreds held each other together as they watched the smoke plumes in the distance on September 11.

Posters created by the Wantagh Chamber of Commerce dot store windows and telephone poles, advertising the parades and festivals which are planned for nearly every occasion and attended by the majority of the residents (the Fourth of July parade, for example, where Miss Wantagh is crowned and the streets are lined with lawn chairs and children in red, white and blue).

Leaving the town for the beach, whether via the Wantagh Parkway or the park, you enter a different sort of sphere entirely. In the summer the road to the beach looks nearly Caribbean, with lazy sways of reed grass and indigo water breezing past. One former high school teacher affectionately refers to it as “a Mayberry suburb with an ocean view.”

Perhaps it is not the most exhilarating place, nor quite the speed of existence so many New York City denizens are accustomed to. It is quite a character in its own right, however- a suburb of gradual change and shoreline sunsets, without the automatic identity of a city neighborhood, but clearly identifiable all the same.

The view from the Wantagh Parkway, heading home from the beach. From davidlepnyc's flickr photostream.