Making a New Hicksville
Let's take a look at what Hicksville was like when we first arrived.
1951 Fairchild Aerial Survey view of Hicksville (enhanced by author)
NYS Archives, Aerial photographic prints and
negatives of New York State sites, 1941-1957
The highlighted rectangle on the right is the site of the future Mid-Island Plaza. Looking below it and a little left (south) along Broadway, we see the grounds and older buildings of what we later called "our" junior high. Further south are the grounds of Lee Avenue School, already under construction. The field visible just above my old home on 7th Street is the farmland on which our high school will be built in a few years. A few blocks north, at Newbridge and Old Country Roads, the Center Shops plaza is partially built, but the parking lot is not yet paved. To the west of it, beyond Plain Lawn Cemetery, outlined in white is the future site of Old Country Road School.
The new homes in the foreground are easy to spot. To the north, there's a great ocean of whitecaps - thousands of new homes with not a tree in sight. It's 1951, and already new homes vastly outnumber Hicksville's pre-war buildings.
Note: Not all of us lived in new houses, but I'm about to sound as if we did. It's not that I favor post-war houses (on the contrary; the house I live in is more than a century old). But Long Island's post-war houses were seen as emblems of a new era, the one into which we had been born.
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