Baseball in Riverhead

A July night at Riverhead Stadium in 1950. Two baseball legends face each other without even realizing it. Satchel Paige, fabled Negro League pitcher, is on the mound for the […]
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A July night at Riverhead Stadium in 1950. Two baseball legends face each other without even realizing it. Satchel Paige, fabled Negro League pitcher, is on the mound for the […]
Brad Kolodny spent four years documenting every synagogue in Nassau and Suffolk Counties that he could find. The result is his comprehensive coffee table book from Segula Publishing. On today’s […]
We’re rebroadcasting our interview with Lillian, Cathy and Susan Barbash about their family and their fight to stop Robert Moses from driving a road down the middle of Fire Island. […]
Maryann Almes, president of the Oakdale Historical Society, joins us to discuss the organization’s role in preserving and celebrating the history of Oakdale. Located in Islip on the south shore […]
Welcome back to the awards ceremony. Today we hit the beach to talk to Mary Cascone, Babylon Town Historian, about the Oak Beach Life-Saving Station. Perched between the Great South […]
The preservation awards ceremony continues! Today we speak with Erinn McDonnell of the village of Sea Cliff in Nassau County. Erinn managed the restoration of their 1931, Tudor revival-style firehouse […]
It’s a preservation party and you’re all invited! We’ve teamed up with Preservation Long Island to help celebrate their 2020 Preservation Awards. Over the next week we’ll be posting interviews […]
We travel this week to the Adirondacks (virtually speaking) to talk with John Warren, founder and publisher of New York Almanack. Formerly known as the New York History Blog, the […]
Our sojourn through the hallowed pages of the Suffolk County News from 1920 hit a speedbump this week when it turned out that no digital copy was available online. To […]
We wade once again into the cool stream of the digital past to fish for items from the Suffolk County News of 1920. Today is Friday, May 14th in the […]
If this is Friday, than it must be 1920! We continue mining the seam of digitzed microfilm out of the New York State Historic Newspapers site, looking at the Suffolk […]
We return today to the sea to consider the whale. More specifically, we talk with Brenna McCormick-Thompson of the Whaling Museum and Education Center in Cold Spring Harbor. Brenna is […]
If it’s Friday and we’re still in self-isolation, then this is another edition of the Suffolk County News, give or take one hundred years. We’re reading through the newspaper as […]
The latest edition of last century’s Suffolk County News is here, for April 23rd, 1920. We continue easing our home isolation by reading what was going on in our region […]
We continue our trek through the local news of a century gone by. Today we read the Suffolk County News from April 16, 1920. We find stories of bootleggers, war-torn […]
We continue our journey through the past, reading our way through the Suffolk County News of one hundred years ago. Today we cover Friday, April 9, 1920. Cars are quickly […]
We’re using our home isolation to look back – reading issues of the Suffolk County News of 1920 week by week. For April 2, 1920: Al Smith, Fatty Arbuckle, and a cow […]
Today our guest, Erin Elizabeth Becker, recounts the story of her great grandmother, Marion Murdoch O’Hara, who worked for the US Radium Corporation in New York City. Through genealogical and […]
We’re using our home isolation to look back – reading issues of the Suffolk County News of 1920 week by week. They had quarantines back then too, it turns out, […]
America tried something new from 1920 to 1933: outlawing the production, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors. In that same spirit of social experimentation, we made this episode something new. […]
We were saddened by the recent news of the passing of Gene Horton, Blue Point historian, former social studies teacher, tour guide, storyteller, friend and colleague. To honor Gene’s memory […]
Imagine a world with a private airport around every corner and an airplane in every garage. Where your form of ID could just as easily be a pilot’s license as […]
David Morrison knows his railroads, from his six books on LIRR history to his extensive research collection to his years overseeing thirty-nine stations. With his seventh book due out from […]
The life of an actor is never easy, so it’s not surprising that many early Broadway stars made a point of vacationing in solitude on Long Island whenever they could. […]
Clarence H. Robbins was a master of hounds and horses, a gentleman jockey and trainer, and a member of Brooklyn’s Gilded Age elite. Come explore this forgotten Long Island figure […]
More than a beach or a brand, Southampton has a history that stretches back thousands of years with the Native Americans in North America. The coming of English settlers in […]
Linda Metzger is the Long Island Genealogist. On today’s episode, you’ll hear how she turned a hobby into a career working to uncover the lost, complicated, and often forgotten stories […]
The waters of Lake Ronkonkoma have seen it all: Native Americans, English settlers, Broadway actresses, 20th century resort-goers and automobile racers. No one knows this better than Evelyn Vollgraff, […]
Don’t call her a ghostbuster. Kerriann Flanagan Brosky approaches her investigations of the paranormal on Long Island with a photographer’s eye and a historian’s perspective. She has long been […]
In honor of Labor Day, we return to the subject of Long Island volunteer firefighters. Last episode, Tom Rinelli and Connie brought up the infamous 1974 fire at Dowling […]
Who knew that firehouses were such deep sources of local history? In the town of Islip, they are overflowing with trophies, photos, devices, and mechanisms going back to the […]
Behind every great woman is another great woman and Natalie Naylor is bringing them to light. Her book Women in Long Island’s Past (History Press, 2012), highlights the accomplished […]
PJ Novak wrote the history of Huntington on a postcard. A librarian, archivist and dedicated deltiologist, she is also the author of Huntington from the Postcard History Series of […]
The Long Island Ducks personified an era and a brand of hockey. From 1959 to 1973, they fought, checked, and slashed their way through the Eastern Hockey League and […]
On this episode, we honor the memory of Gil Bergen, superintendent of the Connetquot River State Park Preserve, and his long service to the Park and the memory of […]
Mary Lou Cohalan and her husband bought the Suffolk County News along with three other couples in the late 1960s. Her resulting career as the first woman editor of […]
Chris Bodkin is a man with a keen eye for detail and a deep love for his hometown of Sayville. We’ve published our interview with him in three parts – […]
Mark R. Smith saves time in a bottle, literally. His antique bottle collection preserves the memory of local dairies, pharmacies, hotels and more. It also tells the story of a […]
Bob Keeler wrote the book on Newsday, a candid history detailing the origin story of Long Island’s original tabloid. Started in 1940 as the “toy” of Alicia Patterson, the paper […]
Imagine a city rising from the fields of Suffolk County in the early 20th cenutry, a wooden metropolis covering almost 20,000 acres. It has its own post office, theater, library […]
Few authors are more synonymous with a place and point in time than F. Scott Fitzgerald. His Great Gatsby came to define the 1920s and cast a golden aura across […]
Melanie Cardone-Leathers is the Local History Librarian at the Longwood Public Library. Today she regales us with tales covering three centuries and many locations. There is Benjamin Tallmadge burning the […]
Carol Gilliam is the Black Heritage Librarian at Roosevelt Public Library where she oversees a collection dedicated to black culture and history. On this episode we discuss the growth and […]
Bill Bleyer has a knack for finding history – or maybe it finds him. He had front row seats for Woodstock, did battle with Robert Moses, and got tear-gassed at […]
We’re looking back to the Hurricane of 1938 on this episode. Called “The Long Island Expresss” by some, “The Great New England Hurricane” by others, remembered by all who lived […]
Sarah Kautz, preservation director of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, joins us to discuss their new list of most endangered historic places on Long Island. From […]
Today we talk with Sandi Brewster-walker about her life and her family’s history. Not only do the Brewsters have deep ties to North Amityville and the Native American community on […]
Isaac H. Green, Jr. was the man to call if you needed a house built around the turn of the last century on the South Shore of Long Island. As […]
Long Island was once known as “The Garden of the States.” Farms and nurseries and orchards filled the landscape from Queens to Quogue and everywhere in between. Many interesting questions […]
Frank Knox Morton Pennypacker was many things: author, printer, collector, antiquarian, and…godfather of AMC’s hit Long Island historical drama Turn? It was, after all, Pennypacker’s diligent research into (and just […]