Port Washington, New York, United States of America
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
General Information
Port Washington, unbeknownst to many of its residents and certainly to most of the residents of surrounding cities, is not truly anything at all. It is a collection of five incorporated villages, Baxter Estates, Flower Hill, Port Washington North, Sands Point, and Manorhaven, which share a post office and a school district. It is fairly remarkable to note, in light of the fact that the five villages have politically very little to do with each other, that Port Washington acts exactly as a small town unit, a cosmopolitan, lightly charged atmosphere coexisting with a close-knit community and a distinct sense of town spirit, which is evident almost nowhere else in the entirety of Nassau County and in fact in very few places on Long Island, the remainder of which is almost exclusively given over to independent cities and towns.
Geography and Transportation
Port Washington is situated on a peninsula called Cow Neck on the North Shore of Long Island, often referred to as the Gold Coast because its affluency used to be much more disproportionate to the remainder of Long Island. Long Island itself juts out of the southeastern tip of mainland New York, in the northeastern region of the United States of America. At the intersection of Long Island and the mainland is Manhattan Island, the nexus from which the five buroughs of New York City spread in all directions.
Because Port Washington juts into the body of water between Long Island and Connecticut known as Long Island Sound and because Manhattan Island is oriented southwest-northeast, the non-municipality is slightly over six miles away from the nearest point on Manhattan by boat, but it is just under twenty-five miles away by automobile, because the most direct bridge connects from near the westernmost tip of Long Island. The Long Island Rail Road's Port Washington branch, which ends in the center of town, cuts a more direct route. Each train run takes anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five minutes each way, including eleven intermediate stops; the other end of the line connects with Manhattan's Pennsylvania (commonly "Penn") Station, the transportation hub of New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area. Currently, LIRR trains on the Port Washington line run anywhere from twice every hour to once every three hours, depending on the day, date, and time. Not all trains stop at all interim locations, but all connect at least Penn Station with at least Port Washington.
History
What is today Port Washington was part of one of the first European colonies in what is today the United States of America. The Dutch claimed the rights to all of Long Island by the rationale that Henry Hudson had been the first European to pass it and chart it roughly on his way up New York's Hudson River. The Dutch bought most of the Western half of Nassau county from the Matinecocks, the subdivision of the Algonquin Native American tribe that had previously inhabited most of the North Shore of Long Island, and who had called Cow Neck peninsula Sint Sink, or "place of many stones" (or "at the small stone," depending on whom you ask1).
In 1674, the land was acquired from the Dutch by a small group of English settlers from Connecticut. The territory was originally fenced in and used as grazing land for cows, during which time it acquired its permenant name and the bay to the West was given the more temporary designation "Cow Bay" (currently "Manorhaven Bay"). In 1674, a settler named Richard Cornwall claimed 1,500 acres of Cow Neck for himself, calling the territory Port Washington (somewhat inexplicably in texts available. It is apparently a misconception that the town was named or renamed after George Washington, the first President of the United States). His claim was contested by the original settlers, but the settlers did not succeed in forcing a retransfer of ownership in court, and the town's foundation was solidified, with Cornwall instated as the first citizen.
The Town of Hempstead, which stretched from the North to the South Coast of central Long Island from the early seventeen hundreds until shortly before the American Revolution, was divided bitterly and evenly right across the middle, just prior to the onset of armed conflict. The southern half of the Town of Hempstead was heavily Loyalist, and the settlers there for the most part fought in Tory (no offense intended, if this word is still derogatory to Britons; honestly, we do love you now!) regiments, if any. The Town of North Hempstead, which is the most local political authority to which the five villages of Port Washington could be said to belong, fired the first political shot of the Revolution when it seceded from the Town of Hempstead, as tensions were mounting and the secessionist movement was gaining strength. After the Revolutionary War was over, the two Towns eventually presumably reconciled their differences, and as the good people of the Town of Hempstead no longer considered themselves British citizens, the Town of Hempstead and the Town of North Hempstead joined politically to form Nassau County.
Economy
Historical
Port Washington, along with much of the Town of North Hempstead, remained largely agricultural through the middle part of the nineteenth century. In 1852, an oyster-seeding project started two decades earlier culminated in the formation of farms, and shell fishing began to account for a very large segment of the Port Washington economy, attracting fishermen, seafood restaurants, and general outside investment. In 1867, the Long Island Rail Road extended a rail branch out to Port Washington from Manhattan, and the smallish community became, and remained for over three-quarters of a century, a fashionable vacation spot. Today, Port Washington is largely self-contained and is devoid of any hotels whatsoever2.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the building boom in New York City was fueled largely by Port Washington sand and gravel. Port Washington's sand and gravel had a rich quality which made them durable and attractive, and they managed to find their way into ninety percent of all skyscrapers and sidewalks constructed in New York City during the first half of the century.3 The retreival, shipment and delivery of sand required far more manpower than Port Washington had at the time; right in the throes of New York City's immigration boom, the town managed to attract its own fairly enormous populations of Southern and Eastern Europeans, the vast majority of whom settled in Port Washington. Over the course of a half-century, the ethnic, religious, and economic demographics of Port Washington became some of the most diverse anywhere, a trend which continues to this day, with an especially large influx of Asian immigrants recorded in recent years.
Modern
With the population explosion that followed World War II, Port Washington became one of dozens of towns on Long Island to become a bona fide Suburb, and people with jobs in New York City found it increasingly convenient to shuttle back and forth on the LIRR, as opposed to living in high-cost, high-risk, noisy neighborhoods within the city itself. The population rose from 4,000 to today's 33,000, and a major commercial renaissance established the light-industial-medium-commercial face of the Port Washington economy seen today.
Port Washington has three major traffic arteries, and, in typical suburban fashion, it is along these that the majority of the commercial sector is found. Main Street plays host to a continuous row of well-established shops which are mostly under local control, while Port Washington Boulevard, though arranged similarly, tends to feature more local or national chains. Shore Road is a long, winding connector of the two ends of Main Street and Port Washington Boulevard that remain untied, and large parts of it are consumed by two consecutive ponds. Its major commercial zones are organized into two consecutive shopping centers of approximately four and sixteen acres in area respectively, and which play host to very few locally controlled businesses and to quite a lot of chain outlets. Each shopping center features at least a supermarket and several restaurants. Along each of the three primary streets, several smallish shopping centers arranged as inlets from the street can be found, as can several smaller grocery stores and a particular share of the town's four banks. Almost every item that one needs and quite a few of the items one desires can be found within Port Washington itself, although designer store chains and vendors of electronics are left to the neighboring towns of Manhasset and Roslyn, as are large shopping centers.
The nearest two "malls," the extraordinarily large Roosevelt Field and the smaller Broadway Mall, are approximately twenty-five minutes to the east by automobile, both within a hundred feet of each other and both residing within the town of Carle Place.
Port Washington has a fairly thriving but visually hidden services industry, including a prestigious national events-planning firm located in someone's attic, a network solutions company, several software development laboratories, two printing services, a biological laboratory, several legal, medical, chiropractic and dental offices, and a firm which links businesses with appropriate scanning devices.
Port Washington has an obscene number of restaurants. It is extraordinarily likely that every other business is involved with food in some fashion. Five sushi restaurants are located within a two-block stretch of Main Street alone, a denser concentration than in many large cities' Japanese districts, and a Korean mini-market along Port Washington Boulevard sells sushi in pre-prepared containers. The town plays host to five diners, ten Italian restaurants, seven Chinese restaurants, four Greek restaurants (three of them owned by the same businessman and located on the same block), three fast-food restaurants, three ice-cream stores, one vendor of multi-flavored ices, nine pizza parlors4, four coffee shops, and five delicatessens, all within a five-square-mile radius. The vast majority of restaurants are often used to full or near-full capacity, as the majority of the town is affluent enough to eat out with some regularity. It is not uncommon for students attending high school to have at least one meal of the day in an inexpensive restaurant.
The number of antique stores is also quite obscene. Lower Main Street is Antique District; middle Main Street contains antique stores and trinket shops; and upper Main Street contains all trinket shops and no antique stores. Clothing stores are concentrated along upper Main Street, and are evenly divided between designer stores and discount outlets. There is only one median-price clothing store, and that is exclusively for children. Port Washington also has a high concentration of nail and beauty salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats, and contains five barber shops and three pharmacies.
Culture and Institutions
Public Institutions
Port Washington's town infrastructure is fully equipped to handle emergencies, educate youth and adults, and provide a permeating sense of culture and purpose.
This entry is incomplete. Thusly, I extend no hope that the information contained herein helps you.
If by any chance it does, please inform me and I will quit while I'm ahead.
1I have not asked an Algonquin.2The three nearest lodging facilities are each one town over, and none of them are particularly fancy. Long Island's resort district has moved east to the Hamptons and south to Fire Island over the past half-century as most North Shore communities have dropped the look-and-feel of vacation communities and replaced them with town-specific identities.3Meanwhile, the landscape of Port Washington was carved up egregiously; what various parts of the town looked like a century ago, one can only imagine. Today, the landscape is still, in places, somewhat hilly, and the town still possesses a very good amount of sand, largely confined to two enormous "pits," one of which was recently carved up again for the construction of a golf course. The removal of so much sand at once created a methane bubble, and an entire section of the town was largely confined to its houses for several months.4Local pizza vendors tend to equal or surpass the sales of chain pizzerias. Each pizza restaurant has a distinctly different style, and having a favorite is standard.
