52 Fun Facts About Long Island

Long Island covers more land than which entire US state?

Rhode Island. The smallest state has about 1,034 square miles of land to the island's 1,400 or so, while Delaware, the next smallest, could still hold the island with room to spare.

Which inventor built Wardenclyffe Tower at Shoreham, Long Island, hoping to send messages and power without wires?

Nikola Tesla. He began the tower in 1901 with money from the banker J. P. Morgan, but the funding ran out and it was torn down for scrap in 1917 to help pay his debts.

Which two of Long Island's four counties are also boroughs of New York City?

Kings and Queens are New York City boroughs: Kings County is Brooklyn and Queens County is the borough of the same name. Nassau and Suffolk make up what most people mean by 'the Island.'

Which pirate left treasure on Gardiners Island, off Long Island's East End, in 1699?

Captain Kidd. He stopped at the island on his way to Boston to answer piracy charges, and after his arrest the governor had the hoard collected to use as evidence against him.

What formed Long Island's two east-west ridges, Harbor Hill and Ronkonkoma?

Ice Age glaciers piled up both ridges as moraines of gravel and loose rock, and blocks of ice they left behind melted into deep kettle lakes such as Lake Ronkonkoma.

Which hill, at roughly 400 feet, is the highest natural point on Long Island?

Jayne's Hill stands in West Hills County Park, where a poet born at its foot came back in 1881 and wrote that he might be standing on the highest spot on Long Island.

Which painter moved to Springs, on Long Island's East End, in 1945 and lived there until his death?

Jackson Pollock. There he began laying canvases flat on his studio floor and dripping paint over them; the house he shared with the painter Lee Krasner is now a museum and a National Historic Landmark.

In United States vs. Maine (1985), the Supreme Court ruled Long Island is legally what?

Part of the mainland. The justices treated the island as an extension of the shore, which turned the waters behind it into a bay controlled by the states instead of the federal government.

The far eastern tip of the North Fork, where the ferry to New London departs, is called what?

Orient Point is where the car ferry leaves for New London, Connecticut; one of the boats on the run, the Cape Henlopen, is a converted landing ship that took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy.

The Battle of Long Island in August 1776 holds what distinction in the Revolutionary War?

Biggest engagement of the war by troops involved, it was also the first major battle after the Declaration of Independence, and the defeat cost the Americans New York City.

How did Washington save his army after losing the Battle of Long Island?

A night evacuation across the East River saved the army: on August 29-30, 1776, about 9,000 men were ferried to Manhattan under darkness and fog without the loss of a single life.

The Long Island Rail Road bills itself as the oldest US railroad still doing what?

Operating under its original name and charter since April 1834, the LIRR was first meant to be part of a New York-to-Boston route via a ferry from Greenport, not a commuter line.

What is the LIRR's second Manhattan terminal, opened in January 2023, called?

Grand Central Madison is named for the Madison Avenue corridor above it; work on the project began in 2008, and its budget grew from about $4 billion to more than $11 billion.

Levittown, the prototype postwar suburb, was called what when Levitt & Sons broke ground in 1947?

Island Trees is what Levitt & Sons first called the development in 1947 before renaming it after themselves; by July 1948 their crews were turning out 30 houses a day.

Levittown's original leases contained a covenant restricting occupancy to whom?

Members of the Caucasian race were the only occupants clause 25 of the first leases allowed; the Supreme Court made such covenants unenforceable in 1948, yet the builders kept turning away Black buyers.

Which financier built Oheka Castle on Long Island, the second-largest private home in the United States?

Otto Kahn made the name from his own, Otto Hermann Kahn; the 127-room house later stood in for Xanadu in Citizen Kane and was the setting of Taylor Swift's 'Blank Space' video.

Which nickname did Long Island's North Shore earn for the mansions tycoons built there from the late 1800s?

The Gold Coast. Its era of great estates ended with new taxes, the Depression and rising upkeep costs, and many owners subdivided the land or gave the houses to parks and preservation groups.

Which real Long Island peninsula, where Fitzgerald lived from 1922 to 1924, was the model for Gatsby's West Egg?

Great Neck became new-money West Egg and Sands Point, across the bay, old-money East Egg; the ash dumps behind the novel's 'valley of ashes' are now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris in 1927 from which Long Island airfield, now a shopping mall site?

Roosevelt Field was named for Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin, a pilot killed in air combat in 1918; Lindbergh left it on May 20, 1927, and the field closed in 1951 to become a shopping center.

Long Island's cluster of pioneering airfields earned it which nickname?

The Cradle of Aviation is also the name of the museum in Garden City, whose prize exhibit is a real Apollo lunar module that never flew because its Moon mission was cancelled.

Which Long Island aircraft maker built the Apollo lunar modules that carried astronauts to the Moon's surface?

Grumman assembled the landers at its Long Island plant, and one of them, Aquarius, became the lifeboat that kept the Apollo 13 crew alive after their main spacecraft was crippled.

Which Long Island lab, on the old Camp Upton army base, produced Tennis for Two in 1958?

Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist William Higinbotham wired an analog computer to an oscilloscope to liven up the lab's visitors' day, and hundreds of people queued to play.

Which Long Island institution was run for decades by James Watson and counts eight Nobel laureates?

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was led by James Watson from 1968 to 2007 as director, president and chancellor; its darkest chapter was hosting the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1939.

Which poet was born in 1819 in a West Hills farmhouse and raised in Brooklyn?

Walt Whitman was born in the West Hills farmhouse now kept as a state historic site, and after a spell of teaching he came back to Huntington to start his own newspaper, the Long-Islander.

The Montauk Point Light was authorized under which president?

George Washington was president when Congress authorized the light in 1792; finished in 1796, it stood 300 feet back from the cliff edge, a margin that erosion has since cut to about 100 feet.

Fire Island National Seashore was created in 1964 largely in response to protests against what?

A proposed highway along the barrier island, pushed by Robert Moses, sparked the protests that led Congress to create the seashore; even now cars can reach only the two ends of Fire Island.

Which Fire Island community is known as 'America's First Gay and Lesbian Town'?

Cherry Grove's Community House and Theatre, where residents began staging shows in 1948, joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 for its part in that history.

The Power Broker alleged Robert Moses built parkway bridges deliberately low to keep out what?

Buses could not clear the low overpasses, Caro wrote, which kept poorer families without cars away from Jones Beach; critics reply that low bridges were standard on parkways of the time.

The Long Island Expressway, Interstate 495, ends in which Suffolk town at its eastern terminus?

Riverhead is where the expressway finally gives out; its chronic jams had earned it the nickname 'the world's longest parking lot' in print by 1963.

Nassau County was carved out in 1899 from the eastern 70 percent of which existing county?

Queens County split after its western part joined New York City in 1898: the three eastern towns left outside the city broke away as Nassau County on January 1, 1899.

Which modern Long Island industry did Louisa and Alex Hargrave start in Cutchogue in 1973?

Winemaking. The Hargraves planted the island's first modern commercial vineyard, other growers soon followed, and the North Fork around it later won its own wine appellation.

According to the usual origin story, the Long Island Iced Tea was invented in 1972 for a contest at which bar?

The Oak Beach Inn is where bartender Robert 'Rosebud' Butt says he mixed it for a 1972 cocktail contest, though a Prohibition-era 'Old Man Bishop' of Kingsport, Tennessee has a rival claim; there is no tea in it.

Which liqueur joins vodka, gin, rum and tequila in a Long Island Iced Tea?

Triple sec. The five spirits get only a splash of cola for colour, which is why the drink looks like iced tea yet runs to about 22 percent alcohol.

What architectural term for a symbol-shaped building comes from a 1931 roadside shop in Suffolk County?

A 'duck' is what architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown called such buildings, after the Big Duck, a shop a Long Island farmer built in 1931 to sell his birds; its eyes are Model T tail lights.

Which island off Long Island's North Fork housed a federal animal disease laboratory from 1954 to 2025?

Plum Island. Federal law kept live foot-and-mouth virus off the mainland, so the work was done offshore until 2025, when it moved to a new laboratory in Kansas.

The Islanders' widely mocked 1995 logo, dropped after two seasons, showed what?

A fisherman holding a stick, often compared to the Gorton's mascot, was the 1995 crest that earned the nickname 'fishsticks'; it lasted two seasons before the classic map-of-Long-Island logo returned.

Since 2021 the Islanders have played at UBS Arena, built next to which famous Long Island racetrack?

Belmont Park, home of the Belmont Stakes, gained the arena as a neighbour in 2021, which gave the Islanders a permanent home in Nassau County again after their 2015 move to Brooklyn's Barclays Center.

Which horse sealed the 1973 Triple Crown on Long Island with a record 31-length victory?

Secretariat ran the mile and a half in a record 2:24, and more than 5,000 winning tickets on him were never cashed, their holders keeping them as souvenirs.

The Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, opened in 1972, sits on 63 acres of what former facility?

Mitchel Air Force Base was decommissioned in 1961, and its airfield gave way to the arena, a community college and part of Hofstra University's campus.

Which ABA team, led by Julius Erving, won two championships at the Nassau Coliseum in the 1970s?

The New York Nets won ABA titles in 1974 and 1976 behind Erving, a Long Islander, but had to sell him to Philadelphia to pay their way into the NBA and moved to New Jersey a year later.

Billy Joel was born in the Bronx but grew up in the Levittown section of which Long Island community?

Hicksville, in a Levitt-built house, is where Joel grew up and started piano lessons at his mother's insistence; his 'The Downeaster Alexa' is sung in the voice of a struggling Long Island fisherman.

Which philanthropist donated the Stony Brook land on which the state university campus opened in 1962?

Ward Melville, the shoe magnate behind Thom McAn, gave more than 400 acres in Stony Brook, and the university moved there in 1962 from its first home on the Planting Fields estate.

The Amityville Horror house at 112 Ocean Avenue was the scene of six murders in November 1974 by whom?

Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot his parents and four siblings there on November 13, 1974; the Lutz family bought the house a year later for $80,000, fled after 28 days, and the address was later changed to deter sightseers.

The 'Montauk Project' conspiracy theory inspired which Netflix series, originally titled Montauk?

Stranger Things was sold to Netflix as Montauk, set at Long Island's tip, but the Duffer brothers moved it to fictional Hawkins, Indiana, once a winter shoot on the island looked impossible.

The Hamptons occupy which part of Long Island?

The South Fork's towns of Southampton and East Hampton began as farming and fishing settlements and only became a fashionable summer colony in the late nineteenth century.

Which body of water lies along the North Shore, separating Nassau and Suffolk from Connecticut?

Long Island Sound is a tidal estuary about 110 miles long; bridges across it have been proposed for decades, from Rye to Oyster Bay among other routes, but none has been built.

With 1,401 square miles of land, Long Island is the largest island in what?

The lower 48 US states have no bigger island; the ones that beat it, the Big Island of Hawaii and several in Alaska, belong to the other two states, and none carries eight million people.

Which Long Island public golf course posts a sign at its first tee warning that it is 'extremely difficult'?

Bethpage Black is a state-park course open to anyone, so golfers queue overnight in the car park for tee times; in 2002 it became the first publicly owned course to host the US Open.

Which Long Island town, settled by Puritans from New Haven in 1640, is often called New York's first English settlement?

Southold dates itself to 21 October 1640, when the Reverend John Youngs, a minister raised in Southwold in England, landed with a group of families; Southampton was founded the same year.

What 1883 event first linked Long Island to the rest of the US without boats?

The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883; the next year the showman Barnum marched Jumbo and 20 other elephants across it, a stunt that also helped calm doubts about its strength.

In 1910 a New York judge ruled that which Long Island tribe no longer existed, with its members sitting in court?

The Montaukett lost their claim to land at Montauk when Judge Abel Blackmar ruled the tribe had ceased to exist; bills to restore state recognition have since passed the legislature and been vetoed.

Which bay lies between Long Island's North and South Forks?

Peconic Bay is a tidal estuary fed by the Peconic River, and its brackish water kept it rich in clams, oysters and bay scallops for generations.