I grew up in Suffolk County, Long Island (Long Island is in New York State, but it’s also very much it’s own place). Once, when one of my friends from college stayed for an extended period of time in 2012, he described my town as “stuck in the 90s.” I thought that was a pretty funny summation, but didn’t really grasp what he meant. I grew up there in the 90s. And although by that time I had experienced 4 years of college elsewhere, I was still on the Island frequently enough that, to me, Long Island was the focal point at which I looked out at the world. So I couldn’t really understand it from an outsider’s point of view.
In the past several weeks I’ve hung out with a bunch of friends from growing up. We are now in our 30s, some living pretty far away, all of us more permanently starting our own lives. Our parents, who are now approaching their mid/late 60s, are also in a period of change; a fair amount selling their houses, downsizing, off to new adventures or grappling with unexpected life changes. Those of us who still have a home base there come back for holidays and family, but each year that number—and the frequency in which any of us are there at the same time—dwindles.
More and more, my friends and I have talked about how much the place has changed. In this sense, the conversation usually veers toward the political. Suffolk County was slightly more blue than red when we were growing up, but it’s since made a sharp right turn with Trump’s rise and seems to be moving further and further that way. Some of my friends1 interpret this drastic political shift as a fundamental change in values that makes our town unrecognizable from even 15 years ago. I personally think it’s all quite complicated, but I also think back to my college friend’s comment about being stuck in the 90s—a dead-on encapsulation of Trump’s MAGA slogan 4 years too early.
In my view, the political shift is the result of a cultural and possibly economic one. Growing up, a fair amount of people I knew viewed neighboring New York City as a cultural companion. Many Long Islanders had parents or grandparents who were originally from the five boroughs2, and there seemed to be a general sentimental link to the city. You’d hear about people visiting family in the city3, or maybe some sort of restaurant or cultural ritual that held familial significance somewhere in five boroughs.
Over time, I began to realize that many cultural touchstones of Long Island—think family style Italian restaurants that smell overwhemly of beautiful garlic, with a bar in the front area where people complain about how bad the Jets are—are indigenous to New York City, not Huntington. The older I got, the more I realized a lot of Long Island’s cultural DNA (another example; delis where people get really mad at you if you don’t have your order ready by the time you get to the counter) has been imported from the five boroughs.
Nowadays, while the family style Italian restaurants are at full force on LI4, the links to the city—at least in my completely non-scientific or remotely validated observation—have become increasingly tenuous.5 Perhaps this is because a generation has passed and families are now more firmly “Long Island” than they were before; or perhaps its because the algorithms tend to move NYC people in one way, and Long Islanders in another. But in the past several years when visiting my hometown, I’ve sensed an attitude that views the city as increasingly foreign. That the city is another planet, full of preening coastal elites (not wrong) that look down on Long Island and suburban lifestyle in general (again, not wrong), and have no idea how the world works (highly debatable) because they don’t how to change a flat tire (accurate). During COVID this disconnect was particularly pronounced, with the general attitude regarding COVID safety being drastically different in the city vs. LI, and the news painting the city as a violent zone of moral decay. Granted, crime in the city during COVID rose in an alarming fashion—but my personal experience didn’t match the near-warzone being portrayed by the news I watched when I stayed with my parents.
**
I have been thinking about the ideas above a lot recently because I’m re-reading a book called Ohio by Stephen Markley, which is about at fictional town in Ohio called New Canaan in 2013. Specifically, it’s about graduates coming back to the town about 10 years on, coming to terms with how much both they themselves and the town they once knew has changed. While the corner of Suffolk County I grew up in is not remotely as economically depressed as New Canaan is painted out to be6, there are a number of similarities; the means by which the opiod crisis has run rampant, a sort of decline of (perceived or otherwise) cultural relevance; a sort of “us against the world” mentality that has emerged; the extent to which 9/11 permanently changed the collective psyche of the place. The characters in Ohio, while dealing with incredibly dark issues and privy to overwhelmingly tragic secrets, contain elements of people that I am reminded of from back home. There is a book like this to be written about Suffolk County, although I doubt it would rise to the level of masterpiece literature that is Ohio.
When thinking about Long Island nowadays, the cliched phrase “You Can’t Go Home Again” comes to mind. I’ll be out there for Thanksgiving next week, and there will still be many elements of home, to which I consider myself lucky. My parents are both thankfully doing well and healthy; my mom will be chopping random things in the kitchen and telling me 10 minute stories of things I’ve already heard about; my dad, like the people in the family style Italian restaurants, will complain about how bad the Jets are. I’ll play in a flag football game that’s been a tradition since 2006, though instead of a tight group of lifelong friends it’s now more littered with random brother-in-laws who grew up in New Jersey. This motley crew of half-friends will all go to the deli after (a new deli, because the old deli burned down), and eat breakfast sandwiches. Maybe the next day, I’ll run into someone in town that I haven’t seen from high school but we’ll pretend not to recognize each other, because there is too much shame in growing older. Or maybe that same scenario happens, but we instead strike up a conversation, only to quickly realize that we no longer really have anything to say to each other.
Either way, my friends from my hometown—none of us appear to be building a life there—have changed just as much as the place that’s connected us. In theory we have a physical place to go back to, but in reality that’s not really true. Moreso, we have a strong connection to a moment in time that has since mostly vanished. I don’t think this is good or bad; it’s just what happens.
I am writing a substack newsletter, so you can hazard a guess of where the majority of my friends lean politically
Suburban development increased drastically after WWII with incentives from the GI Bill, and Long Island’s population skyrocketed, with many second-and-third generation immigrants purchasing homes. A shameful aspect of this shift is the reality that many of these opportunities were often only available to white Americans, and the decision to leave areas of NYC were often certainly in part racially motivated: https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/segregation-real-estate-history/
The historic Little Italys of Manhattan and the Bronx’s Arthur Avenue are only a few blocks each today. The answer to “where did Little Italy go?” can be answered by reading the names of any classroom roster from my high school.
There are some cultural aspects of the surrounding New York suburbs that I think are more reflective of 20th century New York City than New York City itself. One example of this phenomenon is Ben’s Kosher Deli, which has one location in Manhattan, but 4 on Long Island (one of those four is in Bayside Queens, but basically Nassau). Ben’s is essentially an extension of a previous era of New York City, when this style of restaurant was omni-present in New York. In today’s New York City, it’s increasingly hard to find these types of places; they’ve been in large part succeeded by an aesthetic that was recently deemed “Designer Deli” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/deli-new-york.html
People did (and I imagine still) commute to the city for work. Though where I grew up, the commute was well over an hour, and it didn’t seem like parents who worked in the city represented anywhere near a majority. To me, it seems like that is more the primary connection to the city nowadays than anything else.
Many of my friends, myself included, grew up with finished basements where you’d play ping pong and Madden and pretended that your life sucked even though a caring parent upstairs was making you bagel bites at that very moment