05/29/2026
Centennial Fridays #4 - 1956
We turned thirty in 1956. Nassau County was booming. But out here on the East End, things were still quiet — and we liked it that way.
By 1956, the postwar suburban explosion was reshaping Long Island at a pace nobody had ever seen. Levittown was already built. Nassau County had been dubbed "Boomtown USA" through the 1950s, with new subdivisions going up faster than roads could be paved. But Riverhead? The North Fork? Still a different world entirely.
Out here, the land was still doing what it had always done. Long Island growers were harvesting potatoes on approximately 75,000 acres by the 1950s — and Riverhead was the heart of it. Farm produce came into Riverhead through the auction houses, bought by brokers and loaded onto railroad cars bound for New York City, often within two days of being dug up. This was still a working community. Farmers, fishermen, families who had been on the same land for generations. The kind of place where everyone knew their neighbors and a handshake still meant something.
That same year, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture came to Riverhead to address Long Island potato growers directly — a signal of just how significant this community was to the regional economy. The East End wasn't a getaway yet. It was a place people worked.
Thirty years in, we were part of that fabric. Protecting the farms, the homes, the businesses that made the East End run. The faces were familiar. The conversations were personal. That's still how we operate today.
Need an agency that's been part of this community longer than most can remember? Call our office. Real people, right here on the East End, same as always.
📞 (631) 722-3500
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