Wyandanch

Ethnic developments

German and Austrian Americans were the two largest ethnic groups in Wyandanch between 1880 and 1955. German and Austrian-American families constructed the first houses in Wyandanch south of the LIRR. Sheet Nine of the “City of Breslau” area was home to about a hundred “honest and frugal” German and Austrian-American families as early as the 1880s. The Wyandance Brick and Terra Cotta works employed Germans and Austrians as well. Affluent German and Austrian Americans also resided in the hilly, isolated, and sylvan Carintha Heights neighborhood, west of Conklin Street, which Brosl Hasslacher developed following the Long Island Motor Parkway’s construction.

Beginning in the 1920s and extending into the 1930s, working-class settlers (recently arrived from County Donegal in Ireland) began building small wood-frame bungalow-type homes in the fire-prone pine barrens in Wyandance Springs Park-there were no springs, no park and no roads-and in Home Acres. Irish and Irish-American families built homes on land they had purchased in the 1920s land bubble in Wyandance Spring Park or Home Acres. The newcomers wanted to escape from the crowded and economically depressed conditions in Manhattan and The Bronx, and yet be within an hour’s ride of the “City” on the LIRR. More affluent and prominent Irish-American families in Wyandanch lived nearer the “village” in more prosperous homes with larger plots of land.

African-Americans have lived in Wyandanch since the 1920s, when African-American families bought plots of land and built their own homes in the “Little Farms” section of the West Babylon school district between Straight Path, Little East Neck Road and Gordon Avenue.[19] In the Upper Little Farms section bounded by Straight Path, Little East Neck Road and Grunwedel Avenue (now Patton Avenue) in the Wyandanch School District pioneering upwardly mobile African-American families also began building their own homes. Mortimer Cumberbach and Ignatius Davidson opened their C and D Cement Block Corp. on Booker Avenue at Straight Path on December 6, 1928; as late as the mid-1950s, C & D Cement Block was the only large business owned and operated by African-Americans in Suffolk County.

In the 1950s and 1960s, African-American families established homes south of the LIRR in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these families—both middle class and working class—purchased homes in Wyandanch because they were denied opportunities to move into other fast-developing white housing tracts on Long Island (such as Levittown) due to exclusionist real estate practices: steering, restrictive covenants, red-lining or price points.[citation needed] The rapid development of Wyandanch in the 1950s as one of the largest African-American communities in Suffolk County transformed Wyandanch politically into a hamlet which by 1960 voted overwhelmingly Democratic. In the 1950s and 1960s, the political interest of African-Americans in Wyandanch was mainly focused on winning seats on the Wyandanch Board of Education.

At the Carver Park complex at Straight Path and Booker Avenue, Taca Homes, Inc. began selling Wyandanch residents on a “non-racial” basis expandable four-room Cape Cod-style homes in March 1951. At $7,200, the 59 initial stage homes featuring tile bathrooms, hot water heating, and a basement were qualified for Federal Housing Administration loan insurance. Veterans were informed that a 30-year, 4% mortgage could be obtained with just a $365 down payment. (See April 8, 1951, Brooklyn Daily Eagle) “Interracial housing” was the marketed feature of Carver Park. (April 8, 1951, Brooklyn Daily Eagle) Nearly all of the buyers of homes in Carver Park’s initial and second neighborhoods were African Americans.  Veterans could purchase these homes with a $600 down payment and a $58.50 monthly payment.

Wyandanch was the first place Hispanic-American families settled in the late 1940s because it provided cheap land and houses, and it was conveniently located near military facilities and the Pilgrim, Edgewood, Central Islip, and Kings Park State Psychiatric Centers, which provided an abundance of jobs.