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What are now Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, were then mostly farms.

Let alone areas like Long island, etc.

I grew up on Long Island, my family has been there nearly since the Dutch showed up. The entire south half of the town I grew up in was farms when my parents moved there. It's wall to wall houses now.

And my great-grandparents owned a large farm in Nassau county. When my great-grandfather died, his wife didn't do a good job managing it and it was sold off piece by piece to pay for taxes. It's now the site of the Green Acres shopping mall.

grew up on Long Island, my family has been there nearly since the Dutch showed up. The entire south half of the town I grew up in was farms when my parents moved there. It's wall to wall houses now.

I had relatives who moved to Long Island nearly fifty years ago.

I remember visiting with them and, as a city kid, marveling at the comparative paradise it was then--I remember going down to a bay and picking mussels off the rocks to take home and cook--delicious.

I remember how clear the water was in the harbors.

And I remember how wonderful the very air was--it was more than something in how it smelled; you could somehow feel its freshness. It made one feel very much alive and healthy.

I've been back there a few times since, and the place was no longer clean--the air was somehow suffocatingly bad.

And not only did they build up everything, but they erected a very cheap and ugly architecture.

Hideous.

And I sensed a pronounced liberalism--even in Suffolk County.

Horrible.

Those people who have yet to see this happen to their open spaces have no idea how fast the transformation can come about.

They are ignorant.

Very interesting--I thought that before Green Acres was built, the area had been an airfield---Curtiss Field.

If you go to the library of Congress website or Newsday's Website, you can find old maps of the area.

The Library of Congress has a few panoramic maps drawn in 3-D, which includes the buildings, from around the turn of the 19/20th centuries.

You can see the Amityville Horror house in the panoramic map of Amityville from the early 1900s, if you know where to look for it.