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Parts of Suffolk county are still nice - my aunt, uncle, and cousins live in Stony Brook, which is a pretty nice place.
But I don't like Nassau county at all, even though my parents are still there. Too crowded, traffic is terrible, and the air does smell bad. When I go down there to visit it starts to smell funny in lower Westchester county, as we get on I-95 headed for the bridge.

I don't think the entire farm = the entire Green Acres mall, but according to my dad some of it is definitely under the mall. I don't know if the airfield was once the farm (the farm went away around 1910 or 1920, as I recall).
I'll have to ask my dad - he's really up on the history of the area.

LQ

Parts of Suffolk county are still nice - my aunt, uncle, and cousins live in Stony Brook, which is a pretty nice place.

Crowded but still pretty last time I saw it fifteen years ago. But it won't last. And at any rate, I'll bet it's more liberal than it was.

And its surrounded.

But I don't like Nassau county at all, even though my parents are still there. Too crowded, traffic is terrible, and the air does smell bad.

You left out the most important part: With all that crowding, came liberalism.

As for Suffolk, from what I've seen of it since the 1980's, its air is not what it was fifty years ago. And neither is the water.

Another think that shocked me was the absence of insects at night.

People may think me strange, but I missed them--I was always fascinated by the variety of bugs that would congregate around lights at night.

That was the case on LI fifty years ago--but now I guess they've been sprayed to extinction. I find that ominous.

I don't think the entire farm = the entire Green Acres mall, but according to my dad some of it is definitely under the mall. I don't know if the airfield was once the farm (the farm went away around 1910 or 1920, as I recall). I'll have to ask my dad - he's really up on the history of the area

I believe Green Acres was built in the 1950's, and that the airfield was there before--possibly between its being Green Acres and your grandfather's farm.

Do me a favor, LQ: If you find out anything about whether Green Acres was formerly an airfield or not, please let me know.

I'd like to hear about it.

There was also a short-lived early airfield in Suffolk county: Brindley field, which was on the corner of Larkfield and Jericho in Commack or Northport. There's also an old cemetary thereabouts too.

Brindley was in use by the Army for only a few years, in the nineteen-teens, before being abandoned.

There was also an army base, Camp Upton, on the site of what is now Brookhaven Labs.

To learn more about Long Island history, this is a great resource: http://www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/

You and your dad can find some great old maps of Long Island here: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html

The panoramic maps there are the greatest--they have about a half-dozen of them. The nearest to your family's land would be the one of Valley Stream.

Here's a great site on a Suffolk County set of towns: http://www.longwood.k12.ny.us/history/

And here's a page on that Newsday website that you must see: You can get the story of each Long Island town, along with an old map showing how it looked a hundred or so years ago, by clicking on one of the areas in the black outline of LI at the top of the page: http://www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/spectown/townmain.htm