Back in ye olden days when a theater might have a mezzanine, one might acquire one's medicine from an apothecary, purchase a suit at a haberdasher's, buy a hat at a millinery, attend the grand opening of a dry goods store, consider the automobile sufficiently novel as to call it a "horseless carriage",  and play music on a victrola, our area had now-archaic place-names to match the march of time.

The Levittown area was, roughly above the current South Village Green, called Island Trees owing to an ancient grove amid the open grassy area about the corner of Hempstead Turnpike and Jerusalem Avenue. South of this point - and on into Wantagh - the region was called Jerusalem after Capt. Seaman's 1664 land purchase. And just west of this was an area collectively dubbed "the Bellmores" which included a site around the North Jerusalem/Newbridge Road intersection called Smithville.   

Levittown borders on communities that have seen profound name changes or which obtained their monikers under odd circumstances. In the mid-19th Century, for example, much of Plainedge - itself derived from being at the edge of the Hempstead Plains - was, albeit informally, called Turkeyville due to the many turkey farms which operated here and of which Zorn's is a ghost of a memory. Another locale just west of what became the Grumman facility was called Beetletown - a corruption of Bedelltown for the Welsh family who farmed it. And in the 1930s, adjacent Central Park was re-christened Bethpage, a revived Quaker designation given by Thomas Powell in 1690.    

Reflecting a growing interest in American Indian culture during the Victorian era, many communities adopted Indian names or revived older ones. Thus, South Oyster Bay became Massapequa, and Ridgewood - alternatively called Jerusalem South - became Wantagh. Only Glen Cove bucked the trend by changing its name from Mosquito Cove to avoid the entomological association, to Glen Cove- being a play on Glencoe whence came a number of Scottish immigrants to the area. Likewise the East Woods became Syosett whereas nearby Christian Hill became Muttontown to reflect the neighborhood's chief product.    

Closer to home, New Bridge once referred to a region of Hempstead Plains between the East Meadows where Hempstead yeomen grazed their livestock and watered at the Meadow Brook, and the aforementioned grove at Island Trees. It was roughly about the spread north of Hempstead Turnpike and Newbridge Road which became the site of a coal yard in the 1870s to supply the stop on the old Stewart Line of the LIRR. (Today, it's in the vicinity of the East Meadow Firehouse on Newbridge Road where, in the 1970s, I uncovered a rusted railroad spike and a small piece of anthracite). Much of this section, too, was called Salisbury in colonial times owing to its vague resemblance to the Salisbury Plain in the South-of-England.

And thence to the north, the acreage belonging to Valentine Hicks in 1837 when he supervised the route of the LIRR through the grasslands, became Hicksville. Here, too, an urban legend arose in the early 20th Century that this was the origin of the word "Hick" to denote a country bumpkin but, indeed, this abbreviated form of "Richard" can be traced back to the 12th Century and was such a popular English name in subsequent centuries that by the reign of Elizabeth I it was associated with a commoner.    

The arrival of formal postal codes and suburban water, zoning, and school districts prompted by the Levittown-ignited building boom "standardized" our place-names.    

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org.