52°Good afternoon
Cyclists and pedestrians share trails across Caumsett State Historic Park...

Cyclists and pedestrians share trails across Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve. Credit: Ian J. Stark

On July 27, 1960, Newsday published an editorial about Lloyd Harbor residents and the potential of a new state park to be formed from the pending acquisition of the Marshall Field Estate in Lloyd Neck, known as “Caumsett.”

The editorial board wrote, “Property owners in Lloyd Harbor have promised an all-out battle against this fine concept. How stupid and shortsighted can people be?”

Sixty-three years later, Newsday pulled that editorial from its archives and used it as an example of NIMBYism [“Moses’ Lloyd Neck project was no walk in the park,” Opinion, July 29]. “In retrospect, Newsday’s board back in 1960 was prescient. ‘Ten years from now,’ the board wrote, ‘it will be interesting to note how accustomed to the park will be those who now object so loudly and foolishly to it.’ ”

Stupid, shortsighted, loud and foolish. Shame on us apparently.

However, the truth is that both Lloyd Harbor and Cold Spring Harbor residents, along with most local government officials at the time, were indeed committed to stopping then-Long Island State Park Commissioner Robert Moses from making Caumsett a state park. But why?

Why would the residents and officials not want Field’s pristine property preserved and protected from development? Turns out, building 283 or more homes there was the lesser of two evils.

If the editorial board had dug deeper, it would have found that Moses had big plans for Caumsett and the surrounding area.

He had planned to make the estate into a scaled down version of Jones Beach. Thousands of trees would have been removed and wildlife habitats destroyed, according to planning commission reports. Annual visitor counts would have been in the low millions.

Moses planned a major parkway to provide access to the new park. The “Caumsett State Parkway” was to extend the Bethpage State Parkway north. Designs for the new Long Island Expressway included an interchange for the Caumsett State Parkway — the never-built “Exit 47.”

Reaching the mouth of Cold Spring Harbor, the parkway would continue north using hydraulic fill construction. It would have displaced miles of natural shoreline and continued right through the Village of Lloyd Harbor.

Up to 53 Lloyd Harbor homes and 210 acres of public- and government-owned property would have been taken by Moses. In fact, the state began the purchase of land, taking parcels in Woodbury, Syosset, Cold Spring Harbor and Lloyd Harbor.

Residents had every right to be upset. The editorial board should have accounted for those concerns.

We all know what happened next. The “Power Broker” ran into a few problems, and the state spent the 1960s in poor fiscal shape, starving the park system of funding. In 2002, the state transferred the Bethpage-Caumsett Parkway right-of-way to the parks department, forming Trail View, Stillwell Woods Preserve and Cold Spring Harbor parks.

Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve would not open to the public until 16 years later. By then, many of its buildings had been vandalized and/or burned to the ground.

With much help and support from our community, local governments, the state Parks Commission and The Caumsett Foundation, the park has returned to what it should have been in the first place, a glorious historic park preserve protecting wildlife and the environment.

It will serve its public visitors for generations to come, just as Marshall Field III had intended.

— John F. Barone, Lloyd Harbor

The writer is an adviser to The Caumsett Foundation.

WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO JOIN OUR DAILY CONVERSATION. Email your opinion on the issues of the day to letters@newsday.com. Submissions should be no more than 200 words. Please provide your full name, hometown, phone numbers and any relevant expertise or affiliation. Include the headline and date of the article you are responding to. Letters become the property of Newsday and are edited for all media. Due to volume, readers are limited to one letter in print every 45 days. Published letters reflect the ratio received on each topic.

SUBSCRIBE

Unlimited Digital AccessOnly 25¢for 6 months

ACT NOWSALE ENDS SOON | CANCEL ANYTIME