History of Westbury, Long Island, A

The Long Island community of Westbury was once a small town farming neighborhood . While Brooklyn and other boroughs mushroomed into urban giants, the population of peaceful Westbury hovered at less than one thousand. Then the Wall Street tycoons arrived--and everything changed. In this new book, author Richard Panchyk narrates the dramatic transformation of this once-agricultural hamlet, founded in 1670 by Quakers. Little more than a country town until the first two decades of the twentieth century, Westbury changed overnight as Manhattan's financial titans embarked on a frenzied pace of building and development--mansions, resorts, even a racetrack and an airport--catapulting the community into modern times. Westbury was the site of one of the country's first auto races, the 1904 Vanderbilt Cup. Its train stop witnessed the nation's first ever train-car collision. And in 1927, Charles Lindbergh bedded down in Westbury before taking off on his flight into history. Let Panchyk whisk you through the region's occasionally contentious, frequently dramatic, and always entertaining growth and development in A History of Westbury, Long Island.