Glen Cove

By Joan Harrison

Glen Cove, the only city located on Long Island's Gold Coast, has long been reinventing itself. After World War II, the farms and estates in the area gave way to suburban development. Modern advancements like the zoom lens, the dimmer switch, and X-ray technologies were all developed within the city limits, while factories on the creek supplied the world with carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, and graphic arts film and cameras. Albert Einstein, Nikita Khrushchev, and the Kennedy families stayed in the community, and stars of stage and screen performed about town. In 1968, Glen Cove celebrated its tricentennial. It was followed by urban renewal and the rebuilding of the old downtown. In the final years of the 20th century, the industrial era ended, and under the auspices of Mayor Thomas Suozzi, environmental cleanup and waterfront revitalization began.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jan 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781439649169

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INTRODUCTION

Like much of America, Glen Cove, a city with deep and complex roots, underwent a major transition as it entered the second half of the 20th century. GIs returning from the war married and started families. Suburban subdivisions of modest Cape Cod and split-level homes replaced Quaker farms and baronial estates. Industry came on strong, and there was employment for everyone. The harbor, emptied of the great yachts, was filled with barges bringing raw materials to the factories in the creek. Local dairies closed, overwhelmed by competitors with refrigerated trucks. Cars filled the once-bucolic back roads.

The great Ladew Leatherworks, producer of industrial belts, gave way to Columbia, Inc., manufacturer of carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. In the same factory complex, Powers Chemco, pioneer of roll-film technology, automated negative-making, and mobile X-ray units, prospered. Across Herb Hill Road, Li Tungsten/Wah Chang Smelting and Refining Co., a facility that processed 90 percent of the tungsten for the US war effort, retooled for the peacetime economy. In 1951, Photo Circuits, the first independent printed circuit-board fabrication company, originated in the basement of Powers Chemco.

Dr. Frank Back, inventor of the earliest vari-focal lenses, so believed in Glen Cove that he enticed workers to Zoomar, his new manufacturing facility on Sea Cliff Avenue, by paying their rent differential or the partial costs of moving to the city. Mayor Joseph Suozzi initiated renewal of deteriorating neighborhoods in the southern section of Glen Cove dating from the starch-works era. Impoverished families living in overcrowded structures with poor sanitation were relocated, and 40 city blocks were leveled and gradually rebuilt.

In 1960, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the Russian mission at Killenworth, the former George DuPont Pratt estate, and held a vociferously protested press conference on Dosoris Lane. During the tumultuous 1960s, Glen Cove, a normally peaceful place geographically isolated from the main highway and fast rail transport, was not immune to the times. Civil rights leader James Davis led the desegregation of the schools and fire department, and numerous native sons served their country in Vietnam. After the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy and her children found solace at a weekend retreat on West Island. Robert Kennedy and family resided in the city for a time, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton celebrated their scandalous union out of the public eye on the Loew estate. Historically accustomed to the wealthy and famous, Glen Covers took these visitors in stride.

In 1968, the community celebrated its tricentennial, the 300th anniversary of the founding of Musketa Cove, the Place of Rushes that had officially become the City of Glen Cove 50 years earlier. Soon after, urban renewal of the aging downtown and its infrastructure commenced. Most of the patchwork architecture of School and Glen Streets, dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries, was razed. West Glen Street vanished, and Village Square materialized. In addition, two multistory parking garages were erected. Glass-fronted office complexes were built on both main thoroughfares, and downtown was reconfigured. The modernization of the city took more than 30 years to come about, and it continues to this day. In 1976, Glen Cove celebrated the bicentennial of the nation and its own Colonial origins.

Joseph A. Suozzi (mayor, 1956–1960) and his much-loved brother Vincent A. Suozzi (mayor, 1973–1979, 1984–1987) saw the community through many of these events and changes. Their respective sons, Thomas Suozzi (mayor, 1994–2001) and Ralph Suozzi (mayor, 2005–2013), followed. As the 20th century ended, the information age supplanted the industrial one; manufacturing ceased and the factories closed. Cleanup of the air and the waterfront, polluted by a century and a half of heavy industry, began.

When Thomas Suozzi took office in 1994, he brought a new vision to Glen Cove. He shut down the troubled incinerator and leveled the Li Tungsten stack and the skeleton of the ill-conceived Captain’s Cove development. He had the vacant bank buildings on Glen Street repurposed into a civic center, brought Staples to the long-empty Triangle on School Street, and initiated