The Battle of the Old Motor

Submitted by Paul Manton.

In an odd way, everything that's right with America and everything that's wrong with America, is microcosmed in a 2.7 acre vacant lot in Levittown locally known as the Old Motor since the end of World War II.

Baby Boomers will recall the spot with its tall grass, patches of milkweed, leaping grasshoppers, constellations of wildflowers visited by bright butterflies; ideal for the budding naturalist or somebody seeking the serenity and contemplation of one of Levittown's last pieces of rural land. As the site of the grandstand, review stand, and Start/Finish line of the 1908-10 Vanderbilt Cup Race, it was where, before roaring crowds in the thousands and the Progressive Era's captains-of-industry, the state-of-the-art in horseless carriage technology was showcased to a curious world.

Later, between 1929 and 1950, as the speedway's cement and bituminous roadbed became overgrown like some latter day Apian Way, it was employed chiefly by Charles A. Lindbergh and others on the way to the Long Island Aviation Country Club. The Old Motor was overlooked by Levitt & Sons principally because the effort and expense of restoring it as a Newbridge Road-to-Jerusalem Avenue conduit that would mark off the Cape Cod section of the development from the Ranch houses made it simply easier to create a new road immediately parallel and that road is Orchid Road. Plans to create a park were discussed but never materialized and so the land remained in the possession of Nassau County as it had been since 1938 when William K. Vanderbilt sold it off for back taxes.

There is a darker side to this tale. Allowing nothing to stand in the way of his Northern State Parkway, Robert Moses employed the stick and the olive branch as expediency required; seizing the land, via eminent domain, of poor farmers unable to make the kind of "contributions" as the affluent estate owners and making under-the-table deals with said Gatsby set - the likes of which came to light only decades later when Robert Caro published Robert Moses: Power Broker. Putting the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway out of business lest the Northern State be deemed unnecessary in Albany, Moses bullied William Vanderbilt into selling off his old raceway for the aforesaid back taxes.

In 1984, the section that had been the site of the grandstand was sold by Nassau County to a company called Giordano & Venteau. When Lynne Mattarese, Steve Buczak, and Daphne Rus - three of the Levittown Historical Society's founding members - investigated, they discovered that the company's address was an empty storefront in Bethpage. Shortly thereafter, Terra Homes Inc. (now operating under the name Josato) purchased the property for $90,000 which certainly was a bargain given that an adjacent property of similar size and configuration, the site of the old Pintail Lane School, had been assessed by the Levittown School District to be worth just under one million dollars.

All the appearance of legally dubious real estate transactions notwithstanding, Terra Homes/Josato began a 29-year-long battle against the resident organized under the aegis of the Levittown Property Owner's Association. At issue was the proposed creation of a split-level style development on substandard plots accompanied by a service road deemed largely inaccessible by the Levittown Fire Department. Terra Homes/Josato's main obstacle, however, was Article XV of the Town of Hempstead's building code called the LPRD; a uniquely crafted, William Levitt-inspired, legal instrument to address the unprecedented zoning character of the Levitt Development and the unusual set of historical circumstances that created it. The battles in this conflict included numerous pleadings before the Zoning Board of Appeals no less than the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division in Brooklyn and the residents gaining such allies as then Town Supervisor Tom Gulotta (and subsequent supervisors in subsequent court cases).

After a generation of proposals, counter-proposals, resident protests, lawsuits, overlapping jurisdictions, and insinuations of political sweetheart deals, something of a "compromise" has arisen. Terra Homes/Josato has failed to create the kind of development between Skimmer and Heron it desired, but succeeded in creating split-levels facing the existing streets and, as a consequence, is in the process of "land-locking" the Old Motor.

Such a fiasco speaks ill of the political climate whereupon we are compelled to function as a viable community; it, quite frankly, reeks of the Tammany Hall-style politics rejected by the townships of eastern Queens when they opted out of the Act of Consolidation to create Nassau County. It lingers within the nostrils as the kind of Big City politics replete with truculent lawyers and their opportunistic clients that many moved to the suburbs to avoid.

Still, however, the battle of the Old Motor speaks to why Levittown became the American Dream: civic-minded residents not taken-in by the sophistries of interlopers whose sole motivation was profiteering; banding together for the good of their community.

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

Related Stories

New Crocus Lane Plan

Hempstead Town Board Denies Previous Plan

Crocus Lane Rep. Discusses Previous Proposal