Shortly after the revolutions in Eastern Europe, Latvian-born journalist John Jekabson returned from the independent Baltic nations to report that "people in the countryside were restoring destroyed monuments and overgrown cemeteries. Old and long hidden books and photographs were being exhibited in museums." (Without Force Or Lies, Mercury House, 1990).

Indeed, all over the former communist world, people are rediscovering and rehabilitating their rich historical and cultural legacies. The Reichstag and other Berlin landmarks are being restored to their 18th Century glory. Warsaw's Zamkowy Square, millions of cubic feet of rubble in 1945, has been re-created via computer graphics, civil engineering, and 19th Century cityscape paintings.

Sad to say, we on Long Island, even while celebrating "Our Story" with Newsday, are still losing historical structures, place-names, and other vestiges of the past. Greed, arrogance, indifference, and a philosophical bent that Nathan Gardels of New Perspectives Quarterly described as living in "the permanently temporary present" is to blame. So, too, is ignorance. Many people, far too many people, are conditioned to observe history as a mere chronology of distant dates and foreign battlefields. But history lives and it lives right under ouR feet in our home towns.

It is with this sense of living history that I read about recent proposals to change the name of Jerusalem and/or Gardiners Avenue in Levittown with dismay. This loss would be unfortunate given the history behind it. In the Sept. 14, 1987 issue of the Levittown Tribune, Hicksville resident Ruth Baranello shared with readers her recollection of Jerusalem Avenue prior to World War II:

"Jerusalem Avenue was just a narrow two lane tar road then, with no sidewalks to interfere with the farmlands that dotted the countryside. Here and there were clusters of mailboxes by the side of the road awaiting mail addressed RFD2. After the high narrow bridge (at present day Ciper Lane), there was nothing but empty land going south on Jerusalem Avenue towards Hempstead Turnpike."

Unobtrusive though it may be, Jerusalem Avenue began as an Indian trail through the Hempstead Plains running northward to Glen Cove and southward, with a few detours, to Seaman's Neck, thusly linking the settlements of the Matinecock and Massapequans, respectively. By the 1660s, the road connected the English Quaker settlement at Jerusalem (now Wantagh and northern Levittown) to another like settlement at Jericho. This road appears on 18th century maps as the Jericho to Jerusalem Road.

The exact route of Jerusalem Avenue is probably owing to two factors. For one, like many north-south running roads on early Long Island, it ran, in part, approximately parallel to a freshwater creek. Ample water for persons and livestock crossing the Hempstead Plains on blazing summer days when, because of mud and dust and overgrown weeds, the task required several hours. Secondly, the Jericho-Jerusalem Road intersected the only natural shelter from the elements for miles around. It was that ancient grove of pine trees at the northeast corner of Jerusalem Avenue and Hempstead Turnpike whence derived the name Island Trees.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Jericho-Jerusalem Road was simply called Jerusalem Avenue and it became a major conduit for German immigrant families coming to the Hempstead Plains via the Long Island Rail Road at Hicksville. Indeed, Division Avenue started out during this period as a secondary Hicksville to Jerusalem way before being bisected around 1908. The Island of Trees was the center of a three-way intersection at this time for Bloomingdale Road also extended southward to the turnpike. Horsedrawn traffic was sufficient that when the latter became a toll road around the time of the Civil War, the toll booth was erected here.

Gardiners Avenue was a continuation of Jerusalem Avenue renamed early in the 20th Century after the Garner (note the mapmaker's spelling error) family whose holdings were once bisected by the road. The 1896 Garner farmhouse still stands at the northwest corner of Gardiners Avenue and North Jerusalem Road.

Ruth Baranello might well recall that before the war, a large parcel of land on the western side of Jerusalem Avenue belonged to the upscale Long Island Aviation Country Club where Charles Lindbergh frequently visited. Today only little Pilot Lane and photographs in the collection of the Levittown Historical Society exist to document those bygone days along the country lane that was Jerusalem Avenue. Persons wishing to see maps can visit the society's museum at the Levittown Memorial Education Center off Abby Lane. Dedicated to preserving the legacy of William Levitt, the suburban town he established here in 1947, and the rural communities of Island Trees and Jerusalem that preceded it, the museum is open to all on Wednesdays, 2:30 - 4:30 p.m. and Fridays, 7 - 9 p.m.