History oftentimes manifests itself within the most unassuming and unobtrusive ways. The "field of surrender" at Yorktown looked like any other Virginian meadow in the autumn of l99l when I visited it, 210 years after Great Britain was forced, at that very spot, to concede that America was a new nation.

So it is with that vacant lot off Skimmer Lane in Levittown. Today, as when I first collected butterflies there amid the weeds and wildflowers in the summer of l968, it contains only a faint intimation of the cheering throng that gathered there, huddled in a tent city around a big wooden grandstand, to observe the l908, l909, l9l0 and l9ll world-famous Vanderbilt Cup Races.

Over the years, groups like the Levittown Property Owners Association have fought tooth-and-nail in the courts to prevent developers, often out-of-towners with influential friends and backroom deals, from building on this parcel. Last fall, it was against Terra Homes Inc. who now operate under the name Josato Inc. The most recent threat comes in the form of a developer who has floated the idea of a senior citizens housing complex.

Those who know the Skimmer Lane neighborhood know why this is ill-conceived. Those who have to reach for their Nassau County atlas and line up the grid to find Skimmer Lane should be assured that their ignorance is at the crux of this impracticality. You see, Skimmer abuts no major roads, is a good walk to the nearest bus stop, and farther away still to any store or house of worship or community facility. For a young lad of 39, the journey would be relatively easy, albeit time-consuming. For a senior citizen who does not enjoy the health he or she enjoyed when the Fab Four first appeared on Ed Sullivan, it would be an arduous task to say the least. More difficult would be the task of the ambulance driver navigating the side streets of residential Levittown to find Skimmer. A senior citizen housing complex built on this site, I fear, would become a boarded-up eyesore foisted upon local residents while its foolish owners languish in bankruptcy court and its developer laughs all the way to the bank.

We do not seek to preserve this fragment of the old Vanderbilt Motor Parkway simply for the history, though. Two blocks over is Northside School and in years past, classes were taken here to observe nature. In an era when a bird sanctuary or a wildlife preserve gives a community an enhanced status (not to mention educational opportunities) it seems foolish that our Levittown would not desire its own piece of Mother Nature. Indeed, let us not forget that before the carefully tended suburban lawns and ornamental shrubs and fine shade trees of Levittown, and the cow pastures and potato fields of Jerusalem and Island Trees, this whole area was part of a vast, self-sustaining meadow. The Hempstead Plains, as this 60,000 acre horizon-to-horizon grassland was called, was, according to historians and field biologists, the only true prairie ecosystem on the East coast. Hip-high waves of burnt-orange beardgrass, tangles of prickly pear cactus, stands of pitch pine trees, and vast azure patches of birdsfoot violet grew here amid abundant songbirds and flocks of monarch butterflies. That world is gone now, but, as is now being undertaken by many communities in the mid-West, a sample of it could be restored, preserved, and incorporated into a little nature center for future generations of Levittowners.