Now & Then Walnut Ave. Wall St. - Bohemia Historical Society

Bohemia Historical Society

Walnut Avenue and the Postwar Boom

How a farming hamlet became a suburb in roughly a single decade

A four-panel photo grid in our archives offers one of the clearest visual records we have of how postwar Bohemia actually grew. Take a moment to compare the sparse, pine-edged landscape of the older frames with the dense, leafy neighborhood that fills those same blocks today. The transformation captured between these images is not just a story about Walnut Avenue and Wall Street. It is the story of how a Long Island farming hamlet became a modern suburb in roughly a single decade.

1950–1960

What These Photos Are Really Showing

For most of its first century, Bohemia was a Czech-immigrant village of cigar factories, button workshops, kitchen gardens, and chicken yards. As late as 1950, the hamlet was still largely agricultural — dominated by poultry farms and nurseries, with houses spaced widely along the original 1850s street grid and pine barrens filling the gaps between them. The corners now occupied by mid-century homes were, within living memory, scrub oak, sandy soil, and quiet.

Then came the Suburban Boom.

After World War II, returning GIs armed with Veterans Administration loans and Federal Housing Administration mortgages flooded out of New York City looking for affordable family homes. Long Island farmland was cheap, the Long Island Rail Road put commuting within reach, and the model for what came next had just been built one county west: Levittown, on the old potato fields of Hempstead, where Levitt & Sons began selling 800-square-foot Cape Cod homes on October 1, 1947, for about $6,990 apiece. Over the next four years, 17,000 of them went up — at one point at a rate of thirty-six houses a day.

Bohemia was not Levittown. There was no single mass-producing developer, no four-thousand-acre tract. But the same forces — the Baby Boom, the GI Bill, the desperate hunger for affordable housing — landed here all the same. Developers moved in and aggressively subdivided the large, long-held family plots on Walnut, Ocean, and Sycamore Avenues, filling the gaps between original nineteenth-century farmhouses with modest Cape Cods and Ranches — the same affordable, federally-approved house styles being thrown up across Nassau and Suffolk Counties. In 1955, when the hamlet celebrated its 100th anniversary, its population was about 3,000. By the end of the decade, that number had nearly doubled.

That is the moment these photographs sit inside. The older panels show Walnut Avenue and Wall Street before the boom — sparse lots, exposed pine, the long, slow tempo of a farming village. The newer panels show those same blocks after the boom — fully built out, tree-lined, recognizably suburban.

Walnut Avenue

A Walnut Avenue Reading

Walnut Avenue carries a particular weight in Bohemia’s history. It was one of the original cross-streets of the early settlement, and it remained a working spine of the village well into the twentieth century. The intersection of Walnut and Church Street was the center of village life for generations: the old firehouse stood there, and directly across the street stood Mazanek’s — the general store, saloon, and meeting hall that defined the 1950s social scene. Bohemia Fire Department carnivals drew crowds from across Islip Town; after every funeral, after every fire call, after every village meeting, neighbors converged at the same corner for steak, dumplings, and conversation.

Walnut Avenue was also where the Wcela family home stood — the house in whose attic, as Bishop Emil A. Wcela later remembered, sheet music for “English and Czech popular music” still sat waiting for the next dance gig that never came. The street was, in other words, never quite a back lane. It was woven into the life of the hamlet from the start.

What the photo grid captures, then, is not Walnut Avenue’s beginning — it’s Walnut Avenue’s second life. The Cape Cods that fill in the spaces between the older Czech farmhouses were the homes of returning veterans, young couples, and new arrivals — people whose grandparents had not crossed the ocean from Bohemia, but who chose this little hamlet because it offered something the city could not: a yard, a porch, a quiet street, and a public school district they could believe in.

The Landscape

A Note on the Treelines

Look closely at the changing tree cover between panels. In the older frames you can see the pitch pine and scrub oak that originally covered the area — the same “rugged terrain of pitch pine and scrub oak” that the Czech founders Jan Vavra, Jan Kratochvil, and Josef Koula encountered when they stepped off the train at Lakeland in 1855. By the newer panels, those pine barrens are gone, replaced by the planted shade trees — maples, oaks, sycamores — that the new homeowners put in around their Cape Cods. The 1954 hurricanes (Carol on August 31, Edna eleven days later) finished off many of the village’s old-growth trees on Church Street and elsewhere, accelerating the replacement of the wild treeline with the cultivated one.

In the small differences between these two panels — a few rooftops here, a fully grown maple there — you are watching an entire era turn over.

Get Involved

Can You Find Your Home?

The Bohemia Historical Society is actively collecting memories of these streets as they once were. If you can spot your own home, a neighbor’s house, or a landmark you remember from childhood in these photographs — or if your family was among the postwar arrivals who built one of those original Cape Cods — we want to hear from you. Every photograph in our archive becomes a richer record when the people who actually lived there put a name to a roofline.