Bohemia Historical Society
The Industrial Parks Era
Bohemia’s second industrialization, 1960–1985
Drive the northwest corner of Bohemia today and the street signs tell you immediately that something different happened here. Orville Drive. Wilbur Place. No Czech founder carried those names, and no farmer ever worked a field along them. They honor Orville and Wilbur Wright, the brothers who flew the first powered airplane at Kitty Hawk in 1903 — a developer’s deliberate nod to the runway next door, an airport location written right into the addresses. And they were laid out not in the 1870s, when Bohemia’s settlers were still clearing scrub oak by hand, but a full century later, paved over land the founding generation knew only as pine barrens and outlying farm lots.
Between roughly 1960 and 1985, those barrens along Bohemia’s northern edge became one of the most consequential concentrations of industry on Long Island. It was the hamlet’s second industrialization. The first — cigars rolled at kitchen tables, pearl buttons cut in small shops — arrived in immigrant trunks and lived in the home. The second arrived by truck and by airplane, and it changed not just how Bohemia made its living, but which direction the traffic flowed each morning.
1938–1955
What the Land Was Before
By the end of the Second World War, farming in Bohemia was already fading. The 1938 hurricane had flattened barns and greenhouses in a single afternoon, a blow from which local agriculture never fully recovered. The hand-rolled cigar industry had died in the 1930s, undone by mechanized production; the Math & Hrouda pearl button factory on Karshick Street burned in 1947 and was not rebuilt. Nurseries like John Seidl’s still sent rows of young trees toward the horizon, but the next generation was increasingly finding its wages in the trades, the defense plants, and the towns beyond.
The land north of the village center — sandy, dry, flat, and cheap — had never been Bohemia’s best farmland. It was the same cheapness that had drawn Jan Vavra to buy five acres sight unseen in 1855. A century later, almost to the year, that cheapness would draw an entirely different kind of buyer.
1942–1972
The Airfield and the Highways
The seed was planted in April 1942, when the Town of Islip contracted to build an airfield in the pines north of the hamlet — the story told in “How MacArthur Reshaped Bohemia.” For its first fifteen years the field was a quiet, largely military presence. Two things changed that. In 1960, MacArthur began regular commercial passenger service, followed by a proper terminal in 1966. And the roads came: Veterans Memorial Highway, the four-lane connector running past the airport’s front door, formally designated Route 454 in 1972; the Long Island Expressway pushing east through Ronkonkoma in the early 1960s; Sunrise Highway carrying traffic along the hamlet’s southern edge.
Bohemia suddenly sat inside a rectangle of highways with a runway in the middle of it. For a manufacturer, the arithmetic was irresistible: parts in by air, product out by truck, and a workforce arriving from the fast-growing suburbs in every direction. The geography that had kept Bohemia poor and remote for a century — far from the railroad, far from the harbors — had quietly become its greatest asset.
1968
The Rechlers Arrive
The man who saw it most clearly was already famous in Long Island business circles. William Rechler had made his first fortune bending war-surplus aluminum into lightweight lawn furniture, sold that business in the mid-1950s, and turned to real estate. In 1961, with partner Walter Gross, he bought the 1,200-acre former ITT radio transmitter site in Hauppauge and master-planned what became the Hauppauge Industrial Park — today the second-largest business park in the nation.
In 1968, his sons Donald and Roger Rechler struck out on their own, founding Reckson Associates. For their first large project they looked south, to the pine barrens across from MacArthur Airport, and began building Airport International Plaza: ultimately more than two million square feet of industrial and flex space, promoted as Long Island’s first high-tech business park. The buildings rose in quick succession — a 151,000-square-foot warehouse at 65 Orville Drive in 1971, the building at 1385 Lakeland Avenue in 1972, the 183,000-square-foot complex at 140 Wilbur Place in 1973. The aviation street names were no accident. The runway across the road was the entire sales pitch, written right into the address.
The Tenants
Vitamins, Voices, and Avionics
The tenants who filled those buildings gave Bohemia a business history nobody in 1955 could have predicted.
In 1971, a company called Nature’s Bounty — an offshoot of Arco Pharmaceuticals, founded by Arthur Rudolph in 1960 — set up on Orville Drive. It sold vitamins and supplements by mail, went public in 1972, and was doing well enough by 1977 to buy the Bohemia building it had been leasing. By 1995, when it renamed itself NBTY after its stock ticker, it had grown into Long Island’s largest publicly owned vitamin company, with its headquarters still on Orville Drive. There is a quiet echo in that: a village that once made its living manufacturing small things by the millions — cigars, pearl buttons — was a manufacturing town again. Only the product had changed, from tobacco leaf to vitamin tablet.
A few blocks away sat one of the most quietly futuristic companies in America. Periphonics, founded in 1969, built interactive voice response systems — the technology that first let customers check a bank balance or press one for service over the telephone. Its Voicepac systems drew the attention of Exxon, which bought a controlling interest in 1971, and the company grew from a thirty-employee startup into a worldwide operation with $150 million in sales. In 1999, at the height of the telecom boom, Nortel Networks bought Periphonics for $436 million. For three decades, some of the machinery answering telephone calls around the world was engineered a mile from the Jan Hus statue.
On Wilbur Place, North Atlantic Industries — an electronics firm with roots reaching back to the mid-1950s — built embedded computing systems for military and commercial aircraft. There is something fitting in avionics being designed on a street named for the Wright brothers.
Around these anchors grew the everyday economy of any industrial corridor: machine shops and printers, distributors and contractors’ yards, the industrial supply houses and delivery fleets that never make headlines but meet more payrolls than the famous names do.
1982
The Town Doubles Down
The Town of Islip, which owned the airport and much of the surrounding land, kept investing. Town operations clustered along the corridor — including the Islip Town police headquarters in Bohemia, whose roof famously took the brunt of Hurricane Gloria in 1985. And in 1982 came the most exotic addition of all: a Foreign Trade Zone at MacArthur, part of federal Zone No. 52, a town-owned 52-acre park that grew to fourteen buildings and 435,000 square feet where imported goods could be stored, assembled, and re-exported without immediately passing through customs. The hamlet once known for hand-rolled five-cent cigars now contained a slice of legally international ground.
The Legacy
What It Meant
The numbers tell part of the story. Bohemia counted about 3,000 residents at its centennial in 1955; by 2020 it counted nearly 10,000. The growth was residential, but industry underwrote it — the commercial tax base helped carry the new Connetquot school district after the 1960 consolidation, the public library that opened in 1975, the parks and firehouses of a modernizing hamlet.
But the deeper change was in the direction of the morning traffic. For a century, Bohemians left the hamlet to find work — plumbing the mansions of Oakdale’s Gilded Age estates, commuting to the city, walking to jobs in Sayville. The industrial parks inverted that. Every weekday morning, thousands of people now drive into Bohemia to work, into a hamlet whose daytime population swells far beyond the count of its residents. The village that once exported its labor now imports it.
Through it all, the name survived. There had been proposals over the years to rename the hamlet — North Sayville, even MacArthur, after the airport — on the theory that “Bohemia” was too ethnic, too old-country, bad for business. Business came anyway, in quantities the boosters never imagined, and it came to a place still called Bohemia.
Stand today at the corner of Lakeland and Smithtown Avenues, where Albert Kovanda’s cigar factory once stood, and look north. Lakeland Avenue runs straight up past the frontage of Airport International Plaza to the airport gates. It is the same road, on the same errand it has always run — carrying Bohemia’s work out to the wider world. Only the century has changed.
The Era at a Glance
1942
MacArthur Airfield Built
The U.S. Army contracts the construction of an airfield in the pine barrens for the WWII effort.
1947
End of the First Era
The Math & Hrouda pearl button factory burns and is not rebuilt, closing the last chapter of Bohemia’s home-grown industries.
1960
Commercial Aviation Arrives
Scheduled commercial passenger service begins at MacArthur Airport.
1968
Reckson Associates Founded
Donald and Roger Rechler begin building Airport International Plaza right across from the runway.
1969 – 1971
High-Tech Anchors Arrive
Periphonics (1969) and Nature’s Bounty (1971) are founded, bringing interactive voice technology and mass supplement manufacturing to the hamlet.
1982
Foreign Trade Zone No. 52
The Town of Islip establishes an international trade zone, allowing goods to be assembled and exported without passing through customs.