circa 1871

A Family in the Second Wave

Joseph Novotny came to Bohemia as part of the second major wave of Czech migration to the settlement. He was the son of Josef Anton Novotny and Katherine (Matys) Novotny, and the family records preserved by descendants indicate that his parents sold their property in central Bohemia — in what is now the Czech Republic — on June 2, 1871, to fund their voyage to America.

Joseph was born around the time of that migration, circa 1871, making him essentially a first-generation American raised inside an immigrant household. His older sister, Frances Novotny, had been born October 16, 1859, in the old country; she would later live out her life on Long Island, dying in Sayville on April 15, 1953.

Like many Czech families who came to Bohemia in the 1860s and 1870s, the Novotnys’ decision was shaped by chain migration — earlier success stories from relatives and neighbors, including the Kroupa family, drew later arrivals to the same settlement on the South Shore. The Novotnys arrived during a period when the village was just beginning to transition from a scattered camp of woodcutters and small farmers into something resembling a structured town. The scrub oak was being cleared, the first commercial buildings along what would become “Hotel Row” were going up, and the community was creating the institutions — schools, fraternal halls, eventually churches — that would anchor it for the next century. This was the world in which Joseph grew up, and the world he would spend his adult life shaping.

Winter 1893

The Fire Department Takes Shape

The same wood-frame construction that gave Bohemia its character also made it dangerously combustible. Cigar factories full of curing tobacco, hotels full of guests, homes heated by wood stoves, and outbuildings packed with hay sat shoulder to shoulder along sandy, unpaved streets. Until the early 1890s, the village had no organized fire protection at all — just informal bucket brigades summoned by church bells or shouting neighbors.

That changed in the winter of 1893. According to the records preserved by the Bohemia Historical Society, a meeting was held at the end of January 1893 — society sources cite the date variously as January 30 and January 31, 1893 — at which thirteen concerned residents formally organized the Bohemia Hook & Ladder Company No. 1. William Swanda chaired the meeting; Louis Kautsky served as secretary; the motion to organize the company was made by Joseph Fischer and carried unanimously.

A few months later, on May 19, 1893, the new company elected its first officers. In a striking vote of confidence, the men chose the 22-year-old Joseph Novotny as their first Foreman — the title used at the time for what would later be called the Chief of the department. Among those endorsing his election were older and more established figures including John Wild and Theodore Gross.

The choice made practical sense as much as it was symbolic. Novotny had built many of the very structures the new company was being created to protect. He knew where the weak points were — where flame would climb through the steep gables, where porches would carry fire from one building to the next, which hotels and factories had the worst stair runs. The builder of Bohemia was a natural choice to organize its defense.

The Civic Hall

Why It Worked

What Novotny and his fellow founders built in 1893–94 was not just a fire company. It was the village’s first formal civic institution — the first thing in Bohemia organized not around a church congregation, a family, or a fraternal lodge, but around a shared public responsibility, with elections, officers, dues, and a building of its own. The second-floor meeting hall in the new firehouse quickly became the place where the community gathered for almost everything that wasn’t religious: rehearsals, social events, holiday parties, and political meetings. When the Armistice was announced on November 11, 1918, residents converged on the Church Street firehouse before a parade formed; in 1937, when Fire Warden Frank Cizek died fighting a brush fire in what is now Connetquot State Park — the only Bohemia Fire Department member lost in the line of duty during the department’s first century — it was again the firehouse that became the place of mourning.

That dual identity, half fire station and half civic hall, was Novotny’s quiet design as much as the steep-gabled hotels were.

1940

The End of an Era — and What Survives

Joseph Novotny died on April 6, 1940. By then the village he had helped build had already begun changing in ways he could not have foreseen as a young carpenter in the 1890s. Smithtown Avenue, once the social spine of an inward-facing Czech farming and cigar town, was becoming a thoroughfare into the orbit of the new MacArthur Field. The old hotel culture — saloons like Nohowec’s (later the Pilnacek’s Sunrise Hotel, later still the MacArthur Field Hotel) — was reorienting itself around airport traffic. The cigar industry that had once filled the backyard hauziky was in long decline.

The firehouse Novotny’s generation built lasted nearly seven more decades. The department finally moved its headquarters to a modern facility on Pearl Street in May 1962, with a further upgrade in 1975 to its current home at 950 Pearl Street. The old wooden firehouse at Church and Walnut stood empty for fifteen years afterward as a nostalgic landmark — and then, in 1977, in a final and bitter irony, it was destroyed by fire. The loss of the building Novotny had overseen as a young Foreman became one of the catalysts for the founding of the Bohemia Historical Society itself.

What does survive, more than anything else, is his house at 1281 Smithtown Avenue, still standing, still recognizable as a sibling to the lost Central Hotel, still bearing the steep gables and the deep porch line that defined the village he built. And the institution he founded with twelve neighbors at the end of a January meeting in 1893 is still answering alarms.

Joseph Novotny was not a famous man outside his village. But within it, he gave Bohemia two things almost no other single person gave it: a face and a defense.