A Suburb With Edge
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Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived in Great Neck, N.Y., in 1922. It was a bucolic spot, 15 miles from Broadway, on a peninsula wedged between the mundane flats of Queens and the chain of splendid estates and quiet villages of the famous North Shore. The very wealthy were there, but also poorer newcomers. Fitzgerald himself was looking for a middle ground between the exhausting, spirited city and the dull security of the Midwest.
The family didn’t last long in the place, victims of their own instability, reckless spending, and the social chaos nurtured in the postwar decade of prosperity and Prohibition.
They moved to Paris, where he finished a work that he had started in Great Neck. In “The Great Gatsby” Fitzgerald used the mystique of the fictional bay to separate the world of aspirants — natives and immigrants as well — from those born to superiority and wealth. In Nick Carraway’s words, Great Neck was: “this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village; “a place of “raw vigor.” Fitzgerald understood that Great Neck was really about social aspiration and the clashes that occur when new groups join older ones in towns.
Great Neck still interests us today, largely for what it has continued to teach us about tensions among such groups. In the 1930s, the conflict was between suburban Christians and Jews. Like the rest of the North Shore, Great Neck favored Protestant homogeneity through mechanisms such as restrictive covenants. Episcopalians built two strong churches in Great Neck, and they also dominated the school board. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholics also took their place on major thoroughfares such as Middle Neck Road. Still, for whatever reason — perhaps because it liked celebrities — Great Neck did welcome some Jews. Eddie Cantor, the star of “Ziegfield Follies,” moved to Great Neck’s University Gardens. This made Great Neck different from much of the rest of Long Island.
As the Great Depression deepened, the population shifted again. Banks now owned many of the homes, and sold some to Jews. While the rest of Long Island’s North Shore communities remained mostly closed to Jews, Great Neck made Nassau County a possibility for them.
After World War II, there was yet another change. Soldiers and their families were the new arrivals: many, too, were Jewish. The population of the town was still predominantly Christian, but Great Neck was becoming known as a Jewish community, and non-Jews began to favor other places.
The new arrivals insisted on making the public school system as strong and as distinguished as they could. Great Neck High School became one of the top-ranked high schools in the country, right up there with New Trier in Chicago. Jewish parents then were just like Asians today who demand that their children sit the exam for New York’s specialized high schools. They were desperate to win admission to name colleges for their offspring. They made Great Neck High School into their weapon against the old Ivy quota system. In Great Neck, Jews also built hospitals — not only to serve the medical needs of the population but also to provide opportunities for Jewish doctors to serve on hospital staffs.
The balance of gentiles and Jews, sought after by many in the community, disintegrated under the ethnic and religious pressures of an assertive Jewish presence and Protestant and Catholic flight. It was only in the 1960s that Great Neck, the famous Jewish community, actually became predominantly Jewish.
Today, the Great Neck community of 42,000 features many ethnic groups. It also is home to yet other varieties of conflict — again, about social aspiration. This time, however, the tensions are not between gentiles and Jews, or the privileged and the underprivileged. They are between two groups of Jews. There are the old Reform Jews and Conservatives on the one hand, and the very religious Orthodox on the other.
Two areas where the tension is felt are retail commerce and the schools. Orthodox Jews would like to see more stores, even stores owned by non-Jews, close on the Sabbath; merchants and their customers naturally resist. The Orthodox community in Great Neck does not usually send its children to public school. Rather, these children attend Jewish day schools. This fact raises the concern that the community that distinguished itself through its heavy investment in the public schools will see those schools lose support.
Citizens of the Empire State tend to look to the five boroughs for excitement. Places like Great Neck remind us to consider suburbia as well. As Fitzgerald understood, some of the most dramatic parts of American life take place there.
Ms. Goldstein is the author of “Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream” and is founder and executive director of Humanity in Action.
THE ORIGINAL ‘BURB NOVEL
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. … Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on … My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended. …
— “The Great Gatsby”
By F. Scott Fitzgerald