When people ask about a place that holds special meaning for my family, my first instinct is to say the Dowling house in Brooklyn, the duplex my great-great-grandparents purchased in 1905 that has never left the family. I’ve written about that house before (see “One Address, Eight Census Records, 45 Years of Family Survival” and “If These Walls Could Talk: Our Family’s Brooklyn Haven Since 1905“). But the prompt this week stopped me, because the first place I remember, the place where my own childhood happened, was a white clapboard childhood home in Lynbrook, New York, on the south shore of Long Island.
I moved there when I was nearly two years old. I left when I was twelve. It was the first house my parents had ever bought together, and everything that made me who I am happened inside those walls and in that neighborhood.
A Village Named for Brooklyn
Lynbrook sits in Nassau County, about fifteen miles east of New York City on Long Island’s South Shore. Its name is itself a small piece of history. In 1894, the residents, many of them recent arrivals from Brooklyn, held a vote and chose a new name for their village by simply transposing the two syllables of “Brooklyn.” Lynbrook.2 The Long Island Rail Road had linked them to their old home, and they wanted to honor it.
By the time my family arrived in 1971, Lynbrook was a classic postwar suburb: a walkable downtown, good schools, tree-lined streets, and the LIRR station that could carry you into Manhattan in under an hour.
Untapped New York describes Lynbrook as “a quintessential American town,” with charming houses, well-manicured properties, and a stately 1929 library that carries the feel of the Carnegie libraries once built across New York City.3 That library became my second home, but that’s a story I’ve already told.
The House Itself
Our childhood home in Lynbrook, NY was white clapboard, low-slung, and unpretentious. When you walked in the front door (the “real” front door, since the house actually had two), the kitchen was to your left and the living room was to your right. That living room, though, was for Company, capital C, and we did not go in there casually. Children understood this without being told twice.
Straight down the hallway was the bathroom, my parents’ bedroom to its left, and to the right a small hallway that led to the laundry room and then, at the end, my bedroom. My bedroom had red wood paneling on the walls and a trundle bed that my parents, remarkably, still own. For the first years of our time there, the house held just the two bedrooms.
The previous owners had built an addition that connected the main house to a detached one-car garage. You stepped down out of the kitchen door into this added room, which was rougher-looking than the rest of the house. You could still see the garage’s exterior shingles on the far wall. That room became our casual dining space, home to the big table where all the family dinners happened. Turn right from there, step down again, and you were in the family room: wide, comfortable, with a couch, a fireplace, and a door to the backyard.
The most creative feature of that family room was the television arrangement. The window in that room had originally been an exterior window in my parents’ bedroom. Now it was an interior window looking in from the family room. My dad mounted the television on a swivel in that window frame. When we were all together watching TV as a family, it faced into the family room. When the kids went to bed, my parents could swivel it into their bedroom. One television. Two rooms. Elegant.
As four children filled the house (my sister and two brothers arrived after me), it became clear that more space was needed. My dad converted the attic into a second floor, adding stairs up from the living room. At the top, my sister and I shared one room on the left and my brothers shared one on the right, along with a large closet that spanned the width of the house. My sister’s and my room had a door that opened to the outside, a fire escape that put you on the roof of the carport my dad had also built along the left side of the house.
The Backyard and Grandpa’s Garden
The backyard was my grandfather’s domain.
My grandfather, my dad’s father, who had grown up farming in Sweden before settling in the Brooklyn duplex I’ve written about elsewhere, drove out to see us regularly in his light-blue station wagon. He loved that we had room for a garden, so he planted one. And he planted a LOT. Corn. Tomatoes. Potatoes. Green beans. Zucchini (which I hated then, but love now!). Squash. The garden filled the side yard for years, a little piece of Swedish immigrant self-sufficiency transplanted to the South Shore of Long Island.
On the left side of the backyard, the swingset and a magnificent willow tree. We treated that willow the way only children can, hanging from the long, drooping branches, swinging, pretending we were Tarzan. It was enormous to us, or at least it felt enormous.
A white picket fence ran along one side of the yard, separating us from our neighbors next door. My best friend lived on the other side of that fence.
The “A” (IYKYK)
My neighborhood deserves its own section, because it was perfect.
The streets in our corner of Lynbrook were laid out in an unusual configuration: two streets angled toward each other and converged at one end, with a cross street connecting them in the middle. From above, the whole thing looked like the letter A. We called it “the A,” and for a child growing up in the 1970s, it was everything you could want.
It seemed like half of my classmates from Our Lady of Peace School (OLP, which I attended from kindergarten through eighth grade) lived somewhere in or near the “A.” The neighborhood was its own closed world: you could walk to anyone and know that the other kids were always nearby.
Halloweens were legendary. We stayed entirely within the “A” — there was no need to go anywhere else, because there were enough houses that the whole evening could be spent working from one end to the other. Everyone knew everyone. You knew which houses would have the good candy. (And you knew about the one lady at the top of the “A” who didn’t always participate, so you had your strategy.)
The “A” also hosted block parties. The neighbors would block off all three streets, and everyone came out: folding chairs, barbecues, kids running in the actual street because the actual street was closed and that alone felt extraordinary. Those block parties are the distilled essence of what that neighborhood was, a place where people knew each other and looked out for each other, and children moved freely in the space between the houses.
Eleven Years
I moved to Cincinnati from my childhood home in Lynbrook at twelve. But the red-paneled bedroom with the trundle bed, the TV on the swivel in the window, the willow tree, my grandfather bent over the corn rows in the side yard, the picket fence and the best friend on the other side of it, Halloween in the “A,” the block parties… those things are still in me completely.
Brooklyn was the place I inherited. Lynbrook was the place that formed me. Ohio is where that life settled. And when my parents packed us up and moved we carried a piece of that childhood home in Lynbrook, NY with us, too.
Do you have a childhood home, in Lynbrook, NY or anywhere else, that shaped who you became? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
- Thomas Sten, photograph of family home, Lynbrook, New York, February 1975; 35mm slide, privately held by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, Blue Ash, Ohio; digital scan by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, 2024. ↩︎
- Art Mattson, A Brief History of Lynbrook (Lynbrook, N.Y.: Lynbrook Historical Books, 2005). ↩︎
- “Town of Lynbrook on Long Island is an Anagram of Brooklyn,” Untapped New York (https://untappedcities.com/2020/05/05/town-of-lynbrook-on-long-island-is-an-anagram-of-brooklyn/ : accessed 22 March 2026). ↩︎
- “Lynbrook, NY 11563,” Google Maps (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lynbrook,+NY+11563/@40.6650075,-73.7737013,12z : accessed 22 March 2026). ↩︎
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