A History of Westbury, Long Island

The Long Island community of Westbury was once a small-town farming neighborhood. While some towns in Brooklyn and Queens mushroomed into urban giants, the population of peaceful Westbury hovered below five hundred. Then the Wall Street tycoons arrived? and everything changed. In A History of Westbury, author Richard Panchyk narrates the dramatic transformation of this once-agricultural hamlet, founded in 1670 by Quakers. Little more than a country town until the first 2 decades of the twentieth century, Westbury changed overnight as titans of industry and finance embarked on a frenzied pace of building and development?mansions, resorts, even a racetrack and an airport?catapulting the community into modern times. Westbury was the site of one of the country's first auto races, the 1904 Vanderbilt Cup. Let Panchyk whisk you through the region's occasionally contentious, frequently dramatic and always entertaining growth and development in A History of Westbury.