Lawrence, NY — Crash Data, Roads, History & Law

History

Rock Hall, the village's best-known landmark, began as the mansion house of Josiah Martin, a wealthy shipping merchant and Crown official who had settled in the Hempstead area about 1740 after emigrating from the Caribbean colony of Antigua.^[8] In September 1767 Martin purchased a parcel of Rockaway meadow and marshland between Broadway and Jamaica Bay and built the two-and-one-half-story, gambrel-roofed Georgian house there; the National Register nomination calls it a landmark structure for its extremely early use of Georgian architectural motifs on rural Long Island.^[8] Martin was a Loyalist, and his nephew and son-in-law of the same name later served as a royal governor before returning to Rock Hall in 1781.^[8] The Hewlett family, later owners, built the house's east wing in 1881; the Town of Hempstead restored Rock Hall to its eighteenth-century appearance in the early 1950s and maintains it as a historic house museum.^[8]

The village that grew up around Rock Hall took its name from the Lawrence family. Brothers Alfred, Newbold and George Lawrence developed what had been farmland as a summer resort, and in the 1850s began acquiring land to accommodate wealthy New York City families who summered in the country; they also built a train station at Lawrence Avenue with connecting roadways.^[1] A 1918 history of the Rockaways dates the real start of that development to about 1870, when the three brothers — named there as Newbold, Alfred N. and George N. Lawrence — bought up the neighborhood's farms and laid the section out as an exclusive residential district, cutting Lawrence Avenue through from the station to Broadway and Central Avenue toward Far Rockaway.^[21] In 1884 the Rockaway Hunt Club was established at its present site and a hotel was built nearby in an area then known as the Isle of Wight, adjacent to Reynolds Channel, touching off a boom in summer residents.^[1] The same 1918 history adds that the Isle of Wight property was developed separately by Rufus W. Leavitt, that a large hotel built there about 1885 became a fashionable summer resort for artists and writers, and that the Irish writer Oscar Wilde "spent an entire summer at the Isle of Wight Hotel" while his fame was at its height; the hotel later burned down about 1895.^[21] Within five years of the 1884 boom, the resulting demand for surfaced roadways with drainage and curbing led the community to incorporate as the Village of Lawrence on September 13, 1897.^[1][2] Many of the large homes built as summer residences still stand in the area residents call "Back Lawrence."^[1] The Village later acquired the Village Golf Course in 1938 and, in 1952, purchased Hicks Beach to preserve the wetlands adjacent to Reynolds Channel.^[1]

The Village of Lawrence is governed today by an elected Mayor and a five-member Board of Trustees, all of whom serve without compensation; the current Mayor is Samuel (Shlomo) Nahmias.^[7]

How the roads got here

Rockaway Turnpike already existed as a named road through the area by 1869: a Long Island Rail Road historian records that a Mr. William B. McManus owned a farm "located between Rockaway Turnpike and Washington Avenue, Lawrence," which the new Far Rockaway Branch right-of-way cut in two, and that McManus won an injunction against the railroad on May 30, 1869.^[18] The branch itself — built by a South Side Railroad subsidiary, the Far Rockaway Branch Rail Road Co. of Queens County — opened to the public on Thursday, July 29, 1869, bringing the future village within about forty minutes of Brooklyn.^[17] When the Village of Lawrence was first chartered in 1897, a 1918 history of the Rockaways gives its boundaries as the Long Island Railroad tracks on the north, Bannister Creek on the south, the Rockaway turnpike on the east, and the Far Rockaway village line at McNeill Avenue on the west — meaning Rockaway Turnpike originally marked the village's entire eastern edge before later boundary extensions carried the village across it.^[22]

New York State's touring-route description lists NY 878 running through Cedarhurst, Inwood, Lawrence and Atlantic Beach to the Atlantic Beach Bridge, the road commonly called the Nassau Expressway in this stretch.^[16] The bridge itself — a 1,173-foot toll drawbridge carrying NY 878 over the west end of Reynolds Channel to Atlantic Beach's Park Street — is owned and operated by the Nassau County Bridge Authority, which is headquartered in Lawrence at 160 Beach 2nd Street.^[13] The Authority's own account states the original bridge opened in 1927 and the current bridge opened in 1952 and was rebuilt in 1998.^[13] A 2011 New York State Senate resolution gives fuller detail: the first Atlantic Beach Bridge "opened and was officially dedicated on June 29, 1927," and for its replacement "a ground breaking ceremony... was held" on October 14, 1950, with a ribbon-cutting on May 10, 1952; the resolution also recalls the bridge and its approaches being designated an emergency military route during wartime.^[15]

Law and legal history

The Village Code also carries two chapters that reflect the village's position under the JFK Airport flight path and along Reynolds Channel and Jamaica Bay: Chapter 119, "Helicopters," and Chapter 154, "Seaplanes."^[20]

Rock Hall's own federal designation history doubles as a piece of the village's institutional record: the Town of Hempstead is listed as owner of the property in the 1976 National Register nomination, with the Nassau County Courthouse in Mineola named as the location of the property's legal description — evidence of the county-level recording system under which village and hamlet real property in this part of Nassau County is registered.^[9]

Lawrence's boundaries were unsettled well into the twentieth century and were once caught up directly in New York City's own consolidation. A 1918 history of the Rockaways records that the village, chartered by the Town of Hempstead in 1897 with boundaries running to the Rockaway turnpike on the east, was partly swallowed the following year when the Greater New York City charter took effect in January 1898 and placed Inwood and part of Lawrence inside the new Fifth Ward of the Borough of Queens; the state legislature's "Doughty bill," passed later in 1898, then took that territory back out of New York City and restored it to the Town of Hempstead, after which Lawrence re-extended its boundaries.^[22]

Sources differ on Rock Hall's construction date and builder. The 1976 National Register nomination states the house was built about 1767 by an elder Josiah Martin, a merchant and Crown official, and separately notes that his nephew and son-in-law of the same name — the man who actually served as the last royal governor of North Carolina — returned to Rock Hall in 1781, after the Revolution.^[8] A 1918 history of the Rockaways instead states the house was built in 1768 and identifies the builder outright as "Josiah Martin, the British ex-Governor of the Province of North Carolina," dating his purchase of 400 acres from John Cornell to September 21, 1767, naming the architect as Timothy Clowes of Jamaica, and recording his death at Rock Hall on November 21, 1778.^[23]

Government, courts and policing

The Lawrence Village Justice Court, under Village Justice Gary J. Mandel and Associate Village Justice Trudy Stern, sits in Village Hall at 196 Central Avenue and adjudicates tickets issued in the village by the Nassau County Police Department for state Vehicle and Traffic Law violations, plus summonses for violations of the Village Code; the court is in session Tuesday evenings at 6:30 p.m.^[9] The Nassau County Police Department's Fourth Precinct, headquartered at 1699 Broadway in Hewlett, patrols Lawrence along with the rest of the Five Towns and neighboring communities; its own description lists Rock Hall Museum, the Rockaway Hunt Club and the Lawrence Country Club among the "Places of Interest" in its coverage area.^[11][12]

The Village is governed by an elected Mayor and a five-member Board of Trustees who set policy and manage all village property and finances; board and commission members, including the Mayor, serve without compensation.^[7]

Railroad and transit

The Far Rockaway Branch, built by a South Side Railroad subsidiary, opened to the public on July 29, 1869, and the Lawrence brothers who developed the village had already built a train station at Lawrence Avenue with connecting roadways as part of their 1850s development of the area.^[1][17]