Oyster Bay is getting a look at itself as it stood a hundred years ago. On Saturday, November 7 at 1 p.m., Town Historian John Hammond presents Oyster Bay: As It Was A Century Ago, a slide show and discussion at the Community Center on Church Street in Oyster Bay, built from vintage photographs in his personal collection. Many of the images have never been shown publicly.

The afternoon was originally set for late September and was pushed back by bad weather. The Town of Oyster Bay announced the new date in October, and admission is free, with registration available through the town's online portal.

What the photographs show

The presentation works through a single year in the hamlet's past, and the town's announcement lays out the territory: notable Roosevelt homes, the house where Typhoid Mary worked, the old mill, the firehouses, and the Vanderbilt Cup races that once ran over Nassau County's roads. The slides also show the Oyster Bay School as it looked then, the Oyster Bay Free Library in its earliest days, and a run of old businesses that once lined the hamlet's streets.

Oyster Bay is one of the oldest communities on Long Island, and the hamlet's history runs through some of the bigger stories of early twentieth century America. Theodore Roosevelt ran the country from Sagamore Hill in the summers of his presidency, and the cook later known as Typhoid Mary was first traced through an outbreak in an Oyster Bay summer house. Hammond's presentation puts the everyday version of that era on screen: the streets, the storefronts and the people, rather than the headlines.

A question and answer session follows

Hammond, the town's official historian, is scheduled to take questions after the slide show, and the format is built for the kind of back and forth a local history crowd brings: which buildings survive, what stood where a parking lot is now, and who ran the shops in the pictures.

How to go

Oyster Bay: As It Was A Century Ago runs Saturday, November 7 at 1 p.m. at the Community Center on Church Street in Oyster Bay. Admission is free. Registration is available at oysterbaytown.com/portal, and more information is available from the town at (516) 624-6380.

Sources