Island View: Wherefore Art Thou, Wagon Park?
Volume 49, Issue 9
By David Crohn

“Geez, look at all these wagons. I’ve never seen so many red wagons! They’re everywhere!”–a drunken voice overheard at the Ocean Beach ferry terminal, Wednesday, August 3, 2005.

My search begins here, between the ferry terminal and the tennis courts—as appropriate an entry point as anywhere in Ocean Beach. In the spirit of preparing for the future by honoring the past, of closing the circle again before leaving at the end of the summer, I’m looking for an emblem of my ancestral link to this place.

Where is the sign that read, “The George Crohn Sr. Wagon Park”?

I’m a reporter. It’s my job to dig things up. The wonderful thing about this story is that familial and contractual obligations have aligned. Like Hunter S. Thompson once wrote about covering a convention of law enforcement officials, “…a gig like this [feels] perfectly logical. Considering the circumstances, I [feel] totally meshed with my karma.”

The sign is a handmade piece of my family’s Fire Island history, but now the only place where I can find it is in two pictures, both from tattered old copies of The Fire Island News.

In the June, 1976 photograph, George, my patriarchal granddad—Pop, we called him—poses by the new sign at a dedication ceremony with Mayor Arthur Silsdorf and my dad, Frank, and uncle, George, Jr. The brothers had given a few thousand dollars to the village in honor of Pop’s May 1 birthday, resulting in a little known but epoch-defining makeover. The space went from being a loose conglomeration, the place where people locked up their wagons, to a village landmark, complete with wooden posts and a few pieces of shrubbery to beautify the place.

With that money the park became a park.

But about three years ago the sign disappeared. The village replaced the wooden posts with metal ones, and everything was rebuilt south of where the tennis courts begin.

Where one of the signs that now read “BASKETBALL COURTS CLOSE AT 10 PM,” is near where the sign once hung.

Born in 1896, Pop first came out here in 1948 to enjoy his early retirement from the textile business. He and his second wife, Billie, quickly set up shop on Evergreen Walk, where their modest house became a favorite and open destination in the burgeoning Ocean Beach party scene.

Said my dad, “It was always cocktail hour for my father.”

Indeed. Old timers I’ve spoken with, including Maria, Mayor Silsdorf’s widow, and Wally Pickard, can’t remember much about Pop—but they do remember drinking with him. His parties in pre-” Land of No”- era Ocean Beach were legendary, replete with scotch, screwdrivers and betting on the races.

But besides his playboy persona, Pop was known for being active in the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter. He served in World War I in the Signal Corps, and every year on Memorial Day he would get dressed up and march with Ocean Beach’s other veterans. This summer I covered that event for The News, and couldn’t help imagining him up on the village green, saluting the flag with the others.

And the park: the red wagon is an icon of Fire Island, and while other communities have public wagon storage (Seaview and Saltaire are two that quickly come to mind), none are as big and eye-catching as Ocean Beach’s. And none have ever been named after anyone.

“You know, George, you and Bill Shea are the only people I know who have public property named after them,” Bert Harnett, a family friend and a former district attorney of Nassau County, once said to my grandfather.

In the second photo I have of the park, from the July 7, 1984 edition of The News, there’s a different sign, with the same words but with fancier lettering. I know through my research that the caption, reading, “New to Ocean Beach this year is the George Crohn, Sr. Wagon Park…” is wrong. The park wasn’t new, of course, but the tennis courts were. The second sign, as best as I can surmise, went up either with the tennis courts, or a few years earlier, after the original, plainer one, blew away in a storm.

The newest is also missing, and here is where the trail runs cold. I’ve spoken with various village officials, including the mayor, the village administrator and Joe Speranza, head of a recently formed body charged with keeping track of memorial plaques and signs. While all have been very helpful and sympathetic to my cause, no one knows anything—there’s simply no record of the sign, except in the newspaper and the scattered memories of the residents.

As Sallie Potterton, a long-time year rounder who serves on the Ocean Beach environmental committee, said, “It’s just one of those things you remember seeing all the time, and then it’s gone and you don’t even realize it.”

And Mike Kahler, a family friend who has been the sign’s unofficial caretaker, hasn’t gotten back to me after numerous attempts at getting in touch with him.

So that, as they say, is that—for now.