Long Island New York

So one of the island's five million residents recently told me. Yet this slim stretch of land under the very nose of the country's greatest metropolis is one of the fastest-growing regions of the United States. In the last few years the population of its so-called rural counties has increased more rapidly than New York City's or the Nation's as a whole.

Here on Long Island multiple housing developments mushroom. Along with them sprout streamlined factories and modern shopping centers, transport and recreational facilities. Much of the activity burgeons where it seems only yesterday myriad acres of potatoes grew.

Between Long Island and New York's towers, hundreds of trainloads of white-collar commuters daily ebb and flow. Increasing thousands call the island home, and many now earn a living in its hundreds of new industries.

Not quite as flat as a flounder, Long Island on a map resembles a big fish nosing into New York Bay. Its forked tail reaches 120 miles out to sea; its highest hill rises only 410 feet above the surrounding waters. Long Island Sound washes the north shore and separates it from Connecticut's coast. Against the south shore swell the restless tides of the Atlantic.

Although smaller than Delaware, Long Island has about 16 times as many people as that State. Of the island's four counties, urban Kings and Queens in the west belong to New York City; to the east lie Nassau and Suffolk, with numerous little towns and splendid estates, together with fishing villages, truck farms, growing suburbs, and expanding industries.

Fifteen hundred miles of boulevards, high-ways, and State parkways cover the island. Operating over 420 miles of lines, the Long Island Rail Road reaches most major points, runs 631 trains daily, and hauls about 92 million passengers a year, thus making it the leading carrier of suburbanites in the United States.

In addition to subway, elevated, trolley, and bus systems, six major airports serve both the island and the New York metropolitan area.

To reach Long Island from Manhattan by automobile, I could have used any of six bridges over the East River or two tunnels which plunge beneath it. The newest - shiny-tiled Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel - opened to traffic in late May of last year.

I chose the Triborough Bridge, swung onto Grand Central Parkway, and breezed eastward through Queens into Nassau County.

From the congested west end, four-lane parkways stream out like broad ribbons in the wind. Each year they carry more traffic farther eastward as new home and business construction pushes ahead. Cross-island highways link the axial arteries.

Engineers planning these modern highways sometimes turn back a century or two to Indian trails; red men made more topographical sense than their first white successors in laying out lines of communication…"