Vanderbilt: Coastal Playland

On Thursday, May 18th, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum will host Kara Murphy Schlichting, a noted historian of New York City’s environmental history, for an evening lecture on the history of the Long Island Sound as a place for urban recreation and leisure.

Schlichting’s lecture will draw heavily from her 2019 book New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago). In New York Recentered, Schlichting turns dominant narratives about New York City’s urban expansion on their head, focusing not on Robert Moses and grand scheme planning but on the lesser-known local businesses, developers, and government officials whose efforts profoundly shaped coastal communities throughout the metropolitan region. She will explore how, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere” came to be dominated by public parks, beaches, and resorts for an emergent middle-class. It is a fascinating story that covers the rise of the Long Island State Parks Commission and the dissolution of the Gold Coast’s more dramatic estates.

The lecture will take place at 7:00pm in the Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium. Tickets are available online at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s website. Support for the lecture series is generously provided by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.

Kara Murphy Schlichting is an Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University. Her work in late-19th and 20th-century American History sits at the intersection of urban, environmental, and political history, with a particular focus on property regimes and regional planning in greater New York City.

Schlichting has published in the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of Planning History. Her book ­New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore was published in 2019 with the University of Chicago Press’s History of Urban America Series. She is a co-editor of the H-Environment Roundtable Reviews.

Address: 180 Little Neck Rd., Centerport, NY 11721

Date & Time: Thursday, May 18th (05/18/2023) at 7:00pm

Website & Tickets: www.vanderbiltmuseum.org/featured-events/

Press Inquiries: Patrick Keefe, Director of Communications, patrick@vanderbiltmuseum.org