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

History

Late in 1850, Josiah Warren, a 53-year-old "philosophical anarchist," and Stephen Pearl Andrews, a 37-year-old polymath and real-estate attorney, took the Long Island Rail Road to Thompson's Station -- a whistle stop the Long Island Press locates at what are now Fifth Avenue and Suffolk Avenue -- to inspect Pine Barrens land in the Town of Islip owned by a Dr. Edward Fenn Peck of Smithtown.^[1] They bought a 90-acre tract and founded a colony they named Modern Times, built on Warren's theory of individual sovereignty and inspired in part by Robert Owen's New Harmony experiment and Charles Fourier's cooperative-community theories.^[1]

The settlement, which the Long Island Press reports housed "at most 150 residents" who called themselves "sovereigns," ran on Warren's system of labor-note currency rather than money, hosted Suffolk County's first brass band, and became, through resident Henry Edger's correspondence with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, an American center of the philosophy known as positivism.^[1] Visiting in the summer of 1857 -- the year the community's octagonal schoolhouse was built and the colony reached its height, shortly before that year's financial panic -- the traveling clergyman Moncure Daniel Conway wrote that at Modern Times "marriage was abolished, and families arranged themselves according to the law of attraction," and that "free love" was "placed in the same category with all other freedoms."^[1]

On September 7, 1864, during the Civil War, the community's leaders voted to rename the village Brentwood, after Brentwood, Essex, a London suburb. According to the Long Island Press's account of historian Roger Wunderlich's research, the name change did not reflect sentimental attachment to the English town so much as a wish to honor longtime resident Henry Edger and his wife, Milliscent Hobson, who had married there before emigrating, for "their ten years of civic service to the village."^[1] The former schoolhouse continued in educational use, first for Modern Times and then Brentwood, until 1906, and the Long Island Press reports it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[1]

Decades later, in 1931, the community became home to Pilgrim State Hospital, a state psychiatric institution the New York State Office of Mental Health describes as having been "the largest facility of its kind in the world when it was built," opening on 825 acres with 100 patients and peaking at 13,875 patients in 1954.^[6] The hospital, later renamed Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, absorbed the Town of Smithtown's Kings Park Psychiatric Center and the Central Islip Psychiatric Center when both were consolidated onto its campus in the fall of 1996 and merged into it under one name the following fall; it remains an active state facility at 998 Crooked Hill Road, West Brentwood.^[6]

How the roads got here

The Long Island Expressway forms Brentwood's northern edge; New York State's own bridge-inventory documentation records that "Washington Avenue: crosses I 495 in the Town of Islip, hamlet of Brentwood," confirming the LIE's route through the hamlet as a state highway (I-495).^[8] The Sagtikos State Parkway, carried in the state's official touring-route inventory under the reference designation NY 908K, is administered by the state's Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation rather than the Department of Transportation, reflecting its origin and continued classification as a parkway.^[8]

Law and legal history

Modern Times was, by design, a community without formal law enforcement or courts: the Long Island Press's account of the colony states plainly that "[t]here was no jail, no police, no judge and no money," and quotes Conway's 1857 observation that residents "parted without giving any trouble to the courts of common pleas" because the community rejected the state's authority "either to unite or separate" couples.^[1] That experiment ended with the 1864 renaming to Brentwood, and the hamlet has been governed since as an ordinary unincorporated part of the Town of Islip, subject to New York and Suffolk County law like its neighbors.^[1]

Because Brentwood is an unincorporated hamlet of the Town of Islip, it is also subject to the Town's own local laws, including its zoning code. In Town of Islip v. Caviglia, a case that arose from the Town's regulation of adult businesses townwide, the New York Court of Appeals upheld (5-2, with two dissents) a Town of Islip zoning ordinance confining "adult" bookstores, theaters and similar uses to Industrial I districts and phasing out nonconforming uses through amortization, holding "that a municipality may, under the circumstances presented, restrict adult business uses to certain areas of the community without violating the State Constitution."^[10] The Town's ordinance traced to a 1970s planning study of the effects of adult businesses in the Town's several hamlet downtowns, including Brentwood's.^[10]

Suits alleging a road or sidewalk defect in Brentwood are governed by the Town of Islip's prior-written-notice law. Chapter 47A of the Code of the Town of Islip, adopted by the Town Board on June 8, 1972, provides in § 47A-3, "Liability of Town" (added October 3, 1978), that no civil action for injury caused by a defective, unsafe or obstructed highway, street, sidewalk, or similar Town-owned property may be maintained against the Town of Islip "unless written notice of such... condition... was actually given to the Town Clerk or Commissioner of Public Works" and the Town failed to act on it within a reasonable time.^[5]

Government, courts and policing

The Suffolk County Police Department's Third Precinct, headquartered at 1630 5th Ave, Bay Shore, NY 11706, serves "Bay Shore, Baywood, Brentwood, Brightwaters, Islip, Central Islip, East Islip, West Islip, and Islip Terrace," according to the precinct's own description of its coverage area.^[3][4]

As an unincorporated hamlet, Brentwood is subject to the Town of Islip's own local laws -- including the Town's prior-written-notice ordinance (Code of the Town of Islip § 47A-3) and its zoning code, upheld townwide in Town of Islip v. Caviglia -- rather than a village-level code of its own.^[5][10]