New York

23 places with something worth saying about them.

• 1955 MacArthur Airport United Air Lines crash A crew practicing an engine failure pushed the throttle forward to save themselves, and it drove the plane into the ground.
• Amityville, New York Amityville got its name because a town meeting fell apart into shouting, and somebody yelled that what the room needed was some amity.
• Babylon (village), New York A Bible-reading grandmother named this village after the most sinful city she could think of.
• Beekman, New York When an iron mine near Sylvan Lake was flooded, the crews left their tools and machinery on the bottom, and it is all still down there.
• Brookhaven National Laboratory One of the world's first video games was built at a nuclear physics lab on Long Island in 1958.
• Brookhaven, New York One of the first video games ever made was designed at a nuclear research lab on Long Island.
• Bykenhulle To get into the old chicken coop, you tip a carved wooden liquor bottle into a shot glass and a peephole opens.
• Chadwick Lake A lake became a town's water supply by about a hundred votes, after neighbors argued that piped water would end the countryside.
• Fishkill Creek The kill in Fishkill has nothing to do with killing fish. It is just Dutch for creek.
• Forest Park Carousel The carousel in Forest Park is older than the one it replaced.
• Islip Speedway The demolition derby was invented here, by a track promoter who noticed the crowd liked the crashes more than the racing.
• Jones Beach State Park The most visited beach on the East Coast is standing on sand that engineers pumped up from the bottom of a bay.
• Kent, New York The largest indoor Buddha statue in the Western Hemisphere sits in a town of about thirteen thousand people in New York's Hudson Valley.
• Long Island Central Pine Barrens In 1978, RCA handed over seventy-two hundred acres of Long Island wilderness for one dollar.
• Moodna Creek At Salisbury Mills, the longest railroad trestle east of the Mississippi crosses this creek nearly two hundred feet overhead.
• Newburgh (town), New York An Ice Age boulder that county officials twice promised to protect was jackhammered into rubble one June morning, and nobody had been told.
• Ponquogue Bridge The bridge that used to cross Shinnecock Bay is still there, sitting under the new one as a fishing pier.
• Quogue Historic District The widest street in Quogue was laid out that way because cattle were driven down it every spring.
• Rockville Centre train crash Two trains ran head-on into each other because construction had squeezed both directions onto a single shared rail bed.
• Swan River (New York) A stream barely fifteen feet wide holds one of only about six wild brook trout populations left on Long Island.
• The Watermill Center A Western Union telecommunications lab on Long Island was gutted and turned into a theater laboratory where Lady Gaga once hung on the walls.
• Van Wyck Homestead Museum Under the highway ramps and a shopping mall parking lot lies the largest identified burial ground of American Revolutionary War soldiers in the country.
• Washington's Headquarters State Historic Site The medal that became the Purple Heart was handed out to its first three recipients on this front lawn.