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MANHASSET — If you’ve
driven north on Community
Drive toward North Shore
University Hospital, as many
North Shore-LIJ Health System
employees have, on your left
you may have spotted a tiny
white clapboard church. In the
crush of fast-moving traffic, you
may have caught a glimpse of a
graveyard behind the church.
Surrounded by modern medical
facilities, they are clearly relics
of another time and place. That
time was the first half of the
20th century, and the place was
the vibrant African-American
community called Spinney
Hill that once spread over
several acres of Great Neck and
Manhasset.
Dedrick Johnson,
coordinator of medical
records at North Shore
University Hospital, grew
up in Spinney Hill, or more
accurately, what remained of
Spinney Hill, in the seventies
and eighties. (He still lives
in the neighborhood, and
can walk to work.) A sense of
nostalgia, along with an urge
to tell the story before it is lost
in the past, led Mr. Johnson
and his boyhood friend,
Lloyd Means, now a software
engineer with Cablevision,
to make a documentary about
Spinney Hill.
Sunday services are still
conducted at the Lakeville
AME Zion Church on
Community Drive, which
was founded by freed slaves
in the 1820s. But the African
American-owned businesses
that once lined Northern
Boulevard are gone. “There
was a barber shop, a beauty
salon, a nightclub called
Gibson’s, Hotel James,” said
Mr. Johnson. “On what is now
the golf course, black farmers
grew asparagus. The hospital
94 Summer 2012
grounds were all fields, too, of
potatoes, probably, and corn.”
Spinney Hill’s settlers
were part of what is called the
Great Migration of African-
Americans, mostly from
the tobacco fields of South
Carolina, from about 1910 to
1930. New York City’s rich
and famous – the Astors, the
Vanderbilts – were building
lavish mansions along Long
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Island’s Gold Coast, and
the new residents took jobs
as cooks, yard men, maids,
housekeepers, chauffeurs.
Many became entrepreneurs.
If they didn’t live on the grand
estates, their homes were in
Spinney Hill. In the fifties,
legendary pro football player
Jim Brown, who lived on
Lee Avenue in Spinney Hill,
graduated from Manhasset
High School, having earned 17
letters in a variety of sports. In
the sixties, Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., visited synagogues in
Great Neck to raise money for
the cause of civil rights.
Mr. Johnson and his friend
enjoyed what he describes as a
“Norman Rockwell childhood,”
building forts in the woods
and skating on Whitney Pond.
But the post-war Baby Boom
and the suburbanization of
Long Island were eating away
at Spinney Hill. The final
blow was an urban renewal
project in the mid-1980s, with
medical and office buildings
replacing most of the original
establishments.
For Mssrs. Johnson and
Means, the work is ongoing.
They are still collecting
photographs and interviewing
former residents about their
memories — and they are
making another film. “Two
men we interviewed for the
first film, William Singletary
and Joe Oliphant, who both
sang at Hotel James, died
before the film was finished,”
Mr. Johnson said. “We regret
that they didn’t live to see it.
We want the old-timers to
know that Spinney Hill and
they are not forgotten.”
Left: Dedrick Johnson stands outside
the tiny church, founded in the
1820s by freed slaves.