Fire Island
Other versions say the island derived its name from fires built on the sea's edge by Native Americans or by pirates to lure unsuspecting ships into the sandbars.
Another version says that coastal guards, looking out for ships during WW2, lit fires as a signal when they ran out of supplies so that they could get more delivered from the mainland.
The western groups spoke the Delaware-Munsee dialect of Algonquian and shared cultural characteristics such as the longhouse system of social organization with their brethren in what is now New Jersey and Delaware.
The linguistic affiliation of the eastern groups is less well understood [...] Goddard [...] concluded that the languages here are related to the southern New England Algonquian dialects, but he could only speculate on the nature of these relationships [...].
The information on the Shinnecock was too sparse for any determination [...] The most common pattern of indigenous life on Long Island prior to the intervention of the whites was the autonomous village linked by kinship to its neighbors.
"[9] "Most of the 'tribal' names with which we are now familiar do not appear to have been recognized by either the first European observers or by the original inhabitants until the process of land purchases began after the first settlements were established.
We simply do not know what these people called themselves, but all the ethnographic data on North American Indian cultures suggest that they identified themselves in terms of lineage and clan membership.
Deeds, according to the European concept of property, had to be signed by identifiable owners with authority to sell and have specific boundaries on a map.
The relatively amorphous leadership structure of the Long Island communities, the imprecise delineation of hunting ground boundaries, and their view of the land as a living entity to be used rather than owned made conventional European real estate deals nearly impossible to negotiate.
The surviving primary records suggest that the Dutch and English remedied this situation by pressing cooperative local sachems to establish a more structured political base in their communities and to define their communities as "tribes" with specific boundaries [...] The Montauk, under the leadership of Wyandanch in the mid-seventeenth century, and the Matinnecock, under the sachems Suscaneman and Tackapousha, do appear to have developed rather tenuous coalitions as a result of their contact with the English settlers.
"[9] "An early example of [European] intervention into Native American political institutions is a 1664 agreement wherein the East Hampton and Southampton officials appointed a sunk squaw named Quashawam to govern both the Shinnecock and the Montauk.
"[9] When New York's artistic bohème began frequenting Fire Island during the Jazz Age, Ocean Beach became the locale's first gay village.
[17] Tensions between the gay (often famous) tourists and locals peaked when Antoine de Paris built an outhouse, complete with a revealing saloon door, on his land across the street from a Catholic church.
[17] After the Great Hurricane of 1938 devastated the island, the middle class moved to Saltaire, while the gay community settled in Cherry Grove.
[18] Both Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines were established gay enclaves by the 1950s, connected by a notorious cruising area nicknamed the Meat Rack.
The program involved dredging sand from an offshore borrow area, pumping it onto the beach, and shaping the sand into an approved beach face and dune template in front of the communities of Corneille Estates, Davis Park, Dunewood, Fair Harbor, Fire Island Pines, Fire Island Summer Club, Lonelyville, Ocean Bay Park, Ocean Beach, Saltaire, and Seaview.
Fire Islanders agreed to a significant property tax increase to help pay for the project, which was estimated to cost between $23 and $25 million ($6,020 per housing unit), including the cost of environmental monitoring, and was expected to add 1,400,000 cubic meters (1,800,000 cubic yards) of sand in front of the participating communities.
[22] Officials have been debating whether to close the breach and let nature take its course, as it has been flushing out the Great South Bay and improving water quality.
[1] In 1834, Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, a Swiss-American surveyor, measured at Fire Island the first baseline of the Survey of the Coast, shortly before Louis Puissant declared to the French Academy of Sciences in 1836 that Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre Méchain had made errors in the meridian arc measurement, which had been used to determine the length of the metre.
Robert Moses State Park, occupying the remaining western portion of the island, is one of the popular recreational destinations in the New York City area.
A memorial to TWA 800, dedicated in June 2002, is on the eastern end, at Smith Point County Park, near where the airplane crashed at sea.
[38] Fire Island's unique location and constantly changing geography play a major role in the protection of its citizens.
Until 1986, there was no ambulance service on Fire Island,[47] prompting the village of Saltaire to form its rescue company, later followed by Ocean Beach, and then in the 2000s with Fair Harbor.
[48] Some coastal fire departments on Long Island have fully equipped marine rescue and fireboat units which can cross the Great South Bay to provide necessary assistance.
In many cases, Long Island based ambulances will meet the boats once they cross the Bay (roughly 4.5 miles) and then drive individuals the short distance to one of the three hospitals.
[citation needed] Small claims and property matters are usually handled by the individual village of case origin.
[citation needed] It is common practice for police to write tickets then send unruly visitors off the island via water taxi, at the offender's expense.
