what about the plastic animals?

Tesla's Wardenclyffe Laboratory

Around the turn of the last century Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current electricity transmission and father of radio, built a laboratory on the Wardenclyffe estate in Shoreham, NY, just a few miles from the Wading River beach.  The lab was designed by Stanford White and largely paid for by J. P. Morgan as a radio transmission facility.  Secretly though, Tesla was working on a method to wirelessly transmit electricity around the world.  This gets to be a complicated story so I'm going to skip the details and say that Tesla ran out of money and was forced to abandon his project and sell the facility.  Behind the building was a 187-foot high transmitting tower.  The tower was torn down in 1917 for fear that the Germans might use it to send signals back across the Atlantic. 

The building changed hands over the years and currently Agfa, the photographic film company, is trying to sell it.  A non-profit group would like to purchase the site and turn it into the Tesla science center.  Agfa won't lower their price because the company wants to cut their losses after spending millions cleaning the land of toxic chemicals.  Thus, the building sits in real estate purgatory today.

Wading River

Back to Long Island.  If the ocean isn't your thing it is only a half-hour drive to the north shore and Long Island Sound.  We didn't go to Wading River in Wildwood State Park nearly as often as we went to Smith Point.  The north shore beaches are rocky, and full of interesting things to find, but the water is much calmer.  The beach is also just a couple miles away from something very interesting.

I don't know if anyone pays attention to the "recent comments" link over to the right, so I'll bring your attention to the odd recent activity on this post.  Except for Dane's comment back in 2008, all the other comments are from a single person in the UK having a conversation with himself (despite the different names all the comments originated from the same computer).  The comments aren't link spam so I haven't yet blocked them.  It is only a matter of time though...

To the Ocean, To the Sea

I recently realized that it had been a while since I had been out of the city on the weekend.  Christmas weekend to be exact.  Something had to be done so on Saturday I drove east to Smith Point County Park.  We always went here when I was a kid.  This was my first time back since 1972.  Not much had changed since then.  Lots of water, salt, sand and wind.  The combination made for a good workout while walking up and down the beach.