Plainview, NY real estate market

Plainview sits in the Town of Oyster Bay, out in east central Nassau County near the Suffolk line. The name itself has a plain explanation. Back in 1885 residents of what was then called Manetto Hill asked the Postal Service for their own post office and got turned down because a similar name was already taken upstate. So they picked Plainview instead, named for the view of the Hempstead Plains from the top of the Manetto Hills. Before that the land traced back to 1648, when a Welsh settler named Robert Williams bought property near a small pond the local Native Americans called the Moscopas, meaning hole of dirt and water. Thomas Powell picked up the rest of the surrounding land in 1695 as part of the larger Bethpage Purchase.

This was farm country for a long stretch. The Long Island Rail Road reached nearby Hicksville in 1837 and gave local farming a lift. Plainview itself became known for cucumbers, which fed the Heinz pickle factories in Farmingdale and Hicksville, until blight took the crop in the early 1900s and growers switched to potatoes. Another blight after World War II, combined with returning GIs wanting out of the city, pushed farmers to sell. That is when the place changed shape fast. In 1950 the hamlet had 1,155 people. By 1960 it was over 35,000. Nearly all the buildable land got used up in that single decade, either developed or set aside as parkland, which is why so much of the housing stock here reads as one long postwar building boom rather than a patchwork of eras.