page_title: Freeport, New York
section_title: 1940–present: recent history
hierarchical_section_title: Freeport, New York / History / 1940–present: recent history
caption_attribution_description: Postcard of the Sigmond Opera House, Freeport, Long Island, New York, c. 1913. The theater, on the west side of South Main Street in Freeport, was built by real estate developer Charles Sigmond. It first featured vaudeville shows and later movies. In this film, The Gambler of the West was the current feature. According to the 1912 phone book, it stood at 70 South Main. This was later the address of the American Theater (probably the same building), which burned in January 1924.
context_page_description: Freeport is a village in the town of Hempstead, Nassau County, New York, US, on the South Shore of Long Island. The population was 43,713 at the 2010 census. A settlement since the 1640s, it was once an oystering community and later a resort popular with the New York City theater community. It is now primarily a bedroom suburb but retains a modest commercial waterfront and some light industry. It is serviced by the Freeport station on the Long Island Rail Road.
context_section_description: By 1937, Freeport's population exceeded 20,000, and it was the largest village in Nassau County. After World War II the village became a bedroom community for New York City. The separation between the two eras was marked by a fire that destroyed the Shorecrest Hotel (originally the Crystal Lake Hotel) on January 14, 1958. During the 1950s local merchants resisted building any shopping malls in the village and subsequently suffered a great loss of business when large malls were built in communities in the central part of Long Island.
  The landscape of Freeport underwent further change with a significant increase in apartment building construction. When such buildings went up in just two years in the early 1960s, the Village passed a moratorium on multi-unit residential construction.
  While never a major boatbuilding center, Freeport can boast some notable figures in that field. Fred and Mirto Scopinich operated their boatyard in Freeport from just after World War I until they moved it to East Quogue in the late 1960s. Their Freeport Point Shipyard built boats for the United States Coast Guard, but also for Prohibition-era rumrunners. From 1937 to 1945 the shipyard built small boats for the United States Navy and British Royal Navy. The marina and dealership operated by Al Grover in 1950 remains in Freeport and in his family. Grover's company built fishing skiffs from the 1970s until about 1990. One of these, a 26-footer, carried Grover and his sons from Nova Scotia to Portugal in 1985, the first-ever crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by a boat powered by an outboard motor. Columbian Bronze operated in Freeport from its 1901 founding until it closed shop in 1988. Among this company's achievements was the propeller for the USS Nautilus, an operational nuclear-powered submarine and the first vessel to complete a submerged transit across the North Pole.
caption: The Sigmond Opera House (shown here c. 1913), originally a vaudeville theater and later a cinema, stood at 70 South Main Street. It burned on January 31, 1924.[27]
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