Long Island
The easternmost part of the state of New York, Long Island stretches for more than a hundred miles from the East River, just off Manhattan, to Montauk Point. The Island's westernmost end is taken up by three of New York City's five boroughs -- Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The two counties that comprise the rest of Long Island -- Nassau County and Suffolk County -- have over the past hundred years changed from largely rural areas to very extended and built-up suburbs of New York City. Only at the furthest eastern end of the island, on the North and South Forks, does the rural environment persist.
An extended history of Long Island is beyond the scope of the Concordance, but an excellent overview can be found at Long Island: Our History, a site hosted by the major Long Island newspaper, Newsday (which, from descriptions in the YW books, is probably the paper that Kit's father works for as a pressman).
Nita and Kit live in the southern part of Nassau County, near the South Shore town of Freeport. Though the name of their town is given in SYWTBAW and other sources as Hempstead, its Zip code (11575) more closely matches that of Roosevelt (which is an unincorporated village or "hamlet" in the Town of Hempstead, so the description is still in some ways accurate). (SYWTBAW et al)