Local city information for Bethpage, NY

Bethpage is a hamlet and a census-designated place located within the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York, USA. The population was 16,543 at the 2000 United States Census.

The hamlet is served by its own school district, the boundaries of which include parts of some surrounding hamlets including Old Bethpage and Plainedge. The Zip Code for most of the hamlet is 11714 except for the most northeastern portion which lies in the Old Bethpage postal district of 11804.
The Town of Hempstead, on its website, includes a small part of Bethpage that is in the Levittown census-designated place.


The name Bethpage comes from the Quakers, who named the area after the Biblical town Bethphage, which was between Jericho and Jerusalem in the Holy Land. The area was defined by the Bethpage Purchase in 1695.
An early name for the northern section of present-day Bethpage was Bedelltown.

On maps just before the arrival of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), the name Bethpage appears for a community now included in both the post office district and school district of the adjacent community of Farmingdale.
In 1841, train service began to Farmingdale station, near a new settlement less than a mile eastward from what had previously appeared on maps as Bethpage. Schedules at that time do not mention Bethpage as a stop, but have a notation "late Bethpage".
On an 1855 map, the location identified as Bethpage has shifted slightly westward to include a nearby area now called Plainedge.

From at least 1854, the LIRR stopped within present-day Bethpage at a station then called Jerusalem Station, and on January 29, 1857 a local post office opened, also named Jerusalem Station.
LIRR schedules listed the station also as simply Jerusalem.
Residents succeeded in changing the name of the post office to Central Park, effective March 1, 1867 (respelled as Centralpark from 1895 to 1899).
The Central Park Fire Company was organized in April 1910, and incorporated in May 1911. In May 1923 the Central Park Water District was created.

Following the 1932 opening of nearby Bethpage State Park, the name of the local post office was changed to Bethpage on October 1, 1936. The name Bethpage was, however, already in use by an adjacent community, which resisted suggestions of a merger and instead renamed itself Old Bethpage. The change from Central Park to Bethpage was one of the last complete name changes of Nassau County's post offices.

From 1936 until 1994, Bethpage was home to the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, which made, among other things, the F-14 Tomcat and the Apollo Lunar Module for moon landings, and for this reason Bethpage is mentioned in the film Apollo 13. Cablevision Systems Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, is headquartered in Grumman's former main office.

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