There is a certain ability held by all in the New York metropolitan area to wholeheartedly love things which are objectively garbage. There might not be any alternative; to simply make a clear-eyed pro and con list of what it's like to live in New York City, North Jersey, and Long Island would be depressing and could only lead to mass evacuation of the area. That joyous ignorance was in full effect when Billy Joel, the most Long Island of Long Islanders, opened up the newly redesigned Nassau Coliseum to a sold-out crowd of about 16,000.The old Nassau Coliseum—now technically the NYCB Live Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum—was one of these objectively garbage things. Having opened in 1972 and remained basically unchanged until it closed in 2015, the Coliseum lies in Uniondale, between a smoke-spewing power plant and a section of Hofstra University, only a dozen miles from Queens and Brooklyn but in another world. It was a brutalist cement hockey puck, as flat and overcrowded as the land on which it sat.Nobody appears to have liked the old Nassau Coliseum, which did not stop anybody from loving it. Long Island, like chunks of Northeastern New Jersey, is not really like other suburbs; 40 percent of the total population of New York State lives on Long Island's narrow 118-mile length. It is one of the most densely populated and expensive places in the world. And yet its relative proximity to New York City—I say "relative" because it took me two hours to drive the 20 miles from my apartment in Brooklyn to the Nassau Coliseum—has meant that it's long been culturally underserved and ignored. Up until the 1970s, New York's attitude to Long Island seemed to be that if you want to enjoy anything besides your house, required amenities, and the beach, just come to the city.Continue reading on Noisey.
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