THE ELUSIVE LEGEND OF ICY
HOLLOW
Newsday
Long Island Diary
Phil Mintz
There are
about 4,000 place names
that have
been attached at various times to the multitude of hills and
knobs and
bluffs and burbs that make
up Long
Island, but no place, as far as the experts can tell, has ever been given
the chilly appellation of Icy Hollow.
Yet it was there the other night, on
the
weather map on Cablevision's
News 12
Long Island, just over the left
'
shoulder
of the weathercaster, in a
spot that
looked suspiciously like the
Brookhaven
community known as
Ridge.
Icy Hollow, reporting in at an
un-icy 51
degrees.
It turns out
that Icy Hollow
a low-lying valley
about 1 1/2miles long, which
lies between the old
RCA property on the west and
William Floyd Parkway on the east -
was put on the map, so to
speak, by a resident and amateur weather observer
named Martin Fleischman, who
provides the readings to the news station.
Fleischman, an assistant principal
at
William
T. Rogers Middle School
in Kings
Park, said the low-lying valley
got its name because it is consistently
colder than surrounding areas.
"We had
ice last week," Fleischman,
who
started relaying the readings a
few months
ago,
said the
other
day,
recounting
nighttime lows in the 20s.
"We get a lot of radiational cooling,"
he said. That is the term for the
earth's loss of heat to the
atmosphere, particularly on
clear calm nights.
Still, there is no
Icy Hollow
High
School,
no Icy Hollow Civic AssociÂation,
and no children's-size T-shirts
that
complain "My Grandma and
Grandpa Visited Icy Hollow and all I
Got Was a Lousy T-Shirt."
Not only that, Brookhaven Town
Historian David Overton had never
heard of Icy Hollow; neither had
Mike Jones, who was pumping gas the other
day at the Mobil station on Middle
Country Road in Ridge, nor
had the fellow behind the
counter at Alfredo's Pizzeria.
Icy Hollow isn't listed in the "Long
Island Gazeteer," a reference
work that does include Ice Pond (on the east
end of Fishers Island) and another
Ice Pond (on the east side of
Roosevelt), nor does it show up in Hagstrom's Suffolk County Road
Atlas.
But
while Fleischman, who moved to the
area five years ago, gets credit
for putting the name Icy Hollow
before the public, he
says
he first heard
the term from a neighbor, Henry
Schlachter, who has lived in
the area since 1924.
"Henry Schlachter coined the phrase
Icy Hollow," Fleischman said.
Not quite, said Schlachter,
81, a retired carpenter. He
believes his father, also
Henry, actually was the first to
use the term, and would say it often
when the spring and summer
nights suddenly turned cool as cold air flooded the small valley.
My father was the one that originated
it," Schlachter, said earlier this
week. We used to sit outside and when
it got cold, he'd say, 'Here
comes Icy Hollow,' so the name stuck.
I don't know where he got it."
As for the unusually
chilly temperatures, Schlachter
said, "It's the location.
We're kind of deep here. It would cool off nights. The cold wave would
come in, even in the summer."
Several members of the Schlachter
family who live in the area,
just north of
Whiskey
Road,
use the term Icy
Hollow.
So do" the Fleischmans, of
course,
and their new next-door
neighbors.
The low-lying area lies
between two 'ridges and such an
area, according to Brookhaven
National Laboratory meteorologist
Marty Leach, would fill with
cool air when the conditions are
right. "The air gets more dense and
drains into the valley and continues to
cool more and more." At the same
time, he said, warmer air
replaces the cool air leaving the higher ground.
Leach said he had never heard of Icy Hollow, either, but said, "Their
claims are certainly possible."
Richard Schlachter, Henry's son,
said that
in midsummer "you can
come here
and it's 5 to 10 degrees
cooler
than anywhere else." In winter,
he added, it often snows in Icy
Hollow
when it is raining elsewhere.
"We're
down in a hole," he said. "Going
south, it goes up maybe 90 feet,
north, 35
to 40 feet. Go up the big hill
and you
feel the hot air hit you."
“The
coldest I’ve ever seen here is 26 below – that was in ’61 or ’62,”
Richard Schlachter, 42, who is
the head of maintenance at the Suffolk
County Farm. Gardening, he.
said, is different in Icy Hollow. "We're
the first ones to bloom, and the
first ones to lose
everything."
Joe
Cioffi, the News12 meteorologist
who gets the Icy Hollow reports
from
Fleischman, said, "I've seen
some
nights where the variation is
unbelievable. Marty came in one day, he was a good 16 degrees colder
than
anybody
else." The Fleischmans live across Ridge
Road from
the Schlachters. On a day
earlier
this week, in the late afternoon,
there was a cool breeze blowing
outside the Fleischmans' front door.
Christine Fleischman said that
when she
and her husband first
moved
into the area
--
in the summertime
-
they noticed that it was
unusually
cool. In fact, she said, they
thought
their
thermometer was
broken.
"We kept looking at the thermometer,"
she said. "We said, 'It
could not
be that cold here.' "
She said
that the first night they
slept in
the house they kept the windows
open. In the middle of the night,
she said,
they broke out the winter
blankets.
"It was August
- I
couldn't
believe
it was so cold."
Martin Fleischman said the lowest
temperature he has recorded in Icy
Hollow
is 18 degrees below zero. It
happened
twice, he said, first in the
winter of '86 and then in the
winter of '87. More common are the
late frosts, including one
two years ago that occurred on
May 13. "Ask me how many times
I've planted my garden over,"
Christine Fleischman says with
a smile. “But I get good lettuce here.”