The village that I live in is called MerricK . Merrick is a hamlet in Nassau County, Long Island on the South Shore. This village is 35 miles from New York and one expressway exit from Jones Beach. The name "Merrick" is taken from Meroke, the name (meaning peaceful) of the Algonquian tribe . The first people that lived here are the Merokee Indians that farmed and fished in the area. In 1650, a Reverend Denton moved his congregation to the area from Stamford, Conn., and founded the Town of Merrick. They were drawn by the fertile soil and the Meadow Brook - then a wide rushing stream, now a small trickle paralleling the parkway that took its name. Merrick has a total area of 5.2 square miles (13 km2), of which 4.2 square miles (11 km2)
We decided to move in the suburbs, in Long Island. We did not know a lot about the neighborhoods in the Island at that time so we started to do our homework. We gathered information from friends, coworkers and not ultimately through internet. First think that we started to look for, was the report card for schools. Then we started to look at another important feature which is easy commuting. We were pleased to find out that from Merrick it is easy to commute to Manhattan (about 40 minutes), Queens, Brooklyn and Eastern Long Island. The statistics of a low crime rate stir up our interest. We made few trips to the village that we knew so much about it and we were pleasantly impressed about the fact that is a child friendly neighborhood: plenty of play grounds, parks, close proximity to long Island Children Museum and a lot of indoor activity places for kids, a state of the art local library with an extensive program for young readers. What else can we look for? We were so excited that we could find a nice neighborhood were we can grow our family. We contacted a local real estate agent to show us the houses. The hard part was to find a house in our price range and that was really difficult. The houses were well over our price range. It was a little disappointing but we did not lose our hope so within two months we were able to find a fixer upper, a split level house on a dead end street. We could not be happier. It was the perfect bloc with almost no traffic,