Land by iconic Long Island ‘Godfather’ filming location deliberately set ablaze to prevent wildfires
This place will be safer from wildfires than gunfire.
Firefighters administered a controlled burn steps away from an iconic Long Island filming site of “The Godfather” on Tuesday morning for safety purposes.
Hempstead Plains, a prairie on the campus of Nassau Community College has been deliberately torched to prevent a wildfire risk, experts said.
Grass in the area can be spotted in the background of the iconic 1972 mob movie scene in which James Caan’s hot-tempered Santino “Sonny” Corleone met his fate in a hail of gunfire at a tollbooth in 1972.
“It’s important to do this because we want to get rid of any unwanted fuels on the ground, any bushes and shrubbery that can cause an uncontrolled fire,” NCC civil engineering professor Nina Shah-Giannaris told Newsday.
“It helps reduce the density of those invasive species that take over and kills the plants that we want, the native plants that we want to grow,” Giannaris, a member of the eco-org Friends of Hempstead Plains, added.
Now, the friends are trying to preserve the fewer than 20 acres of tall grass and other plant life — the group said it once was over 40,000 acres — adjacent to Meadowbrook Parkway in pristine condition.
They want it to exist as it did way, way before Francis Ford Coppola, who attended Hofstra Unviersity down the road, filmed his hit scene more than 50 years ago.
“And what we really want to do is to keep this as it looked for 10,000 years,” Friends of Hempstead Plains member Paul Van Wie told ABC7. “Since the end of the Ice Age, this is a primeval landscape that we have here.”
About The Author
