Explore Long Island

Actress Naomi Watts was on Shelter Island Thursday filming her latest flick, "Funny Games," a remake of the 1997 movie about two psychotic young men holding a family captive in a lakeside cabin.

While chain and competing independent record stores are struggling, Looney Tunes in West Babylon stays in tune.

Each summer without fail, a flotilla of some 3 million singles, families, loners, groupers, straights, gays, celebrities and homebodies descends on Fire Island – the stunning 32-mile-long sandbar that is New York's Key West (minus the palm trees and Hemingway haunts.)

FOR MORE than a century, ferry boats have been transporting pleasure-seekers to the South Shore barrier beaches. Few places on earth have the lure of the longest of these islands, the 32-mile sandbar known as Fire Island. More than a half-million passengers are now ferried each summer to Fire Island's sun-drenched communities, where the absence of cars is part of the sweet-life appeal.

He signed the document that launched our nation. But how many beachgoers who ply the parkway named for him know that was William Floyd's claim to fame -- or that the colonial estate where he was born is an intriguing mainland part of Fire Island National Seashore?

Even migrating birds may do a double take when they spy the dense 40-acre woodland on windswept Fire Island.