The Long Island Half Dollar: a son's coin, and a party that ended before it arrived

In 1636, a handful of Dutch settlers put down roots in what is now Flatlands, Brooklyn — the first lasting European foothold on Long Island. Three hundred years later, in 1936, the people of Long Island wanted to mark the moment the way a lot of American communities did that decade: with a silver half dollar of their very own.

The 1930s were the high-water mark for this idea. Congress would pass a law letting a local committee buy a run of special half dollars at face value — fifty cents apiece — straight from the Mint, then sell them to the public at a premium and pocket the difference to fund the festivities. The Long Island Tercentenary Committee got its law on April 13, 1936, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt.

There was just one problem. The committee, as one account put it, got off to a late start. The big anniversary celebrations happened in May. The coins were not struck until August — and only reached buyers well after the bunting had come down. A commemorative coin that missed the thing it commemorated.

The committee gave the commission to Howard Kenneth Weinman — and the name is the whole story. His father was Adolph A. Weinman, the sculptor behind two of the most beautiful coins America ever made: the Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty half dollar. The Weinmans became only the second father-and-son pair to each design a United States coin. For Howard, a young sculptor, this was the chance to step out from under a very long shadow.

The obverse — the heads side — shows two profiles facing the same way, layered one over the other (collectors call this a jugate pairing): a Dutch settler and an Algonquian man of the people who already lived there. Weinman said he wanted the balance of the two heads to suggest the island's peaceful settlement. Not everyone read it that way. Critics grumbled that the pair, with their heavy jaws and strong noses, looked less like neighbors than like "two boxers about to square off."

The reverse — the tails side — is calmer and lovelier: a three-masted Dutch ship under sail, with IN GOD WE TRUST tucked into the waves beneath the hull. It is the half of the coin nearly everyone agrees on.

Here is the upside of arriving late and unloved: the Long Island half dollar is one of the friendlier classic commemoratives to own. It comes in a single date and a single mint — there are no rare branch-mint versions to chase. Of the 100,000 struck, only 81,826 sold; the rest, 18,227 coins, went back to the Mint to be melted. That leaves a population large enough that a nice example has never been out of reach for a normal collector.

The game with this coin is condition, not rarity. Because so many were tucked away by proud Long Islanders, plenty survive — but truly pristine, fully struck pieces with original surfaces command real money. Many were stored in the cardboard holders of the day, which over decades leave a halo of color around the rim where the coin met the cardboard. Collectors prize that "tab toning" as proof a coin has sat untouched since 1936.

In numismatics, grade is the shorthand for how well a coin survived — from worn to flawless — and on a common commemorative like this one, the leap from a merely nice coin to a top-grade gem is where almost all the value lives.