This is a Seinfeld moment :-)
When I lived in Manhattan, I had a girlfriend who lived on Russian Parkway in Brooklyn. Her life pretty much revolved around home in Brooklyn, school/work in Midtown and the F train in between. Since I was the idiot who kept a car in the city, we went for a drive once out to Robert Moses State Park. She remarked that she'd never been to Long Island before. I got a kick out of that, since she literally lived on Long Island. I quite understand how locals consider Queens and Brooklyn as somehow separate from the rest of Long Island.
