Harry Chapin Death Site — Long Island Expressway, Jericho, New York

On July 16, 1981, Harry Chapin was killed when his Volkswagen Rabbit was struck from behind by a tractor-trailer on the Long Island Expressway near Exit 40 in Jericho, New York. He was 38 years old and on his way to a free concert at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow — one of the many benefit performances he gave for World Hunger Year, the organisation he had co-founded with journalist Bill Ayres. The truck driver suffered minor injuries. Chapin was pronounced dead at Nassau County Medical Center. He had been complaining of chest pains before the accident and an autopsy revealed a pre-existing heart condition; the coroner ruled the cause of death as a heart attack precipitated by the collision.

Chapin was by any measure one of the most generous figures in popular music. He gave roughly half his concert dates to benefit performances and donated the majority of his income to anti-hunger causes, eventually securing legislation through congressional lobbying that established the President's Task Force on Food Assistance. His storytelling songs — "Taxi," "W*O*L*D," "Cat's in the Cradle" (co-written with his wife Sandra), "A Better Place to Be" — were long, novelistic character studies that treated their subjects with a warmth and specificity that made them genuinely affecting. "Cat's in the Cradle" reached number one in 1974.

The stretch of the Long Island Expressway where he died is not formally marked, but Chapin's legacy in Nassau and Suffolk Counties is substantial — he was a Long Island artist in the deepest sense, rooted in the landscape and community he wrote about. An annual Harry Chapin Run Against Hunger is held each year on Long Island. World Hunger Year, renamed WhyHunger after his death, continues to operate in his name.