THE house on Lillian Drive in Hazlet was the kind of modest split-level that was the chief crop on much of New Jersey 's farmland in the mid-1960 's -- chicken coops still standing at one end of the street , a bus stop to New York at the other , three bedrooms and a throw rug of a yard that , to the McDermott clan of Hell 's Kitchen via Brooklyn , looked like all the space a family would ever need .