Next Stop.... Yonkers?

In the February 19, 2016 edition of the Rivertowns Enterprise, Kris DiLorenzo’s story entitled “Objections pile up against The Jefferson,” which recapped the second Jefferson DEIS scoping session with the Greenburgh Town Board ends as follows: “Bill Hirschman expressed succinctly one objection to the Jefferson: This is going to turn Ardsley into an extension of Yonkers.”

It is not readily clear what this means.  Does it relate to the housing desegregation litigation which was depicted in the recent acclaimed HBO mini-series “Show Me A Hero” which arose out of the controversial case known as “United States vs. Yonkers?” Or does it refer to the longstanding and legitimate concerns of residents of outer ring suburbs like Ardsley about the presence of large multi-family developments in areas traditionally populated by single family homes? Before it was outlawed as an illegal real estate practice, sellers of homes in Northwest Yonkers advertised their homes as being located in "Hastings Vicinity."  Perhaps Yonkers should take a page from North Tarrytown (now called Sleepy Hollow) and re-brand itself as apparently saying your community will be like Yonkers is suburban code for something bad.

Yonkers is a city of  200,000 inhabitants covering a land area of approximately 18 square miles. In contrast, Ardsley, a village, is just over one square mile in size, with a population of roughly 4500 residents. Outside of perhaps the weather, Yonkers is vastly different from Ardsley by any conventional measure – demographics, government structure, per capita income, educational levels, transportation (Yonkers is now served by four train stations on the Hudson Line (Yonkers, Ludlow, Greystone and Glenwood) and Crestwood (which uses a “Tuckahoe” address) on the Harlem Line while Ardsley has no train stations.  Yonkers has two hospitals, two colleges (Sarah Lawrence (which uses a Bronxville address) Westchester Community College which has an extension in the Cross County Center shopping mall) and a museum (the Hudson River Museum). 

Yonkers, being located on the Hudson, also has an active kayak club (Yonkers Paddling and Rowing).  In addition, Yonkers has several religious seminaries such as the Academy for Jewish Religion, St. Joseph's (Roman Catholic) and St. Vladimir’s (Christian Orthodox).  Yonkers is also the home of a casino, a racetrack, a marathon race, a marina and the now restored Persian Gardens of Samuel Untermeyer. Ridge Hill (whatever you make of it coupled with its history of being approved only after a City Council Member was bribed to change her vote) is located in Yonkers (as well as the trifecta of Costco, Stew Leonard’s and Home Depot) and a good portion of the local traffic boogieman – Central Park Avenue, which also cuts through Edgemont in Greenburgh on its way north to the City of White Plains where it ends at Tarrytown Road (Route 119) near the City Limits Diner. Of course, to get from Ardsley to Yonkers, you have to pass through a portion of Hastings-on Hudson or the section of unincorporated Greenburgh having a Hastings-on Hudson postal address near the Mount Hope Cemetery which is known as Donald Park.

What sections of southwestern Yonkers once had is what the developer of The Brownfield at Saw Mill (which in true real estate fashion has been renamed the The Jefferson at Saw Mill) falsely claims their project to be -  a transit oriented development.  Wikipedia defines transit oriented development as follows:

“A transit-oriented development (TOD) is a mixed use residential and commercial area designed to maximize access to public transport, and often incorporates features to encourage transit ridership.”

This is as far away from a description of The Jefferson as you could imagine. 

As explained in a fascinating article appearing in a 2004 edition of the National Railway Bulletin entitled "The Phantom Spur - Retracing the Vanished Getty Square Branch of the Putnam Railroad", former Yonkers resident and historian Daniel Abraham Klein, whose original home on Saratoga Avenue in Yonkers backed up to what his mother called “the tracks,” detailed the saga of a rapid transit spur which was an early example of true transit oriented development.

As Klein explains, the goal of the Yonkers Rapid Transit Railway, formed in 1879, was to build a three mile stretch of railway from a junction in Van Cortlandt Park (and not far from the oldest building in the Bronx, the 1748 Van Cortlandt Mansion) to Getty Square in downtown Yonkers. “From the start,” he writes, “the plans for the Yonkers Rapid Transit Railway had anticipated the development of new residential communities along the route. The Park Hill, Lowerre and Caryl sections of Yonkers have in fact been described as among the earliest planned suburban areas in the country.”

The picture below is from the 1912 catalog of Park Hill homes developed by builder-architects the American Real Estate Company showing its proximity to the Putnam Railroad. According to Klein in his Phantom Spur article, “Park Hill was linked to the Getty Square rail line in a picturesque and dramatic fashion. An “incline elevator” transported passengers by hydraulic-powered tram from the Park Hill station at South Broadway up a steep 107-foot hill to Alta Avenue.The incline was anchored at either end by two depots built in 1893, the lower one in Neo-Tudor style in the upper one in the late Victorian “shingle style.”

The spur serving these communities was discontinued after roughly 55 years of operation in 1943 for, as explained by Klein, primarily economic reasons. In a related article appearing in the Spring 2009 edition of The Yonkers Historian, “Yonkers versus United States:” The Epic Legal Struggle to Save the Getty Square Railroad Branch, Klein relates the twists and turns of the attempt by the Putnam Railroad to close the Getty Square spur (and sell it for scrap to ostensibly help the war effort) and the numerous ways the City of Yonkers and others, including commuters, tried to prevent it. The legal dispute was the subject of two appearances before the United States Supreme Court which ultimately decided in favor of the railroad. In his articles, which double as travelogues on a search for the physical remains of the now phantom spur, Klein discovers that “the tracks” behind his childhood home were the remnants of the portion of the spur that ran between the now vanished Caryl and Lowerre stations.

Ardsley and Yonkers still do not have much in common. What they do share is the loss of true transit oriented development with the closing of the Getty Square spur (and in the case of Ardsley, the entire Putnam Division which had depots in both the Chauncey section of Ardsley and Ardsley itself (although some contend the station was actually in Dobbs Ferry)) and its phony appropriation by the developers of the Brownfields at Saw Mill where transit oriented development (let alone the amorphous “bicycle oriented development”) only exists in their marketing propaganda.

In the February 23, 2016 edition of The New York Times, it is reported that Bob Dylan has long been the most cited songwriter in judicial opinions and that even the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who loved opera, also had a soft spot for Bob Dylan.

As Dylan sang in his epic song poem – It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), a track on his Bringing It All Back Home album (Columbia Records, 1965) – “propaganda, all is phony. “

As Ardsley Mayor Peter Porcino noted at the final scoping session, he knows of no plans by the Town of Greenburgh, the County of Westchester or the State of New York to create any form of new transit facilities at the location where The Jefferson is proposed to be built. At best, and its a poor substitute, the developer suggests it might provide a trolley to transport its Jeffersonistas to the train station. 

Here is a better idea - let The Jefferson vanish from our midst like the Getty Spur until its promoters can come up with a true transit oriented development as was done in Yonkers over a century ago.