July 25, 2022, Mayor's Column

By custom, this will be my last column until Labor Day so I thought I would end on a fun, positive note sharing some unique facts that make our home so special.

• Bronxville has 2300 home addresses in the Village but over 10,000 area residents use it as their postal address.
• In 1898, at the time of its incorporation as a Village, Bronxville had but 300 citizens.
• 60% of our residents live in single-family homes and town houses while 40% reside in apartments, co-ops and condominiums.
• Over 20% of the land in the Village is tax exempt.
• The Bronx River was actually rerouted and the Village border changed to accommodate the original construction of the Bronx River Parkway.
• There are 1356 parking meters in our village and they all work . (most days!!)
• The Village has over 700 acres of park land.
• The area so named Scout Field, both upper and lower, is actually Westchester County park land with over 95% of the actual acreage in the cities of Yonkers and Mount Vernon.
• Palumbo Place is name for Joe Palumbo, the long time Village Public Works Director.
• Leonard Morange Park, on the west side near the train station, is named after the first Village resident to die in service to our country in World War I.
• Famous people who have called the Village home include President John F. Kennedy, Eddie Rickenbacker, Beat Generation writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, Elizabeth Custer, Jack Parr and Marvin Bower
• Bronxville has been featured on the silver screen with the Bronxville School appearing in Stepmom starring Julia Roberts, Six Degrees of Separation had major scenes at Siwanoy Country Club and Legget Road was the host to the film Baby Mama with Value Drugs and Womrath’s in the movie Admission.
• The original soil at the Alfredo Fields, near Siwanoy Country Club, was sold and trucked to Queens for the Worlds Fair in 1939.
• With the exception of the Hasidic Village of Kiryas Joel in Orange County, Bronxville is the only community in New York State that is co-terminous with its school district with the municipality issuing both school and Village tax bills.
• The Village encompasses just over one square mile at 666 acres. It is 16 miles from midtown Manhattan and 2 ½ miles from the Bronx border.
• The first European settlers can be traced to the early 1700’s with the construction of a saw mill on the Bronx River by John Underhill and the subsequent development of a Village around the mill in the 1850’s was so named Underhill’s Crossing.
• The railroad arrived in the 1840’s, the Reformed Church in 1850, and a post office designation in 1852.
• The Hotel Gramatan was erected in 1905, Lawrence Hospital in 1909 and Concordia College in 1910.
• By the opening of the Bronx River Parkway in 1925, the Village was almost truly built out.
• Village population peaked in 1940 to 6888 residents, a slight increase over the current  census numbers.
• The overwhelming majority of Village housing units, (72%), were built before 1939.

• Westchester County spreads over 500 square miles making it larger than 40 countries.
• County of firsts:
  • Elevator - Otis Company of Yonkers
  • American Golf Club - 1888 St. Andrews in Hastings
  • First synthetic plastic - bakelite in Yonkers
  • First parkway - The Bronx River Parkway
• Tuckahoe marble was used to build New York City Hall, the Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street, the Washington Square Arch, the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol.
• John Peter Zenger, the Colonial era newspaper editor, wrote an article about an Eastchester town election that heavily criticized the New York governor.  The resulting trial for “seditious libel” led to the enshrining of freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights.