Thursday, June 6, 2019
Monday, May 20, 2019
News from the Town of Greenburgh.
Day: Saturday June 22, 2018
Location: Edgemont Road/Hartsdale Train Station (Pipeline)
Time/Registration: 8:30am: Start of Race 9am
Ages: All Ages 6 Above are welcome
Fee: $10 Pre-registration $15 on the day of event
Come out and get your run on!! Run our One Mile Fun Run, all proceeds will go to Gilda’s Club of Westchester.
For more information contact Keith Wright (914) 989-1816 or kwright@greenburghny.com
Thursday, May 16, 2019
News from the Town of Greenburgh.
Some good news for Bicycle Sunday lovers! The weather seems to be cooperating for this Sunday. Bicycle Sunday on the parkway should be open for you and your family to enjoy! 45 years ago I got my start in government by serving on Westchester County Executive Al Del Bello’s bikeway committee. I recommended the closing of the parkway for cyclists at that time. In 1973 I persuaded the county to appropriate $50,000 for the first bikeway in Westchester on the Bronx River Parkway (it was cheaper than). It’s so exciting to see that this event is still very popular.
Bicycle Sundays | Bronx River Parkway
Bike, walk or jog the 13.1 mile loop. May 19, June 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30, Sept. 8, 15, 22 and 29
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Thank you Ardsley High School student Elizabeth Chun for organizing the following community concert this Saturday night. She and fellow student musicians are real inspirations.
PAUL FEINER
Concert #1:
Saturday, May 18 at 7 PM
Ardsley Community Center
Concert #2:
Saturday, June 8 at 2 PM
Greenburgh Public Library
Welcome to More Than Mozart! We are a group of passionate Ardsley High School student musicians. Having thoroughly enjoyed the opportunities that our school’s music education program offered, we created More Than Mozart in the fall of 2018 to share our love for music with our community and put it to good use.
More Than Mozart organizes and launches free student-organized concerts to support various great charity organizations.
We are extremely excited to be launching our inaugural season! This year, our concerts will aim to raise awareness and money for Lifting Up Westchester’s Brighter Futures Summer Day Camp, which provides homeless and economically disadvantaged children with an enriching yet fun summer program where they can just be kids. Music is just an amazing platform for outreach, and we hope to inspire and bring smiles to the faces of our audiences.
We cannot wait to serve our community, and we hope you will join us at our upcoming events (listed above)!
To learn more about More Than Mozart, please visit us at
We still have three dates left - July 27th, August 3rd and August 10th. All other dates have been reserved.
CALL NOW to reserve.
PRIVATE POOL RENTALS
Pools E or F at Anthony F. Veteran Park can be reserved on Saturday with Sunday as the rain date. The cost to reserve from 1:00pm-4:00pm is $230.00 (includes a lifeguard). The cost for use of both pools is $390. Please call Diane Crasto for more information at 989-1821.Sunday, May 12, 2019
News from the Town of Greenburgh.
...current auto repair shop site (E Hartsdale Ave/Wilson Street--near Central Ave)
This is the first major 4 corners redevelopment proposal to be presented to the Town Board
On Tuesday May 14th at the Town Board work session (which begins at 4 PM) a presentation will be made by owners interested in redeveloping the corner of East Hartsdale Avenue and Wilson Street with a new multi-family residential building. Presently at the site (two separately-owner lots) a former gas station (and current auto repair shop) exists with two, one-family residences to the rear. A site owner approached the Town with a concept to combine the lots and develop one building fronting close to East Hartsdale Avenue. Collectively the two sites are zoned primarily M-174 (Multi-Family Residence District), with a small sliver of R-7.5 (One-Family Residence District).
The properties were planned to be rezoned to M-174 in connection with Appendix E of the Comprehensive Plan, however, this zoning map change was postponed to allow for full review of an actual redevelopment proposal for a multi-family building redevelopment. This multi-phased approach allows for an appropriate process for review of traffic, buffers, landscaping, etc., in advance of any rezoning. The meeting with the Town Board is the very first step in this process, which will entail site plan review and a zoning map amendment, all of which will include public input.
The subject site is the only property in the Four Corners Study area with present zoning (provided the R-7.5 portion is amended) that would permit development consistent with the Hartsdale Four Corners Study, which is an ongoing Town planning initiative. In addition to the site plan review and zoning map amendment noted above, it is also very important for the Engineering/Planning Consultant selected for the Four Corners Traffic/Stormwater and infrastructure study (Consultant to be selected in June) to provide input on the potential for this property to be incrementally developed, in the context of Four Corners planning.
The Town will receive copies of the rendering for the proposal at the meeting Tuesday and will then post this information on the Town website. The auto-use is a non-conforming use that is proposed to be replaced with an attractive modern building. The meeting Tuesday can be live streamed from the Town website, viewed on cable access tv or in person at the work session. The applicant will also make a separate presentation to the Four Corners Land Use Resident Committee following soon after the Town Board meeting. The input of the 4C committee is important, as will be input from all residents, in this process.
Last year the Town Board and I invited residents who are most impacted with proposed land use applicants to join land use committees that are advisory to the Town Board. These land use advisory committees have worked with the Commissioner of Planning, preparing RFPs for consultants and they have also helped interview potential consultants who analyze land use application. We want citizens to be partners in all major development review processes.
After the presentation I will post a link to the video/discussion for those who can't attend our Board meeting or watch it live.
PAUL FEINER
The properties were planned to be rezoned to M-174 in connection with Appendix E of the Comprehensive Plan, however, this zoning map change was postponed to allow for full review of an actual redevelopment proposal for a multi-family building redevelopment. This multi-phased approach allows for an appropriate process for review of traffic, buffers, landscaping, etc., in advance of any rezoning. The meeting with the Town Board is the very first step in this process, which will entail site plan review and a zoning map amendment, all of which will include public input.
The subject site is the only property in the Four Corners Study area with present zoning (provided the R-7.5 portion is amended) that would permit development consistent with the Hartsdale Four Corners Study, which is an ongoing Town planning initiative. In addition to the site plan review and zoning map amendment noted above, it is also very important for the Engineering/Planning Consultant selected for the Four Corners Traffic/Stormwater and infrastructure study (Consultant to be selected in June) to provide input on the potential for this property to be incrementally developed, in the context of Four Corners planning.
The Town will receive copies of the rendering for the proposal at the meeting Tuesday and will then post this information on the Town website. The auto-use is a non-conforming use that is proposed to be replaced with an attractive modern building. The meeting Tuesday can be live streamed from the Town website, viewed on cable access tv or in person at the work session. The applicant will also make a separate presentation to the Four Corners Land Use Resident Committee following soon after the Town Board meeting. The input of the 4C committee is important, as will be input from all residents, in this process.
Last year the Town Board and I invited residents who are most impacted with proposed land use applicants to join land use committees that are advisory to the Town Board. These land use advisory committees have worked with the Commissioner of Planning, preparing RFPs for consultants and they have also helped interview potential consultants who analyze land use application. We want citizens to be partners in all major development review processes.
After the presentation I will post a link to the video/discussion for those who can't attend our Board meeting or watch it live.
PAUL FEINER
Saturday, May 11, 2019
News from Town of Greenburgh.
Irvington in Chains and our Process A History of Slavery in Irvington and A look at how Slices of History are
...and our interview with historian Robert Marchant (listen to radio show link below)
By: Riley Wentzler &Felicia Barber
Greenburgh’s Village of Irvington (1860-1865):
When President Abraham Lincoln initiated a draft on July 11 1863, violence broke out in Irvington. The waves of violence eventually became a full-scale riot. One of the first buildings that these White rioters destroyed was an African American orphanage. After burning the orphanage, this mob joined with a similar-sized mob from the Village of Tarrytown and proceeded to kill as many African Americans as they could.(Greenburgh Town Archives) and for many years after the Civil War Irvington and other Villages of Greenburgh had active chapters of the Ku Klux Klan (Esannason, 2017p. 6). We already mentioned these details in our article Greenburgh at The Great American Crossroads: Greenburgh’s Civil War Story (http://www.greenburghny.com/
Why do you think resistance to the Union War Effort was so strong in Irvington? Do you think these Anti-Union forces were strong States’ Rights advocates? We doubt that very much because if they were, why would they have made a special point of destroying an African American orphanage and killing as many African Americans as they could? A more likely explanation, given that by July of 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation had been passed making ending slavery a major war goal, is that residents of Irvington as a whole objected to the abolition of slavery. Why would they, you ask? The answer is that slavery was a proud tradition in Irvington. This article will tell the story of the history of slavery in Irvington.
Slavery in Greenburgh’s Village of Irvington:
The State of New York was the capital of the slave trade from 1520 until 1789 (Cox & Sears 2019 p. 2) and while New York City was the hub, Greenburgh’s Village of Irvington still has a long history of slavery. Slavery in the area that is now Irvington began in 1520, but Fredrick Philipse, who began slave trading in 1680, was the first major slave trader in the area (Marchant 2019 p.16). As a Dutch citizen he was an iron and copper merchant, but when he became a British citizen he realized that the British didn’t need as much copper and iron as the Dutch had, therefore, he switched to trading slaves.
It was easy for him to make the transition from selling raw materials to selling slaves because slavery was a very profitable business for those who could afford it; paying a White indentured servant cost 60 pounds a year whereas ,for the same 60 pounds, you could buy an African slave for life (Cox & Sears 2019 p. 3). As an extremely wealthy merchant, Philipse could afford to buy and sell slaves repeatedly. In contrast to Philipse and his family, most families in Irvington were too poor to purchase any slaves, and therefore didn’t own any (Cox & Sears 2019 p. 3). Most of the slaves were owned by one of five wealthy and politically influential families: the Odells’, the Requas’, the Buckhouts,’ the Jewels, and the Van Tassels’ (Cox & Sears 2019 p 1). Most of these families were still not as wealthy as the Philipse Family and therefore only owned an average of one or two slaves a piece (Cox & Sears 2019 p 2).These slaves were known by only their first names, most of the time their ages weren’t even recorded, because very few slave owning families cared to know the age of their property (Cox & Sears 2019 p 1).
Here is a partial list of slaves by family-
Owned by Gload Requa &Family:
· Bill
· Jack
· Bete
· Hannah (Estate Inventory of Gload Requa 1809).
Owned by Peter Van Tassel &Family:
· Prince (agreement between Peter Van Tassel and Samuel Bouton 1781).
While there weren’t that many slaves in Irvington those few that were in slavery toiled in bondage for centuries, as the State of New York did not abolish slavery within its borders until 1827 (Esannason, 2017 p 6).
Now for an inside look at how we write our articles:
We find a topic in one of three ways:
1. Greenburgh Town Supervisor, Paul Feiner suggests a topic
2. our readers suggest a topic
3. we bounce ideas off each other until we come up with one
In this particular case Greenburgh Town Supervisor, Paul Feiner suggested Slavery in Irvington and gave us a copy of Sarah Cox’s and Kathy Sears’ article, “Our Town and Slavery.”
Once we have a topic we go through a long process of researching it:
First, we check Microsoft Encarta Reference Library, a major encyclopedia, for information on it. This doesn’t usually help because although this is a highly accurate source, it doesn’t often have what we need as most of our topics are too local to be included in this encyclopedia.
Second, we check the internet to see what’s out there and fact check what we find based on Field Horne’s A History of Westchester County.
If we find nothing at all, or nothing reliable, then we go to the Westchester County Archives or occasionally we interview people. This time we had the rare opportunity to interview some of the people who wrote our source material. We interviewed Robert Marchant who wrote the book Westchester: History of an Iconic Suburb. To hear this interview click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
 | ||
Mr. Marchant has a profound interest in Black History. In the course of the interview he covered:
· slavery in Greenburgh
· Greenburgh’s Resistance to the Union War Effort during the Civil War which, resulted in the murder of numerous African Americans
· Greenburgh during the Jim Crow Era
· Madam C.J Walker and The Harlem Renaissance
· Ana Jones Bernard ,who was the first African American woman to pass the New York State Bar Exam
In addition to discussing these Black History related topics he also discussed organized crime in Greenburgh. Returning to our process, once the information is collected, we write up the article, and cite it using APA Citation Style Manual.
We hope you found these facts on slavery interesting and that you enjoyed the inside look at research-writing process
Previous Slices of History include:
There is no church here, but “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” this ground: The Story of The Little White Church Cemetery (4/27/19) http://greenburghny.com/
From Fixing Cars to building Infrastructure: How Massaro Park Got its name (4/13/2019) http://greenburghny.com/
From Chasing Rabbits to Setting Records: The Amazing Story of Larry James (4/7/2019)
Greenburgh Under the Hollywood Lights: The TV shows and Movies Filmed in Greenburgh Part II (3/29/19)
From Insurance to Symphonies: The Home of Charles Ives
Oh, The Places Your Mail has Gone: A History of The Hartsdale Post Office (3/9/2019) http://greenburghny.com/
Greenburgh Under the Hollywood Lights: The TV shows and movies Filmed in Greenburgh Part I (2/23/19) http://www.greenburghny.com/
The Power of Wealth and Humility: A Reflection on Two Highly Influential African Americans (2/18/19)
A Beautiful View for the Perfect Event: The Belvedere Estate (2/9/19)
An Unspoken Promise of Redemption: How Hartsdale Got its Name (1/31/19)
Lost History: The Tragedy of Malkasten(1/26/19) http://www.greenburghny.com/
The Intersection of Banking, Ballet, and School: Greenburgh’s Warburg Estate (1/18/19) http://www.greenburghny.com/
A Small House, an Important Meeting, a Huge Victory: The Story of the Odell House (1/12/2019)
The Guardians of History: Greenburgh’s Historical Societies (1/6/19) http://www.greenburghny.com/
How a Flat Tire led to a Happy Escape: The Story of Carvel in Greenburgh (12/11/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
A Thousand Words Which You Never Knew: The Forgotten Story of the Seal of Greenburgh. (11/17/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
"The Disappearing Railroad Blues" in Greenburgh: The Fate of the Putnam Railroad Line and the old Putnam Trail ((11/6/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
A Different Kind of Rebel: Greenburgh’s Contributions to the Underground Railroad (10/27/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
Greenburgh at The Great American Crossroads: Greenburgh's Civil War Story (10/19/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
Greenburgh’s Hall of Heroes: Ferncliff Cemetery Where Memories Live Forever (10/12/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
A Final Resting Place for “Man’s Best Friend”: The Peaceable Kingdom (9/29/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
Greenburgh and The Arts (9/22/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
Greenburgh’s BROTHERLY LOVE, RELIEF AND TRUTH: A History of The Freemasons in Greenburgh (9/12/18) http://www.greenburghny.com/
About the Authors:
We are both Assistant Town Historians at Greenburgh Town Hall and we are engaged to be married and are currently looking for permanent employment.
Riley Wentzler:
I was born and raised in a small rural town in central Pennsylvania. In high school, I took every honors course available including four years of Spanish. I received A’s in all of them. I graduated third in my class of 146 students. This brought me to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Once there, I continued my trend of academic excellence. I graduated summa cum laude in Political Science with a minor in Spanish and a Master’s in Communication Studies, with a G.P.A of 3.94. It was also there that I met my lovely fiancée, Felicia Barber. My Master’s in Communication has promoted public speaking, teamwork, and customer service. My Political Science degree has developed my research skills using computer-based tools and provided me with experience using the Microsoft Office products. My minor in Spanish has facilitated my bilingual capabilities. During my internship at Greenburgh, I created the petition for the State Roads project using website tools. My diverse education and areas of interest have provided me with a wide range of skills. I look forward to finding a career opportunity in business or government. To suggest a topic for next week’s article, you can contact me at assistanthistorian@
Felicia Barber:
I was born in New York City and raised in Hartsdale, New York. I graduated from Ardsley High School. I recently earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. It was here that I met my fiancé, Riley Wentzler. As a result of my academic excellence, I won a scholarship every year. I learned and applied many graphic design skills to projects during my summer internships and at school. I am proficient in using Adobe graphic design applications including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. For my Identity/branding course at Edinboro, I created logos to appear on the tee-shirts of Physical Education majors. For a veteran’s upcoming event, I used a typeface to focus the reader to the soldier in the poster. For the State Roads Legislative Campaign project, I created the embedded graphic-photo that accompanied the petition I am looking for a job to utilize my skills as a Graphic Designer in an agency, print shop, company or government To suggest a topic for next week’s article, you can contact me at assistanthistorian@
Two Interviews with the authors:
References
Cox, S. & Sears, K (2019, Winter (NOT GIVEN)). Our Town and Slavery . The Roost, pp. 1-7.
Esannason, H. (2017). Our Roots Run Deep. Elmsford, New York: Esannason, Harold.
Estate Inventory Series 16(1809) Gload Requa retrieved from Westchester County Archives
Manuscript # 141 (1781) agreement between Peter Van Tassel and Samuel Bouton retrieved from Westchester County Historical Society
Marchant, R. (2018). Westchester: History of an Iconic Suburb . Jefferson, NC : McFarland&Company Inc.
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