Railroad Stations: Foot of S. Main St. for New York Central System (main line); Broadway and Getty Sq. for New York Central System (Putnam Division); 12 suburban stations.
Bus Stations: Riverdale Ave. and Hudson St. (bus stop, not a terminal) for Greyhound, Flying Eagle, Gray, and Champlain Lines and interurban busses.
Ferry: Alexander St., foot of Ashburton and Wells Aves., to Alpine, N.J.; 6 a.m.–midnight; car and passengers, 40¢-50¢; pedestrians, 5¢.
Taxis: 30¢ first ¼ m., 10¢ each succeeding ¼ m.
Streetcars: 5¢ within city; connect with busses, interurban trains, and New York City subway.
Accommodations: 3 hotels; tourist homes.
Information Service: Chamber of Commerce, 20 S. Broadway; American Automobile Association, 284 S. Broadway; Daily Herald-Statesman, Larkin Plaza.
Motion Picture Houses: 5.
Swimming: Tibbets Brook Park, Midland Ave. between Yonkers and McLean Aves.; weekdays, children 15¢, adults 25¢; Sun. and holidays, children 25¢, adults 40¢; children under 12 free Mon., Wed., Fri. mornings.
Golf: Sprain Lake Golf Course, Grassy Sprain Rd. near north city line, 18 holes, greens fee: Mon.–Fri., 75¢; Sat. and holidays, $1.25; Sun. $1.50. Grassy Sprain Golf Course, Central Park Ave. at Tuckahoe Rd., 18 holes, greens fee $1; Sun. $1.50.
Tennis: City parks; season tickets $1, from Yonkers Recreation Commission, 283 Nepperhan Ave. Tibbets Brook Park (Westchester County Park Commission), 40¢ per hr. Mon.–Fri., $1 Sat., Sun., and holidays.
Annual Events: Polish Kosciusko festival at Kosciusko statue, Nepperhan Ave., Decoration Day; Italian Roseto festival, New Main St. and Park Hill Ave., July 16.
YONKERS (30 alt., 142, 404 pop.) plays a double role as a residential suburb for New York City commuters and as an important manufacturing center. The 14 railroad stations within the city limits are supplemented by five additional ones—the latter the most heavily used—just beyond the eastern boundary.
The city occupies a huddle of hills and hollows on the east bank of the Hudson, its southern line forming the northern boundary of New York City. North Broadway runs between well-kept estates; South Broadway, its trolley line connecting with the northern terminus of the New York City subway system, is lined with apartment houses, secondhand automobile lots, and business establishments. The main business district centers in Getty Square, at a five-way intersection where Broadway crosses Main Street.
West of Broadway is the city’s riverside industrial section; north and east along the Nepperhan River stretches a jumble of factories, mills, and warehouses surrounded by the drab homes of workers. East of Broadway, a maze of residential streets, broken by county parks and parkways, rises in a series of terraces from Locust Hill and Rose Hill along the Hudson to Nodine Hill and Valentine Hill, thence on to the Bronx River, which forms the eastern boundary. Valentine Hill was the scene of a skirmish after the Battle of White Plains, the only action of the Revolution within the present city limits.
The eastern part of Yonkers is composed of attractive residential districts. These communities—Crestwood, Mohegan Heights, Armour Villa Park, Sherwood Park, and others—have little to do with the commercial and industrial section to the west. Their inhabitants shop and receive their mail in Tuckahoe, Bronxville, and Mount Vernon, of which they consider themselves residents and to which their community spirit is tied.
The foreign groups of the industrial city, representing 28 nationalities and employed mostly in the mills and factories, comprise 25 per cent of the population; the public school rolls show 50 to 60 per cent of pupils of foreign parentage. The more recent Italian, Slav, and Polish arrivals outnumber the earlier Irish, Scotch, and German groups. These newcomers hold the balance of power in elections and take an absorbing interest in sports. The Empire City race track attracts turf followers in season. The city carries on an extensive program of recreational activities, and its sand lots frequently produce major league baseball stars. Golf was introduced in this country on the local St. Andrews course.
An Indian village—Nappeckamack—stood on the site of Yonkers, which was part of the Kekeskick Purchase (1639) made by the Dutch West India Company from the Indians. The city site was included in a grant of land made in 1646 by the company to Adriaen Cornelissen Van der Donck, the first lawyer and the first historian of New Netherland. By reason of his wealth and social position Van der Donck enjoyed the courtesy title of ‘jonker,’ the Dutch equivalent of ‘his young lordship,’ from which was derived the name of the city.
Van der Donck’s colony, called Colendonck, was broken up into smaller holdings shortly after the British took possession in 1664. In the 20 years after 1672, Frederick Philipse, merchant trader and member of the Provincial Council, by a series of purchases acquired a tract of land extending along the east bank of the Hudson from Spuyten Duyvil Creek on the south to the Croton River on the north and eastward to the Bronx River. In 1693, by Royal charter, this domain became the Manor of Philipsburgh and its proprietor the lord of the manor. He erected the original Manor Hall, established mills, rented land to tenants, and soon had a flourishing colony, important in the eighteenth century for its iron mines. His great-grandson, the third and last lord of the manor, supported the Tory side in the Revolution, and the estate was confiscated in 1779.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Yonkers was a village inhabited mainly by farmers; the land was well watered, the growing metropolis to the south provided a market, and transportation by boat was cheap. Development was accelerated by the opening of the Hudson River Railroad in 1849. In 1855 the village was incorporated with a population of 7,554. With the passing of the turnpike era, stagecoaches and taverns disappeared. Cheap transportation and the water power of the Nepperhan River attracted industries, such as Elisha G. Otis’s elevator works in 1854, David Saunders’s machine shop in 1857, and Alexander Smith’s carpet mill in 1865.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Yonkers enjoyed a national reputation for the products of its looms, spindles, and machine shops. New industries were added and attracted Irish, English, Scottish, and German immigrants, later to be followed by Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Armenians, and Russians. The city was chartered in 1872. In 1892 several dams, which at one time crossed the Nepperhan at seven levels, were torn out, industry turned to electricity for power, and the river, reduced to a trickle, disappeared beneath highways and buildings. Water transportation steadily decreased until it is no longer a factor; and the Hudson River docks, which once bustled with the traffic of sea-going craft, are practically deserted. The latest development in transportation has been the extension of the elaborate system of county parkways transecting the city.
Yonkers has more than 100 industries, employing about 15,000 workers and producing annually $100,000,000 in goods. Chief products are carpets and rugs, clothing—including women’s dresses, men’s hats and caps, and uniforms—elevators, books, patent medicines, and insulated wire and cable.
POINTS OF INTEREST
1. ST. JOHN’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, SW. corner of S. Broadway and Getty Square, is designed in a modified Romanesque-Victorian Gothic style. The plan is cruciform, with a very high nave, high, broad aisles, and narrow, low transepts, much like side vestibules. The second lord of the manor gave a glebe for the church and cemetery and built the original edifice in 1752, which was partially destroyed by fire in 1791 and rebuilt in 1792. The old walls were incorporated in the present church, built in 1870.
2. The YONKERS CITY HALL, S. Broadway opposite Prospect St., occupying the crest of a sharp hill, is a three-story-and-basement structure built in 1908 of yellow pressed brick with buff stone trim. It is designed in the neoclassic style, its high, domed clock tower dominating the downtown section.
The WORLD WAR MEMORIAL, at the foot of the hill, is a semicircular monument of pink granite set into the rocky face of the hill and bordered by shrubs and flower beds. In the center stands a female figure in bronze executed by I. Konti.
3. PHILIPSE MANOR HALL (open 9–12, 2–5 weekdays; 2–5 Sun. and holidays; adm. 25¢, children under 16 free), NW. corner of Warburton Ave. and Dock St., is an example of restored Georgian Colonial architecture, built of weathered brick with white wood trim. The building is L-shape in plan, with hipped slate roof, dormers, and roof balustrade. The symmetrical, five-bay façade with its fanlighted doorway and small Doric portico is typical of the period. The older part of the house, the south wing facing Dock Street, was built about 1682; the northern portion was added about 1745. During the Revolution it was held alternately by Americans and British. In 1780, 16,000 British soldiers encamped on the estate for several weeks; in 1781 the grounds were occupied by Americans. A 300-acre parcel of the estate, including the manor house, was sold to Cornelius P. Low, New York merchant, in 1785. It was purchased by Yonkers in 1868 and became the village hall. When the new city hall was built, the preservation of Manor Hall as a shrine was made possible by a gift of $50,000 by Mrs. William F. Cochran. Title is vested in the State and the property is in the custody of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society.
The building contains Colonial furniture and objects of historical interest and a priceless collection of portraits of the Presidents from Washington to Coolidge and of a number of early American leaders, including the Tuckerman portrait of Franklin, portraits of George and Martha Washington by Gilbert Stuart, the portrait of Alexander Hamilton by James Sharples, and the portrait of John Quincy Adams by Thomas Sully. Of the five portraits of Washington in the collection, three are with brown eyes and two with blue eyes.
There is a local tradition that Washington courted Mary Philipse, sister of the third lord, in this house, and that in the midst of the feast following her marriage to Captain Roger Morris an Indian appeared and uttered the Sibylline prophecy, ‘Your possessions shall pass from you when the Eagle shall despoil the Lion of his mane.’ This came to pass when the manor was confiscated during the Revolution.
4. The OTIS ELEVATOR WORKS (open by permission), 44 Wells Ave., a number of old brick and new concrete buildings, manufactures electric elevators. Elisha G. Otis, the inventor, settled in Yonkers in 1852 and installed the first elevator to carry freight in his bedstead factory, in which for some years the Otis elevators were made. In 1853 he demonstrated his ‘perpendicular stairway’ at the Crystal Palace exhibition in New York, and the contrivance soon became popular.
5. The HUDSON RIVER MUSEUM AT YONKERS (open 9–12, 1–5 weekdays, 2–5 Sun. and holidays), 511 Warburton Ave., is housed in the Victorian Gothic Trevor Mansion. Built in 1876, it is of rock-cut stone, with square and round towers, many dormer windows, bracketed cornice, high, patterned slate roofs, bay windows, and balconies. The collections include manuscripts, books, newspapers, prints, maps; antique furnishings; American Indian, Philippine, Australian, and African native material. The museum serves the city schools and has special loan exhibitions.
6. The BOYCE-THOMPSON RESEARCH INSTITUTE (open 9–5 Mon.–Fri.; 9–12 Sat.), 1086 N. Broadway, is a center for the scientific study of plant growth. Alarmed by food shortages during the World War, the late Colonel William Boyce-Thompson founded the institution and equipped it with facilities for growing plants under controlled conditions.
7. GREYSTONE (grounds open 10–5 Tues. May to Oct.), 919 Broadway, built in 1873, is a solid graystone three-story structure designed in the French Second Empire style with bulky square towers that rise an additional story above a mansard roof. The grounds are especially beautiful during the blooming of the rhododendrons in May and June. Once the home of Samuel J. Tilden, it was owned by Samuel Untermeyer until his death in 1940. The garden includes a cryptomeria walk, one-color gardens opening from the walk, Persian canals, Greek temples, and a ‘living sundial’ of flowers.
8. The ALEXANDER SMITH CARPET MILLS (open to technicians by appointment), with its general offices on Saw Mill River Road between Ashburton and Lake Aves. and its mills on near-by streets, is the largest industry in Yonkers, employing about 5,000 workers. During the last century, the carpet weaving industry was revolutionized by labor-saving looms invented in this plant by Alexander Smith and Halcyon Skinner.
9. ST. JOSEPH’S SEMINARY (open by special permission), 201 Seminary Ave., is an immense ashlar stone building, five stories high, with high attic, slate roofs, and cut stone trim. It is of modified French Renaissance design. The main entrance unit is marked by a pyramidal roof surmounted by a high open lantern and flanked by circular towers with conical roofs. The building is occupied by about 270 aspirants to the Catholic priesthood and their teachers.
10. The EMPIRE CITY RACE TRACK (grandstand and paddock, $1.50; clubhouse, $4; July and Oct.), Yonkers and Central Aves., is the smallest and least pretentious of the metropolitan tracks. It was built in 1898–9 by William H. Clark and in 1902 was purchased by James Butler, chain store magnate. After a long controversy with the Jockey Club, Butler was finally given a license for his track, and in 1907 he entered upon his colorful career as a racing promoter. Known as the ‘poor man’s race course,’ Empire City attracts crowds ranging up to 35,000 daily.
Butler has become a legendary figure in Yonkers. ‘The Squire of East View,’ as he was known, was no flashy mixer of the ‘Diamond Jim’ type, but had a vast acquaintance among horsemen everywhere and was well liked by his Westchester neighbors. When one of his thoroughbreds stood in the winner’s circle, Finnegan’s Band invariably played The Wearing of the Green, and the crowd shouted its approval. Butler, however, never let sentiment interfere with business, and when the band became too great an expense it went the way of all unnecessary trimmings, Butler declaring that if the crowd must have its favorite tune of victory, ‘Let ’em whistle it!’ Butler would not look at golf or tennis. When his neighbor, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., invited him to play a few holes, Butler refused, declaring that golf was a rich man’s game. He maintained the fiction of being poor by riding to his racetrack in a rickety automobile of outmoded design. For education, however, he loosened the purse-strings. Marymount College, on a high hill opposite Rockefeller’s estate in Tarrytown, was founded by Butler.
11. SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE, a liberal arts college for girls, occupies an 18-acre campus just west of the Bronxville line. The main buildings, arranged in a rough semicircle, are built of Harvard brick and native stone and designed in the English Tudor style. The faculty numbers about 60; the student body about 275. The curriculum emphasizes music and dramatics.
The college was founded in 1926 by William Van Duzer Lawrence in memory of his wife, Sarah (Bates) Lawrence. The present campus was the Lawrence estate. WESTLANDS, erected in 1916, a large English Tudor mansion that was the Lawrence residence, is now the administration building of the college.
POINTS OF INTEREST IN ENVIRONS
Saxon Woods Park, 12 m.; Playland, 17.5 m. (see Tour 1). Wayside Inn, 7 m.; Kensico Dam, 17 m. (see Tour 20). Sunnyside, 11.2 m.; Sleepy Hollow Dutch Reformed Church and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, 12 m. (see Tour 21).