Diving back into the theme of the week, Philip F. Horne’s Mount Pleasant: A History of a New York Suburb and its People, we arrive in the 1890s and see that the enterprising real estate speculator Louis Smadbeck is intent on getting New Yorkers to move to Hawthorne (then Unionville) and Thornwood (then Sherman Park).
Smadbeck divvied the area into 100 by 25 foot plots and focused on Germans living on the Upper East Side. He formed a corporation called the Rapid Transit Real Estate Company; as the name indicates, he used the area’s railroad as a main lure for Manhattan folk looking for more space.
At this point in history, Grand Central Terminal, not City Hall, was where the local Westchester train entered and exited.
Horne writes:
On Sundays, Smadbeck hired excursion trains and ran them, free of charge, from Grand Central Terminal to the station at Unionville, where the passengers were transferred to stagecoaches to be driven around the tract. The railroad was the focal point of the community; a Sherman Park station was established [Editor's Note: I believe that's the closed down station house across from the pizza joint on Commerce Ave. in Thornwood], and Smadbeck wrote of greatly improved passenger service which was to be inaugurated:
Rapid Transit means…the establishment of a continuous four track service, which will enable residents of Sherman Park to reach the heart of New York City in 35 minutes.
Thirty five minutes! Smadbeck also offered to sell gullible New Yorkers a share of the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Previous installments from the book:
A (Train) Trip Down Memory Lane