Sticking our nose back into the oddly delightful Mount Pleasant: A History of a New York Suburb and Its People, we see that train commuters in Hawthorne in the mid 1800s didn’t have a whole lot of options. Two trains ran each way every day; there was a train out of City Hall at 7:30 a.m. (the early days of reverse-commuting!) that pulled into Hawthorne (then “Unionville”) at 9:27. Next up was a train from City Hall that left at 3:30 p.m. at pulled into Unionville at 5:42.

So, if you missed the 7:30 train, you had to wait eight hours for the next one.

The southbound trains, meanwhile, left Unionville at 8:42 a.m. and 3:56 p.m.

The trains ran on burning wood. They bypassed Valhalla, which was known as Robbins’ Mills and later Kensico.

An 1851 map showed that Unionville consisted of its new train depot, which tripled as a store and post office; a church, a parsonage, school, and some mills.

Throw in Gordo’s and the Punta Cana restaurant, and it’s not much different today.

Pleasantville, meanwhile, was rocking. It had a general store, Hay’s Hotel, the Depot House (now the Iron Horse Grill), a saw mill, a church and a school.

In 1891, a directory of what everybody in Unionville did for work was published. There were 32 farmers, 15 laborers, a pair of milkmen, two gardeners, two blacksmiths, a grocer and a station agent, among others.

Of the 82 “heads of household” in Unionville, there were three NYC commuters. Edward Ledley was a glove manufacturer, William Weed was an “expressman” (not sure what that means), and Ambrose Van Tassell was a customs house official.

The Missus picked up an interesting treat at the library late last week. (Paying what we do in taxes, we try to get our money’s worth by taking dozens of books out of the library each day and creating as much garbage as possible for the pick-up guys.)

It’s Mount Pleasant: The History of a New York Suburb and its People. Written by Philip F. Horne, the book is a wispy 57 pages, type-written, with a strip of tape holding the binding together. Horne says he wrote it as a sophomore in college, publishing it in 1971.

The writing is a bit clunky, but the kid did ample research–poring through old history documents and even finding a few old-timer primary sources.

The railroad plays something of a starring role in the book, as the rail link to the city truly changed the lifestyle in the area, and helped the farms give way to suburban tracts.

Horne does give a glimpse at the earliest days of city commuting as the 1800s began.

The farmer could also drive his own wagon to New York, leaving at midnight to arrive early in the morning. He backed his wagon up to the sidewalk and led the horses to a livery stable for the day. In addition to produce the farmer would sell any fancy work his wife had sent along. Later in the day, purchases were made for the family; for special goods, this was their only opportunity to buy, except from peddlers.

Hawthorne was known as Unionville, presumably for the residents’ allegiance to the British Crown (the Union) despite our kicking their ass in the Revolutionary War. The people were primarly Dutch Reformed.

And long before Gordo’s there was John Brett’s tavern at 347 Bradhurst–around where Bradhurst hits Broadway, near where the Citgo station blew up and the entrance to the Taconic/Bronx River Parkway is.

The tavern was the site of some bloodshed during the Revolutionary War. Two Yank soldiers popped in for a potable after their honorable discharges. A British soldier shot up the front window, then went in and offed the two soldiers with his sword.

The first glimpse of Mt. Pleasant-as-suburb came in 1835, when Manhattan resident Joseph Miller bought the Zephaniah Birdsall homestead, whose manor house stood as 230 West Lake Drive. Miller claimed New York City was no place to raise kids.

I’ll be excerpting from Mount Pleasant all week.

We were fairly psyched when we saw the first signs of a new restaurant along Hawthorne’s sleepy strip in the fall. Indeed, Punta Cana Restaurant promised “Spanish & Portuguese food”–a nice variation from the red sauce and bar food available in Hawthorne.

The place opened a few days before Christmas, and I’m just not getting the sense that it’s booming as I bike by every day. Indeed, most days, I see the proprietors–a pair of affable Latinas–looking a bit bored inside. More often than not, there are no customers in there–at 6:30 p.m., no less.  

We got takeout there once, over the Christmas break. I got the “Bonless” chicken with rice and beans; I may never get tired of English-as-a-second-language typos on menus, a pastime stoked across many years of visiting the curry joints and their malaprop-rich menus on 6th Street in the East Village.

The food was decent. The portions were huge; I had my bonless chicken for dinner, had it for lunch the next day, and even snuck a few bonless bits into the Hawthorne multiplex for a snack during Invictus a few days later.

The Missus wasn’t so wild about hers. She detected a shallow pool of oil in the bottom of her aluminum dish, which likely means we’ll never go back.

The main proprietor was sweet and said she lived a few doors down, and that her kid goes to Hawthorne Elementary School.

So let’s get out and support the newest culinary addition to Hawthorne Heights. They even serve breakfast. The food may not be Gramercy Tavern-level, but it’s better than that dirty comic book shop/deli that used to grace the main drag.  

As our 3-year-olds frolicked about recently, a local cop friend started bending my ear about the book Circle of Fire, which tells the tragic tale of a Swiss nanny in Mount Pleasant and the gruesome death by fire of the newborn, Kristie Fischer, she was tasked with minding.

Not my thing, I thought. But being a polite fellow, I nodded and said I’d keep the book in mind.

When our kids were around 3 1/2, the cop friend started talking up the book again. This time, he actually slipped me the hardcover copy of it. What could I do, except read the damn thing? After all, the guy’s a cop, and my only good contact on the local force.

Sixty pages in, Circle of Fire isn’t bad. The writing (by Joyce Egginton) is B- work, and the story is interesting, though newborn murders are not exactly heartwarming fare.

As coincidence would have it–and I didn’t realize this until just now–the fatal fire on West Lake Drive took place exactly 18 years ago today: Dec. 2, 1991, and perhaps forever sullied the term “Swiss au pair”–though Olivia Riner was acquitted.

What’s really interesting about Circle is that it’s such an under-the-microscope look at the Thornwood-Hawthorne-Valhalla area. Cop chief Louis Alagno is in there, and Mount Pleasant supervisor Robert Meehan is too. In fact, the book suggests considerable ill will between local government and local police–though not specifically between Alagno and Meehan.

The dour entertainment options facing a young nanny in Thornwood, NY are painstakingly depicted.

“She was allowed the occasional use of a family car; even so, it was hard to imagine where in the Thornwood area a girl like Olivia might want to go. Certainly not to the bar by the railroad station [Editor’s Note: the boozy watering hole Gordo’s in Hawthorne, or the more family friendly boite Valhalla Crossing in ‘halla?] or the neighborhood McDonald’s, which were popular meeting places for local young people.”

Egginton makes some errors that only local residents would notice or care about. One page one, no less, she describes Thornwood as “rural” (was it really rural as recently as 1991?) and refers to it as an “exurb” of NYC (Exurbs lie beyond the suburbs. Thornwood is a suburb.) And Egginton repeatedly refers to Thornwood, Valhalla and Hawthorne as “villages,” though they’re in fact hamlets.

“At its hub the three adjoining villages of Thornwood, Valhalla and Hawthorne are so interdependent as to be essentially one community. Thornwood has the two neighboring shopping centers, Valhalla has the town hall and police headquarters, and Hawthorne the railroad station on a commuter line to New York City.”

Of course, Valhalla too has “the  railroad station on a commuter line to New York City,” but that’s picking nits.

Jeez, what a morning. I was cutting it close this morning, and had to park the steel chariot (I’ve rebranded my bicycle) in the usual bike rack, not against the fence under the overpass, which provides a bit of protection in the rain.

Turns out I had more time than I thought. Way more.

Right around 8:16, the would-be 8:16 could be seen on the horizon beyond Gordo’s, but it never let up its pace and blasted right by the anxious commuters.

So we waited. I grabbed a seat on the three-person metal mesh bench. A portly 20-something was yammering on her cell. She had a yellow plastic grocery bag with a box of oatmeal inside. With nothing else to do, and without the energy to take out my Blackberry or newspaper from my bag, I listened in.

“I went to Donnie’s Facebook page, and it was, like, so weird–it was his four year anniversary! I know, weird, huh? And he had all this weird writing on his Wall, like, 40 days to go! I’m like, what happens in 40 days? He’s joining the Air Force! I’m like, what the hell, like, why the hell did you go to college, what a waste! I mean the Air Force is awwwsummm and everything, but still.

And then I was tawkin’ to Shane. Do you know what Shane is doing? The Peace Corps! I’m like, Donnie’s in the Air Force, Shane’s in the Peace Corps, like, what the f***’s wrong with these people!”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Indeed, serving your country, and the impoverished around the world, is extremely silly–especially if you’re college-educated. Taking the train to some mindless job in the city, however, is noble.]

It was 8:25, and still, no sign of the 8:16. No word of the delay either from the MTA advisory service or Clever Commute.

The blabbing went on, loud enough for people within, oh, 15 feet to hear.

“What wuz I gonna say to you…It was good, what was it gonna be. I’ll come down on Thursday, drive in after work. Steve’s going to Montreal–in that case I’m outtie!!! Four-day weekend at Ashley’s house! Oooo-wooooh!”

Mercifully, the loudspeaker broke the cacaphony with an announcement at 8:29:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the next train arriving on Track 2 will be your express, stopping at White Plains, Harlem 125th Street and Grand Central.”

Undaunted, “Ashley” blabbed on: $80 shoes from Nine West that were going back (”awwwsummm, but, like, $80?”), the laptop she forgot to bring, the party at her house this weekend.

Finally, the 8:16 turned up at 8:33. The rain continued to fall, turning the soil company on the other side of the tracks to mud. Ashley kept up her end of the convo.

“It’s such a shitty morning,” she said. “I should’ve slept in.”

Word up, Ash.

I cruised by the little strip mall with the Chinese food restaurant, the laundromat and not much else on the way home from work yesterday, and saw the first signs of life in the northernmost storefront in almost three years. Tiny downtown Hawthorne is getting a Spanish-Portuguese restaurant!

The paper in the window said Coming Soon: Punta Cana Restaurant. The storefront held a sign company called Signworks when we moved in nearly three years ago. Signworks shut down not long after we arrived, and the storefront has been empty ever since. There was talk two years ago of a Dunkin Donuts with serious plans to open up there, but that was apparently denied by the Town of Mount Pleasant over traffic concerns.

Punta Cana is in a tiny shop; it looks like it will be one of those joints with four or five small tables and the bulk of its business coming from takeout. Good stuff. Ever since Bel Paese closed down, Hawthorne Heights (OK, that’s a stretch) hasn’t had a proper sitdown restaurant, not including the bar Gordo’s.

Between Punta and Hawthorne Wines, there are signs of life in little Hawthorne.

At the same time Punta hung its announcement signage, the Grand Central coffee shop Oren’s served its last customer after a decade-long run. All the equipment inside the shop has a sign hanging on it, instructing where to ship the various gear.

“Thank you all for the past 10 years,” read a forlorn sign inside.

It’s been quite a few weeks for the little hamlet of Hawthorne–first, there were signs for a new wine shop in its tiny downtown, and then the cable channel TNT announced it was setting a new drama in the burg–and naming the show after Hawthorne as well.

Yes, the medical drama Hawthorne debuts June 16 and stars Jada Pinkett Smith.

TNT describes Hawthorne thusly:

Following in the footsteps of Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer and Holly Hunter in Saving Grace, Jada Pinkett Smith (The Women, The Matrix Trilogy) is the latest actress to bring her talent to TNT’s arsenal of strong, complex female characters. In this character-driven medical drama told from the nurses’ point of view, she stars as Christina Hawthorne, the forceful-yet-caring director of nursing.

Christina Hawthorne works out of Westchester Medical Center, downs brews at Gordo’s with her nurse pals, and sorts out her home repairs at Berger Hardware while making her way as the lone African-American in Hawthorne, NY.  

It’ll be a nice viewing alternative for residents to watching Town Supervisor Bob Meehan give his OK to an unattached garage project on Memorial Drive on channel 78.