How could I forget, one of the main highlights from our Metro-North excursion to the city Sunday. We were heading home and had just arrived in Valhalla. “Get ready,” I told Little G. “The next stop is ours.”

The conductor then announced that the next stop wasn’t in fact, Hawthorne, but Mount Pleasant. The Mount Pleasant stop is that teeny tiny little platform near where Stevens hits the Taconic; it’s for those taking the train up to visit the dearly departed, such as Babe Ruth, in Gate of Heaven cemetery.

The Bambino rests eternally in Hawthorne.

The train eased into Mount Pleasant, but to say it was a “stop” flatters it a bit. The conductor said the last car was the only one that would open. No one got off and no one got on. We may have stopped for three seconds.

Nonetheless, it was my first stop ever at Mount Pleasant after almost 3 1/2 years on the rails–though I did come close three years ago. This actually qualifies for “exciting” for me these days.

[image: findagrave.com]

Since I don’t spend nearly enough time riding the rails to New York City, we packed up the gang to head in for a day trip yesterday. Little G is obsessed of late with two colossal things: skyscrapers and dinosaurs. So we threw it to him: see the dinos at the Museum of Natural History, or see the skyscrapers in midtown.

He opted for the buildings, which meant we could take the train.

We bundled up the kids, packed the snacks, and I got a taste of what the rest of my commuting brethren enjoy each day: driving to the station and parking in the lot. It being a weekend and all, we had our choice of spots, so I took the one usually occupied by the Yankeemobile during the week, hoping to impose some sort of jinx on the spot.

The 9:53 was about five minutes late (what, you couldn’t be late when I was chugging into Hawthorne station on my bike today with seconds to spare, having read Little G one too many pages from one of his dino books this morning?), and it was pretty packed. The Missus had suggested seats near the front, to minimize walking along the Grand Central platform, so we set out for seats.

I saw what looked for all the world like an empty three-seater, but upon arriving at it saw a SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-User–a young woman napping across all three. (For the record, SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-User is just a working title…we’ll try to come up with a snappier term for those seat-sleeping types. If you can think of a good Word of the Week for this, please send it along.)

[The Missus snapped this shot moments before the woman woke up.]

We instead grabbed a pair of folding seats facing each other, but Little G–his first train ride since the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City in December–started howling because there’s no window next to the folding seats (handicapped people apparently don’t enjoy looking out windows, I s’pose). He and I relocated to a two-seater with a window behind the SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-User, and he was happy again.

North White Plains saw a cattycorner two-seater open up, so the Missus and Little Miss C slid in there.

And we were off.

It’s interesting to see what affect the SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-Users (SLTSUs) have on the train. At White Plains, we saw at least four different parties do just as I did: See what looked like an available seat (or three!), approach it, then look with dismay at the body lying supine across it. We get it, you’re tired, you’re hung over. But it’s not a victimless crime. Buy three tickets and I promise I won’t blog about you.

The SLTSU eventually woke up around Bronkers and then, to ensure she had all three the rest of the ride, spread her backpack and a second back across all the seats. No longer snoozing, she was merely a LoserThree-Seat-User.

Much like Little G’s beloved view out the window from the train, making the trip with newbies is a good reminder that there’s interesting stuff to be seen amidst the boredom of the daily commute. Little G’s favorite among the New York skyscrapers is the Chrysler Building, and we were all of a block south of Grand Central when we looked back and saw it in all its silvery majesty–a vantage point I’d hardly noticed in three years of walking that route. (Cue the Annie soundtrack: You’ll stay up, until this place shines….like the top of the Chrysler Building!)

We meandered down to 34th and Park and decided not to tell Little G about what skyscraping colossus awaited around the corner. It took seconds before his eyes went wide and he said “Look!!!” Indeed, the Empire State Building (the informal “Empire”, to Little G, who’s on a first-name basis with all the Gotham skyscrapers–the Empire, the Chrysler, the Flatiron) loomed like Kimbo Slice in the foreground.

Staring skyward as we were, we were pestered by the usual swarm of hawkers looking to sell us a trip to the top. We turned them down, but did stop at a gift shop to get post cards. Little G wasn’t having the 10 for a buck cards, opting instead of the 99-cents apiece ones: One of the Empire, one of the Chrysler, one of the World Trade Center, RIP, and one of the Brooklyn Bridge.

After a cold but fun frolic in the Madison Square Park playground and a pit stop at my work, we headed back for the train. We grabbed some sandwiches at Mendy’s (”You said lunch, Jerry. Soup is not a meal.”) and hit Grand Central with time to spare. I made a big show in front of Little G to drop a quarter into the cup of a homeless man huddled in the foyer of Grand Central (the hypocrisy…like I ever do that on a normal commuting day). Sensing a teachable moment, I paraphrased the man’s placard for Little G once we were out of earshot, telling him that the man did not have a job and did not have any money.

Little G found the positive in that way kids do: “If he doesn’t have a job, then he can play with his kids all day?”

I stammered through a response that said he could, but the toys would not be very good.

We hit the 12:48 with a few minutes to spare, grabbed a six-seater, busted open our Mendy’s bounty, and looked forward to one final view from the bridge.

Our dear neighbor to the north Pleasantville was the subject of the most recent “Living In” profile in the NY Times Real Estate section. The writer, Elsa Brenner, does a nice job of looking beyond the idyllic village name and cute downtown–attributes that helped Pleasantville grab Trainjotting’s illustrious “Best Commuter Town” honor back in 2008, voted as such by you, dear readers. (Come to think of it, we didn’t do BCT in 2009.) 

To be sure, Brenner discusses what’s pleasant about Pleasantville:

AN outpost 30 miles from the city where children walk to school on sidewalks lined with trees; where lovingly refurbished Victorians have old-fashioned front porches; where shopkeepers greet longtime customers by name: The 1.8-square-mile village of Pleasantville pretty much lives up to the qualities implied by its name.

But she–and I’m assuming Elsa is a she–digs a bit deeper and injects a bit of menace into the story. The Rockwellian lifestyle might not be in place for the long haul, she suggests.

Amenities that the 7,200 residents of this affluent and overwhelmingly white village take for granted, like twice-weekly backyard garbage pickups, may have to be scaled back, said Peter Scherer, the mayor. “The time has come to rethink the way some services are delivered,” he said recently. “It’s a matter we’re very, very deeply focused on.”

Residents might also need to reconsider their traditional resistance to new development in light of the pressing need to generate more revenue, Mr. Scherer said, citing the long-opposed idea of building a multilevel parking garage downtown. “We want to make sure the lack of parking doesn’t thwart business development,” he said. “We need the tax dollars.”

You’ll see Brenner describes Pleasantville–referred to as Priusville by snide bloggers, or at least by me, for its lefty mindset and abundance of Priuses on its streets–is “overwhelmingly white.” If Pleasantville, with a few pockets of affordable housing, is overwhelmingly white, then Hawthorne must be “shockingly white.”

Brenner concludes:

It is clear why some residents have fought to preserve the status quo. But others are now asking, at what price?

The quality of life outfit Mount Pleasant Today is informing residents that there is a “Train Station Meeting” regarding the Hawthorne and Valhalla stations March 22 at Town Hall.

It will be residents’ first opportunity to address new Town Supervisor Joan Maybury, who took over when Hawthorne’s own Rob Astorino tapped Bob Meehan for a county job. Police chief Louis Alagno and Highway Superintendent Peter Sciliano will be there too.  

Here’s something to discuss–the awful oil slick where the cab company fixes its busted cars behind the station.

As we once again jump into the Way-Back Machine for this week’s theme, the book Mount Pleasant: The History of a New York Suburb and Its People, we see that the area is becoming more of a commuter town as the 1900s beckon. The time also marks the birth of the “station car”, as evidenced by one Theodore Muller.

Muller was a “woodturner” in the big city. Writes Philip F. Horne:

He drove a carriage to the depot each morning, and had only to turn the horse, Bessie, toward home and she would return to the barn.

Muller’s (and Bessie’s) home was still standing at Kensico and Arthur Avenue, notes Horne, when the book was published.

A second track was added in 1901, and construction began on a new fieldstone station house later that year in Hawthorne, which was still “Unionville.”

A correspondent for the Pleasantville Journal, Herbert Elwell, had the idea to combine the various villages (Unionville and Neperan) into one municipality, and the Neperan post office changed its name to Hawthorne late in 1901. It was a nod to the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose daughter, Sister Alphonsa, did loads of charity work in the area for the terminally ill.

When the new train station opened in March of 1902, the tickets bore the name “Hawthorne.”

Indeed, trains were part of local residents’ lives at this point. In 1911, the Hudson River and Eastern Traction Company petitioned the local villages for the right to build what they called a “street surface railroad” along Marble Avenue and Commerce Street to make shopping easier for residents. Most of the shopping, Horne notes, took place in Tarrytown and Ossining. Horne doesn’t say if that plan ever saw the light of day.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s history lesson.

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

1846: The Train Arrives in Hawthorne

Redcoat Terrorism and Commuting Via Horse-and-Buggy

The snow presumably stopped at some point late last night or early this morning, and the whole of the nabe was covered with a calf-deep layer of perfect white stuff.

Biking to the station was out of the question, so my thoughts turned to which footwear I’d opt for. The logical choice in heavy snow would be the big mofo black J Crew boots, but they’ve never been comfortable; it’s like I’m still breaking the damn things in a dozen years after I bought them. They’d be pretty useless if I had to run to the train, which I end up doing most every time I walk.

Then there’s the more conventional low-cut Rockports, which are fairly grippy, but don’t offer protection above the ankle.

I thought of the stretch of the trip where I’d have to go off-road–the 20 paces where Bradhurst hits Broadway–and opted for the boots.

[Editor’s Note: Sometimes I write a few paragraphs for the blog, then wonder why the hell anyone would care about what I just wrote about. Such as with the previous few paragraphs about the footwear.]

The nabe had a Rockwellian charm, if you’ll pardon the cliche, hushed and covered with that perfect white. Everybody was digging their cars out at 8 a.m. this morning. Despite the miserable task at hand, everyone I passed was chipper, offering up a hearty hello, relief about surviving the blizzard, a hint of bon homie about the shared experience of the storm.

Every so often a car would crawl by; some looked like snowballs with headlights, their owners not taking enough time to properly dig them out and dust them off. One car, a white Mercedes coupe that looked as though it spent the previous 24 hours in a garage, zoomed down Brighton at a pace that was way too fast for the elements.

I think I know that car…If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it blew through a Stop sign where the new cross walk is at Chelsea and Brighton Tuesday evening, making folly of the lame left-turn hand signals I attemped to offer up as I approached the crosswalk.

The driver, a woman, parked at the house that’s had the offensive/not offensive black lawn jockey in the front lawn for years.

I’m keeping my eye on her.

The roads were covered with a half-inch layer of slushy ice, with some bare pavement in the middle. My feet were aching and I was wishing I’d worn the Rockports, until I got to the off-road stretch. Indeed, we had about 10 inches down. I tried to walk in the previous pedestrians’ footprints, but still was calf-deep in the white stuff. The Rockports would’ve been toast.

The train arrived on time. The sun was peaking over the eastern cliff of Hawthorne, promising to help melt away the previous day’s production. All was good–at least until I boarded and grabbed a seat catty-corner from a guy in a neat blue suit, pink pattern tie, and the most horrific duck boots you’ve ever seen.

I’d run the marathon in my painful J Crew shit-kickers before I’d wear those things.

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.

Metro-North reports that 43,000 people absolutely had to get to work via the railroad this morning. That’s down from the norm of 55,000–meaning 21% of the daily commuters opted for the snow day.

We’re happy to report we’re one of the 21%.

We think there are going to be 43,000 very unhappy commuters this evening, and 12,000 people sitting at home, sipping hot chocolate in their favorite fuzzy slippers.

[image is from IRidetheHarlemLine.com]