Westchester is still digging out after the two-foot ass-kicking we took late last week. Much of the county lost power for a significant amount of time; some are still without power, I think,

Chappaqua resident Peter Applebome, who writes the My Town Our Towns column for the NY Times, writes about the misery of being off the grid for three days up there in Clintonville. To be fair, Applebome says it ain’t exactly the same as being an earthquake victim.

I saw stretches of outages while walking home Friday, including Broad just east of Bradhurst.

While we were able to keep Dinosaur Train airing on Sprout for Little G all weekend, we were nonetheless dismayed to find our beloved little bike rack–the one we pestered Town Hall for 2 1/2 years ago, the most publicized little bike rack in the free world–flattened from the snow.

What fond memories we have of the rack: Seeing it arrive that fateful day in July 2007. Seeing it become a popular hangout for two-wheeled vehicles when gas got freakishly expensive. Seeing it get totally full of bikes after some initial resistance.

[The curvy black bar behind the fence]

Well, perhaps it was not entirely flattened, but it’s looking for all the world like it is not something you will ever again lock your bike on, at least not in its current state.

It appears the snow plows, while clearing out the Hawthorne station lot, shoved a mountain of snow against the rack, which has been lifted off its moorings on one side and now is raised to the sky at a 45 degree angle, as opposed to the right angle more commonly seen on bike racks. The plows presumably busted the thing right out of its concrete platforms, which, frankly, didn’t look so secure from the start.

We’ll see what it looks like when the mound of snow clears. For now, there’s so much snow keeping the rack in place that it seems safe to lock your bike to–heck, I did this morning, and the long vacated Power Climber bike is still there, more neglected than Kirstie Allie’s StairMaster.

But the Town maintenance guys are going to have to do some jiggering to make it viable after the snow’s gone.

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]

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

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.

The signs have been up almost as long as Trainjotting has been around: A long and skinny board, shaped like a thermometer, the words, Tick Tock, Time For a Clock on it.

There’s one in front of Hawthorne Station (the tiny green there is now known as a “pocket park”), and another at the Four Corners in Thornwood. People are asked to donate for fancy grandfather clocks, slated to go at Hawthorne Station and at the former Thornwood Station (now the Chamber of Commerce). When enough people give the red-painted “mercury” climbs up the thermometer to another level.

Well, the Examiner reports that the hamlets have mustered up a sufficient amount of mercury, and the Mount Pleasant Town Board has approved the $46,000 required to buy the two clocks.

An additional $4,000 will be spent on installing them, which commences in the spring.

In addition to the clock, Hawthorne station’s pocket park–my out-of-office when I get an important work-related call that I don’t want to take on the train ride home–will get “new plantings and benches.”

We’re holding out for a jacuzzi, cigar humidor, and foosball table.

The kid bike was on the rack at Hawthorne again this morning.

It’s a tiny little dirt bike, with a lock so flimsy that I was surprised did not pop open in this morning’s sharp winds.

It looks like it’s suited for a kid that’s about 8 or 9.

In fact, the rack had all of five cycles on it once I pulled up. So for the second time this week, I did not get to chain my ride to one of the four nice U- (or upside down U, depending on your perspective) shaped bars in the middle of the rack (those are Park Place and Boardwalk), and instead had to chain myself to one of the outside bars and lean my bike against the side of the rack (that would be Baltic or Mediterranean Ave.).

But back to the kid bike. What’s the kid doing chaining his bike to the rack on the school day? Where is he going? Frankly, as Swiss nanny author Joyce Egginton points out, Mount Pleasant ain’t much of a draw for young people. Is he hopping the train to Gotham? Despite the considerable progress from Mount Pleasant Today, I wouldn’t exactly encourage kids to ride their bikes around Hawthorne.

Is the kid bike related to what looks like the dad bike–a beat-up mountain bike that showed up the same day the wee dirt bike did? Do kid and dad venture off together on dusty adventures, like the grim father-son combos on Cormac McCarthy novels? 

Maybe it’s not a kid riding the tiny bike at all. Maybe it’s a munchkin, a Smurf, a garden gnome. Hey, times are tough–maybe those guys have to commute to the city too.

I’ll get to the bottom of this soon.

By the way, our train featured six cars instead of the usual eight, so it was jammed, with people occupying the middle seat (”sittin’ bitch”, as the bikers say). The conductor acknowledged the shortfall but not the reason why. 

The short train reminded me of the dark days of 2006, when I was a commuting novice and Metro-North was very much at the mercy of the dreaded late fall Slippery Rail season.

Kudos to Metro-North for getting through this past fall without being victimized by the pesky leaf residue that used to knock cars out of commission.  

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.

Exciting day at Hawthorne station yesterday. First off, we had County Exec hopeful Rob Astorino pressing the flesh and handing out handbills bearing his mug yesterday morning at his home station (You know what the Westchester political strategists say–if you win Hawthorne, you win Westchester). Then we had fliers greeting us upon our return from the big bad city announcing a “Train Station Meeting” this Thursday night at Mount Pleasant Town Hall.

Yes, our modest train station, happy recipient of some gloriously crisp crosswalks in the past few weeks, will be Topic A as the commuter constituency meets with supervisor Robert Meehan, police chief Louis Alagno, and other Mount Pleasant luminaries.

Topics for discussion include parking at the train, security, flooding in the lot, sidewalks (!!!), and something called “proposed taxi code,” though we’re uncertain what that means.

Spearheading the local activism is the community organization Mount Pleasant Today, which did a great job in getting the crosswalks created in the heart of Car Culture. If I had their ear for a moment, I’d suggest turning the crummy old Hawthorne station house currently used to hold the cab company’s junk into a coffee shop, I’d build a sidewalk for the poor pedestrians going to and from the station to points north on the skinny stretch of road over by Gordo’s, and I’d build some sort of sidewalk or path from the Taconic entrance at Memorial and Broadway, under the highways, to close to West Cross Street. Pedestrians are forced to use the shoulder, which is dangerous and extremely muddy.

Turn up and make your voice heard.

On the eve of the American League Championship Series, we’d like to welcome you to the first annual Trainjotting Caption Contest. Please post the best caption you can for the following photo, taken this morning at our train station.

A little back story: The fully pinstriped and logo’d Jeep Cherokee pictured above positively lords over the train station parking lot, backed into the best spot in the yard and just daring the measly Toyotas and Chevys in its midst to knock it from its lofty perch.

In short, if the Yankeemobile could speak, what would it be saying?

The winner gets as many dollar bills as he/she can stuff in C.C. Sabathia’s uniform trousers.