Amarcord Note:
Village?
5 February 2015
What a shock it was, to read in this morning’s Times that Walter Liedtke was killed in the horrific Metro-North commuter train crash on Tuesday. Liedtke, a Vermeer specialist, was the Curator in European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I recognized his name, printed under his photograph, but could not believe my eyes; so I went to the art bookcase and pulled down the catalogue for the Delft School exhibition and there it, or he, was.
It turns out that Walter Liedtke and at least one of the other victims who were also prominent in their fields, Eric Vandercar, chose to sit in the first car of the train because it was the quiet car. The location of the quiet car ought to be reconsidered. Grade crossings in northern Westchester ought to be reconsidered. Metro-North ought to be reconsidered. Every Senator and Congressman who has ever acted in derogation of this country’s passenger railroad system ought to be sent to Guantánamo.
As for the Taconic State Parkway, its hair-raising curves designed to accommodate the estates of millionaires — shut it down! Turn it into a bike path.
***
Last week, I had dinner with a woman who lived in Bronxville — served by the same Metro-North branch, but much closer to the city — for twenty years. She doesn’t live there any more; she has returned to her home town, a major European city. She moved to Bronxville initially because her husband worked for an international corporation that found him housing there. (On the very next street to the one in which I suffered through adolescence and from which I was gratefully packed off to boarding school — but my dinner companion, whom I shall call Joan — didn’t arrive until nearly twenty-five years after my family relocated to Houston.) She went on to have several other Bronxville addresses, and I knew each of them. It was very strange to talk about Bronxville at this level of detail. It’s not only that Bronxville is a very small town; for generations, its population has held steady at about five thousand. Most people with a history of Bronxville don’t have much to say about it, beyond that it’s lovely and safe and endowed with a great public school. Joan and I were talking in detail because we were both very uncomfortable there. Joan told me that a bunch of her friends took to calling it “Deathville.”
These friends did not live in Bronxville themselves. Joan didn’t make any real friends while she was there. But she did make the acquaintance of a grand old lady. This lady was one of Joan’s best customers. I can still recall the prickle of resistance that swept over my skin when I heard that Joan and her husband had run a business in Bronxville. It was just a prickle, possibly because Joan is European, and not to be expected to understand how things work here. It turns out that the grand old lady did more than prickle. She gave Joan some advice. “Don’t tell anyone that this is a business, Joan. Tell them that it’s a hobby, that your husband indulges your desire to do this while he works at the bank in the city. If you let anyone know that you depend financially on this business, they will boycott you.”
It sounded so strange! I had never heard of such a thing. And yet I instantly knew that the old lady’s advice was the best that Joan could have been given, and I said so at once. If I never knew of any instances of boycotting and so on, that’s because, to the best of my knowledge, the provocation never arose. None of my mother’s many friends, nor even the people whom she didn’t care for, ran a business, even as a “hobby.” The dawn of my social consciousness was the realization that it was “funny” that nobody who worked in Bronxville lived in Bronxville, and that everybody who lived in Bronxville worked, if he (or the very occasional she) worked at all, in the city. I grasped that this arrangement did not prevail in most places known, as Bronxville so insistently was, as “villages.”
(I honestly do not remember not knowing that it was wrong that Jews and blacks were not permitted to live there.)
Bronxville had been a village, once, a long time ago. A rather frontier-looking place, from the look of the old photographs. Then, in 1889, along came a millionaire, William van Duzer Lawrence, with a vision for development. Such visions were almost commonplace at the time; the oldest suburbs of New York, many of them within the city line now, were built as middle-class utopias. There must have been something mildly progressive about Bronxville, because support for an excellent public school arose early; but it would also have been “progressive” to exclude blacks and Jews, who were, in most middle-class minds, associated with poverty. (Prosperous Jews were believed to be dishonest.) Over time, Bronxville’s proximity to midtown Manhattan, not to mention a train station that anyone could walk to in half an hour or less, became a powerful magnet. Houses there are now very expensive, and of course the school is supported by high property taxes.
There are two Bronxvilles, the real or legal one (roughly a square mile in size) and “Bronxville PO,” the area covered by ZIP Code 10708 that is not within the legal Bronxville (another square mile, give or take). Most of Bronxville PO is in Yonkers, a city that stretches from the Hudson River to the Bronx River, but some of it lies within the unincorporated town of Eastchester, with a slice in Tuckahoe. (Both Bronxville and Tuckahoe are incorporated villages within Eastchester.) If you live in the real Bronxville, your kids go to Bronxville school (K-12) for free. If you live in Bronxville PO, your kids can go to Bronxville School if you pay a lot of money. William Lawrence’s former estate, now the nucleus of Sarah Lawrence College, sits in the middle of the part of Bronxville PO that is known as Lawrence Park West.
Joan told me that, while she was in residence, the Clintons were thinking of settling in Bronxville. But the Secret Service nixed it. According to village scuttlebutt, the Secret Service will not permit a former president to live on a property smaller than three acres. I don’t believe that there is a parcel of that size in Bronxville. The three-acre rule sounds slightly dubious to me, but I can understand the squeamishness about a relatively densely-packed suburb.
I haven’t been to Bronxville in a long time, but I expect that its principal beauty is still its trees. I have never heard that there is an official village forester or arborist, but I shouldn’t be surprised to discover one. (The village will, however, mow your lawn if you neglect to do so, and charge you punitively for the favor.) When I was a boy, before the Dutch Elm blight, Elm Rock Road was a cathedral of leaves, a truly exalting interior space. It may be that I am largely unimpressed by wilderness woodlands because I grew up in a sort of park that offered all the beauty of the forest without any of the inconvenience. As for the houses, however, they are for the most part not village houses, which is to say that they are too large and too formal for their small lots. In Lawrence Park, which sits athwart the ridge that rises from the train station to the northeast, some houses are preposterously huge, perched on steep hillsides with only a patch or two of grass.
In one sense, though, Bronxville really is a village. Joan recounted several anecdotes attesting to the abiding absence of cosmopolitan mindsets. Having been married before, and having kept her maiden name, she ran into endless red tape at the school, because her name was different from that of her husband and two of her four children.
And I forgot! An exception is made for doctors. Doctors and dentists can both live and practice in Bronxville. I suppose that a lawyer might get away with doing the same, but I never knew of one to try. I know I haven’t spent any time in the village for decades, but Joan’s stories strongly suggested that not much has changed.