Pleasantville, New York

Pleasantville, New York
Village
Location of Pleasantville, New York
Coordinates: 41°8′11″N 73°47′15″W / 41.13639°N 73.78750°W / 41.13639; -73.78750Coordinates: 41°8′11″N 73°47′15″W / 41.13639°N 73.78750°W / 41.13639; -73.78750
Country	United States
State	New York
County	Westchester
Settled	1695
Incorporated	March 16, 1897
Area
• Total	1.8 sq mi (4.7 km2)
• Land	1.8 sq mi (4.7 km2)
• Water	0.0 sq mi (0.0 km2)
Elevation	292 ft (89 m)
Population (2010)
• Total	7,019
• Density	3,900/sq mi (1,500/km2)
Time zone	Eastern (EST) (UTC-5)
• Summer (DST)	EDT (UTC-4)
ZIP codes	10570-10572
Area code(s)	914
FIPS code	36-58728
GNIS feature ID	0960746
Website	www.pleasantville-ny.gov

Pleasantville is a village in the town of Mount Pleasant, in Westchester County, New York. The village population was 7,019 at the 2010 census.^[1] It is located in the town of Mount Pleasant. Pleasantville is home to a campus of Pace University and to the Jacob Burns Film Center. Pleasantville was the original home of Reader's Digest, which still uses a Pleasantville postal address. Most of Pleasantville uses the Pleasantville Union Free School District even though small parts of northern Pleasantville are served by the Chappaqua Central School District. The village is also home to Pleasantville High School, which was ranked 191st on Newsweek's list of top US high schools, placing it in the top 1%.^[2]

History

The Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville

The settlement of Pleasantville dates back to an Iroquois tribe which raised corn there and which established trading routes crossing through the present-day village before the arrival of Europeans. French Huguenot Isaac See^{[nb 1]} settled here as an agent for Dutch landowner Frederick Philipse in 1695, beginning the modern history of Pleasantville.^[3][4]

By the time of the American Revolution, the population of the growing settlement comprised English, Dutch, and Quakers, most of whom were tenant farmers. During the Revolution, this area was part of the Neutral Ground, where there were conflicting loyalties among the settlers. British spy Major John André passed through present-Pleasantville carrying information from Benedict Arnold at Fort Clinton to the British in New York City. André lost his bearings near the present-day corner of Bedford Road and Choate Lane and was captured. The capture of André is often cited as a key factor in the ultimate victory of the American forces.^[4][5][6]

As the area's population grew in the early 19th century, the settlement was called Clark’s Corners, referring to property owned by Henry Clark at the intersection of Broadway and Bedford Road. This area was the village’s original commercial center. In the 1820s, the newly appointed postmaster, Henry Romer, was directed by the Postmaster General's office in Washington, D.C., to give a name to the post office planned here. Romer's proposed name, Clarksville, was rejected because another New York post office already had the name. His second choice, Pleasantville, was accepted, and the Pleasantville Post Office opened on February 29, 1828.^[7][8]

A significant change in the development of Pleasantville came with the arrival of the New York Central Railroad and New York and Harlem Railroad in 1846. In the following year, a train station was built near the present corner of Bedford Road and Wheeler Avenue, and as a result the commercial center of Pleasantville shifted to its current location. The older business district at Bedford Road and Broadway is today called the Old Village. The railroad offered a speedier and more frequent connection with New York City—only 70 minutes away by rail, compared with a five-hour overland journey by stagecoach or a two-hour steamboat trip down the Hudson River. The present-day train station, which currently houses a restaurant, was built in 1905 and was moved to its present location in the 1950s to accommodate the lowering of the tracks below grade. Before the addition of the now heavily trafficked station, commuters working in New York City and lower Westchester County were forced to rely on rides from Marc Damon, now famous in Pleasantville for being "The Friendly Coachman".^{[5][9][10][11]}

According to several sources,^[12] Pleasantville was a stop on the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses for escaped slaves from the South on their way to freedom in the north.^[13]

The latter half of the 19th century was a time of rapid growth in Pleasantville. By the 1870s, there were four shoemaking businesses, a shirtmaking business, and a pickle factory. The first newspaper to serve the village, The Pleasantville Pioneer, was launched at about 1886. The village's numerous small farms and orchards began to be subdivided for a wave of solid foursquare and Victorian houses built for a growing middle class. The 1890s saw the establishment of a police department, volunteer fire department, and a library system. Pleasantville was incorporated as a village on March 16, 1897.^[14][15]

In the following years, Pleasantville quickly developed into a modern suburb of New York, with a large number of workers commuting between the village and the metropolis on what is now the Metro-North Railroad's Harlem Line. During the first two decades of the 20th century, roads were paved for the first time, water mains were installed, and electrical wires brought power to the village's houses. Other improvements during the first half of the 20th century include the construction of Soldiers and Sailors Field in 1909, the Saw Mill River Parkway in 1924, the Rome Theater in 1925, Memorial Plaza in 1930, Parkway Field in 1930, and Nannahagen Park in 1937 (the adjacent village pool was completed two years later). By the time of World War II, the village had taken on the appearance that it bears today.^[16][17][18]

Pleasantville merits interest for its literary history. Playwright Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour, The Little Foxes) bought Hardscrabble Farm on the western outskirts of Pleasantville and lived there in the 1940s and 1950s. For many years author Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon), with whom Hellman was romantically involved, lived and worked at Hardscrabble Farm.^[19] DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace, co-founders of Reader's Digest, made Pleasantville their headquarters in 1922, using a converted garage and pony shed on Eastview Avenue as their office and later building a home and larger office space on adjacent property. Subsequently the Digest held office space in several buildings throughout Pleasantville, including the present-day Village Hall at Bedford Road and Wheeler Avenue and, diagonally opposite, the bank building currently occupied by Chase. Reader’s Digest moved its headquarters to nearby Chappaqua in 1939, but retained its Pleasantville post office box, thus making the name of the village familiar to millions of Reader's Digest subscribers around the world. Pleasantville is also the home of Joseph Wallace, writer of the novel Diamond Ruby. Today Pleasantville is home to many novelists, editors, and writers, who find its easygoing charm and proximity to New York an attractive combination.^[20][21][22]

Pleasantville's reputation as a cultural center was enhanced in 2001 with the opening of the nonprofit Jacob Burns Film Center in the landmark Rome Theater, a Spanish mission-style building and one of the first movie theaters in Westchester County. The Burns Center is dedicated to presenting independent, documentary, and world cinema. Guest speakers at the Burns Center have included Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, Robert Klein, Oliver Stone, Stephen King, Rob Lowe and numerous other notable filmmakers and actors.

In 1948, in an unincorporated area of Pleasantville off Bear Ridge Road, acolytes of Frank Lloyd Wright began putting their lessons to work by building homes in their mentor's modernist, open-plan style. The neighborhood, called Usonia Homes, comprises 50 houses spread among 100 acres (0.40 km²) of wooded hillside; the development includes two houses designed by Wright himself.^[23]

According to Chandler Burr of GQ, Pleasantville is among the "Top Ten Best Smelling Cities in the World". Although Pleasantville is technically not a city, Burr contends that, "Money changes the smell of everything, and wealthy towns where people who want to flee New York's asphalt canyons go to have gardens and lawns have scents as restricted as the covenants guarding their real estate values. Maple, oak, and pine smell cyclically different as the seasons turn, and Pleasantville's scent is based on these trees and their leaves at all stages—green, yellow, dead brown, and budding. When you close your eyes you get grass and then the smell of 'America as it was' whenever that might mean for your nose. If Normal Rockwell's paintings emitted a scent, this is what it would be."^[24]

Pleasantville is home to the Westchester Table Tennis Center, where over 250 members compete, practice and train for various tournaments, and now, many are even training to become olympic athletes. Some well known restaurants can also be found in Pleasantville, including the Iron Horse, which has received excellent reviews from the New York Times. The Batonnage Wine Bar is also a hot spot in town. The Captain Lawrence Brewing Company's first brewing location was in Pleasantville.

Another addition to Pleasantville's cultural scene is the Pleasantville Music Festival, made possible by the village, over 150 volunteers and WXPK, an all-day outdoor event stage at Parkway Field on the second Saturday in July. Main stage acts have included Roger McGuinn, The Bacon Brothers, Rusted Root, Jakob Dylan, Dar Williams, Carney, Back Door Slam, Marc Cohn, Augustana, Z.Z Ward, and Joan Osborne.

From 1975-1987, Pleasantville was home to the New York Giants Training Camp. Each summer the Giants would hold their off-season workouts and Training Camp at the Pace University Pleasantville Campus. During their time at Pleasantville, thousands would flock to camp. During their stay in Pleasantville many businesses benefited from the influx of people and many of the players would be seen at many of the restaurants and delicatessens in town.^[25]

Pleasantville is also the only place in America to have hosted a royal wedding, between Estelle Bernadotte and a duke of Sweden who rejected his claim to the crown.

The Marmaduke Forster House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.^[26]

The Pleasantville Police Department has received several complaints in recent years. In 2008, former Detective Sergeant Stephen Bonura retired after being suspended for outing a confidential informant and stating deliberately misleading and false information to an internal affairs investigator. At that time Bonura, along with the support of other officers, claimed that these actions did not warrant his discharge because the department's staff was ill-run by the Village.^[27] That same year, Pleasantville resident Kian Daniel Khatibi was released from prison after his older brother confessed to two stabbings at a Pleasantville bar for which Kian was wrongly convicted; it was alleged that village detectives had framed him in 1998.^[28] In October 2010 Danroy Henry Jr. was killed in a melee after Pleasantville Police responded to a report of a disturbance at a local gathering. The Grand Jury declined to charge the officer responsible.^[29] In 2011, Chief of Police Anthony Chiarlitti, whose tenure oversaw all of these incidents, retired from the force.^[30] Recently the village has also looked into eliminating its small police department in favor of either a merger with neighboring Mount Pleasant police or a takeover by Westchester County Police.^[31]

Geography

Pleasantville is located at 41°8′11″N 73°47′15″W / 41.13639°N 73.78750°W / 41.13639; -73.78750 (41.136410, -73.787521).^[32] According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of 1.8 square miles (4.7 km²), all of it land.

Demographics

As of the census^[35] of 2000, there were 7,172 people, 2,637 households, and 1,824 families residing in the village. The population density was 3,943.4 people per square mile (1,521.5/km²). There were 2,684 housing units at an average density of 1,475.7 per square mile (569.4/km²). The racial makeup of the village was 90.35% White, 2.90% African American, 0.18% Native American, 2.89% Asian, 1.73% from other races, and 1.95% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 7.36% of the population.

There were 2,637 households out of which 35.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 58.3% were married couples living together, 7.8% had a female householder with no husband present, and 30.8% were non-families. 25.6% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.3% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.61 and the average family size was 3.16.

In the village the population was spread out with 28.5% under the age of 18, 4.8% from 18 to 24, 29.9% from 25 to 44, 23.5% from 45 to 64, and 13.3% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 38 years. For every 100 females there were 98.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 91.1 males.

The median income for a household in the village was $86,632, and the median income for a family was $105,227. Males had a median income of $62,344 versus $47,978 for females. The per capita income for the village was $41,397. About 2.0% of families and 4.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.0% of those under age 18 and 3.5% of those age 65 or over.

Notable residents

Emergency vehicle gallery

Fire and ambulance vehicles

Car 2371, a 2012 Chevrolet Suburban/TCD  Engine 91, a 2005 Ferrara Igniter 2000/1000  Tower Ladder 5, a 2011 KME Predator 95ft.  Engine 260, a 1994 Pierce 1250/750  Rescue 47, a 2005 Ferrara Igniter 2000/750 Rescue Pumper  Engine 259, a 1984 Pierce Dash 1250/750  Tanker 57, a 1979/2000 International/Wilde Fire 0/2500  Ambulance 7603, a 2007 Ford E-450/Lifeline  Ambulance 7602, a 2012 Ford F-450/Lifeline  Car 7606, a Ford

Notes

References

External links

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Pleasantville (New York).

• Village of Pleasantville
• Pleasantville Union Free School District
• Pleasantville Community Television

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