By Mary Marvin, Mayor of Bronxville

July 10, 2024: I thought I’d take a break from reporting on flood projects, road repaving and errant scooters and highlight some of the interesting factoids about our Village and our home county. 

-The Village has 2,300 addresses, but over 10,000 people use Bronxville as their postal address.

-Sixty percent of our residents live in single family homes and townhouses while forty percent reside in apartments, co-ops and condominiums.

-With the exception of the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel in Orange County, Bronxville is the only other community that is co-terminus with their school district and as a result the municipality issues both School and Village tax bills.

-Palumbo Place is named for Joe Palumbo the long time Village Public Works Director. Leonard Morange Park, on the west side, is named after the first Village resident to die in service of our country in World War I.

-The Village has no County owned roads and only one State Road, Route 22. As a consequence, it is the only road that cannot be repaved or upgraded by the Village.

-The original soil at the Alfredo Fields, near Siwanoy Country Club, was sold and trucked to Queens for the World’s Fair in 1939.

-Over twenty percent of the land (97 acres) in the Village is tax exempt.

-The Bronx River was actually re-routed and the Village border changed to accommodate the construction of the Bronx River Parkway completed in 1925. It was the first multi-lane limited access parkway in North America.

-The largest age cohort in the Village is 35 to 54.

-We have 2,193 Village households, three quarters of which characterize themselves as family units with an average family size of 3.45, a number slightly above the County average.

-Single person homes approximate the other 25% of our residential inventory. Those living alone over 65 have increased to 13.6% of our population, a number 2% higher than the Westchester County average.

-72% of Village housing stock was built before 1939 of which 83.9% are owner occupied.

-In terms of open space, Scout Field is a 22.29 acre park, of which only 0.29 acres are in the Village of Bronxville with the remaining acreage almost evenly split between the Cities of Yonkers and Mount Vernon. As a consequence, the Village Police Department cannot patrol on land in other cities/jurisdictions.

-The Nature Preserve is the Village’s largest park/open space comprising 5.7 acres, 4.7 of which are actually in the Town of Eastchester.

-The Bronx River, which forms a Village boundary, is a tributary of the East River with its source in North Castle, 24 miles to the north.

-The Village’s temperatures range from an average low of 39° in January to a high of 86° in July.

-The Village has 2434 public parking spaces, an increase from 2000 spaces in 1992.

-On our Village owned roads, the intersection of Cedar Street and Pondfield Road was tracked as the most dangerous during a three year study encompassing the years of 2015, 2016 and 2017.

-John Peter Zenger wrote an article about an Eastchester town election that heavily criticized the New York governor. Litigation over the article led to the immortalization of freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights, hence the name Bill of Rights Plaza at the intersection of Mill Road and Route 22 in Eastchester.

-As of the last Census, Westchester had a population just slightly under one million residents, one in five of whom were born out of the United States, and one in eight who wake up hungry. The county is served by 48 public school districts, 118 private and parochial grammar and secondary schools and 14 colleges.

-Union Church in Pocantico Hills has nine Chagall stained glass windows and one Henri Matisse. The Matisse “Rose Window” was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to honor his mother.  Matisse finished the design just two days before he died.  The Chagall windows, the only series in America, were commissioned by David Rockefeller.

-The first chapter of the Garden Club of America was founded in Bedford in 1938.

-Paddle tennis was invented in Scarsdale in 1928 and first played at the Fox Meadow Club there in 1931.

-Yonkers resident Leo Baekland invented one of the world’s first and most useful plastics in 1907 and formed the Bakelite Corporation in Yonkers in 1910. It manufactured the glossy brightly colored plastics that defined the 50’s and 60’s.

-In 1888, Yonkers resident John Reid became the first person to play golf on American soil naming his three hole course in a local apple orchard, St. Andrews.