Yonkers, New York This article is about the town/city in the state of New York.
Yonkers, New York View of Yonkers from the New Jersey Palisades View of Yonkers from the New Jersey Palisades Flag of Yonkers, New York Flag Official seal of Yonkers, New York Nickname(s): The Central City, The City of Gracious Living, The City of Seven Hills, The City with Vision, The Sixth Borough, The Terrace City Location in Westchester County and the State of New York Location in Westchester County and the State of New York Body Yonkers City Council Yonkers (US / j ek rz/) is the fourth most crowded city in the U.S.
State of New York (behind New York City, Buffalo, and Rochester), and the most crowded city in Westchester County, with a populace of 195,976 (according to the 2010 Census).
It is an inner suburb of New York City, directly to the north of the Bronx and approximately two miles (3 km) north of the northernmost point in Manhattan.
Yonkers' downtown is centered on a plaza known as Getty Square, where the municipal government is located.
The region also homes momentous small-town businesses and non-profits, and serves as a primary retail core for Yonkers and the northwest Bronx.
The town/city is home to a several attractions, including the Hudson River Museum; Saw Mill River Daylighting, wherein a parking lot was removed to uncover a river; Science Barge; Sherwood House; and Yonkers Raceway, a harness racing track that has renovated its grounds and clubhouse and added legalized video slot machine gambling in 2006 in a "racino" called Empire City.
Major shopping areas can be found in Getty Square, on South Broadway, at the Cross County Shopping Center and Westchester's Ridge Hill, and along Central Park Avenue, informally called "Central Ave" by region residents, a name it takes officially a several miles north in White Plains.
The territory on which the town/city is assembled was once part of a 24,000-acre (97-square-kilometer) territory grant called Colen Donck that ran from the current Manhattan-Bronx border at Marble Hill northwards for 12 miles (19 km), and from the Hudson River eastwards to the Bronx River.
Van der Donck was known locally as the Jonkheer or Jonker (etymologically, "young gentleman," derivation of old Dutch jong (young) and heer ("lord"); in effect, "Esquire"), a word from which the name "Yonkers" is directly derived. Van der Donck assembled a saw foundry near where the Nepperhan Creek met the Hudson; the Nepperhan is now also known as the Saw Mill River.
Frederick was a wealthy Dutchman who by the time of his death had amassed an enormous estate, which encompassed the entire undivided City of Yonkers, as well as a several other Hudson River towns.
The improve was incorporated as a village in the northern part of the Town of Yonkers in 1854 and as a town/city in 1872.
In 1874 the southern part of Yonkers, including Kingsbridge and Riverdale, was took in by New York City as The Bronx.
In 1898, Yonkers (along with Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island) voted on a popular vote to determine if they wanted to turn into part of New York City.
While the results were positive elsewhere, the returns were so negative in Yonkers and neighboring Mount Vernon that those two areas were not encompassed in the merged city, and remained autonomous. Still, some inhabitants call the town/city "the Sixth Borough" referring to its locale on the New York City border, its urban character, and the floundered consolidation vote.
The New York City and Northern Railway Company (later the New York Central Railroad) connected Yonkers to Manhattan and points north from 1888.
Aside from being a manufacturing center, Yonkers also played a major part in the evolution of entertainment in the United States.
"Typical homes of New York company men" in the Colonial Heights neighborhood of Yonkers, 1911. With the loss of jobs in the town/city itself, Yonkers became primarily a residentiary city, and some neighborhoods, such as Crestwood and Park Hill, became prominent with wealthy New Yorkers who wished to live outside Manhattan without giving up urban conveniences.
Yonkers's excellent transit infrastructure, including three commuter barns lines (now two: the Harlem and Hudson Lines) and five parkways and thruways, as well as its 15-minute drive from Manhattan and picturesque prewar homes and apartment buildings, made it a desirable town/city in which to live.
On January 4, 1940, Yonkers resident Edwin Howard Armstrong transmitted the first FM radio broadcast (on station W2 - XCR) from the Yonkers home of C.R.
In 1960, the Enumeration Bureau reported Yonkers's populace as 95.8% white and 4.0% black. The city's struggles with ethnic discrimination and segregation were highlighted in a decades-long federal lawsuit.
Sand ruled that Yonkers had engaged in institutional segregation in housing and school policies for over 40 years and tied the illegal concentration of enhance housing and private housing discrimination to the city's resistance to ending ethnic isolation in its enhance schools. In the 1980s and 1990s, Yonkers advanced a nationwide reputation for ethnic tension, based on a long-term battle between the City of Yonkers and the NAACP over the building of subsidized low-income housing projects.
The town/city planned to use federal funding for urban renewal accomplishments inside Downtown Yonkers exclusively; other groups, led by the NAACP, felt that the resulting concentration of low-income housing in traditionally poor neighborhoods perpetuated poverty.
Yonkers attained national/international consideration during the summer of 1988, when it reneged on its previous agreement to build promised municipal enhance housing in the easterly portions of the city, an agreement it had made in a consent decree after losing an appeal in 1987.
After this reversal, the town/city was found in contempt of the federal courts, and United States precinct court Judge Leonard Sand imposed a fine on Yonkers which started at $1 and doubled every day until the town/city capitulated to the federally mandated plan.
Yonkers remained in contempt of the courts until September 9, 1988, when the City Council relented in the wake of library closures and sanitation cutbacks and while looking at massive town/city layoffs, which would have been required to continue its resistance to desegregation.
Yonkers's youngest mayor (elected at age 28), Wasicsko was a lonely figure in town/city politics, which was scarred with the stigma of the "Balkanization of Yonkers".
A Kawasaki barns cars assembly plant opened in 1986 in the former Otis plant, producing the new R142 - A, R143, R160 - B, and R188 cars for the New York City Subway, and the PA4 and PA5 series for PATH.
The Irish-American improve is prominent in Yonkers, and the town/city hosts one of the nation's earliest St.
Yonkers also has a momentous Portuguese population.
Recently a large number of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia have called Yonkers home.
Yonkers still has a large Slavic community.
Yonkers also has a large Arab population, coinciding with the high percentage of Arabic speakers in Yonkers.
The improve settled in Yonkers in the late 1940s and has since continued a steady growth.
There also once was a momentous Jewish populace (the Broadway plays Lost in Yonkers and Hello Dolly take place inside the Yonkers Jewish community).
High-rise apartements along the Hudson River in Northwest Yonkers The town/city is spread out over hills rising from near sea level at the easterly bank of the Hudson River to 416 feet (126 m) at Sacred Heart Church, whose spire can be seen from Long Island, New York City, and New Jersey.
The town/city is situated in 20.3 square miles (52.6 km ), including 18.1 square miles (46.8 km ) of territory and 2.2 square miles (5.8 km ) (11.02%) of water, as stated to the United States Enumeration Bureau.
The Bronx River separates Yonkers from Mount Vernon, Tuckahoe, Eastchester, Bronxville, and Scarsdale to the east.
On the south, Yonkers borders the Riverdale, Woodlawn, and Wakefield sections of The Bronx.
In addition, the southernmost point of Yonkers is only 2 miles (3 kilometres) north of the northernmost point of Manhattan when calculated from Broadway & Caryl Avenue in Yonkers to Broadway & West 228th Street in the Marble Hill section of Manhattan.
Much of the town/city interval up around the Saw Mill River, which enters Yonkers from the north and feeds into the Hudson River in the Getty Square neighborhood.
Although Yonkers contains many small residentiary enclaves and communities, it can conveniently be divided into four quarters, demarcated by the Saw Mill River.
Northeast Yonkers is a primarily Irish-American and Italian-American area.
Central Avenue (officially titled Central Park Avenue) provides an abundance of shopping for Yonkers residents.
Northeastern Yonkers contains the upscale neighborhoods of Crestwood, Colonial Heights, and Cedar Knolls, as well as the wealthy enclaves of Beech Hill and Lawrence Park West.
Northeast Yonkers is somewhat more expensive than the rest of the city, and due to the adjacency of a several Metro-North commuter barns stations, its inhabitants tend to be working in corporate positions in Manhattan.
Northwest Yonkers is a compilation of widely varying neighborhoods, spanning from the Hudson River to around the New York State Thruway/I-87 and from Ashburton Avenue north to the Hastings-on-Hudson border.
The populace of northwestern Yonkers is probably the most ethnically diverse in the city.
The two block section of Palisade Avenue between Chase and Roberts Avenues in northwest Yonkers is colloquially known as "the north end" or "the end".
One part of Yonkers that is sometimes overlooked is Nepera Park.
Many of the businesses and type of architecture in southeast Yonkers bear a greater resemblance to certain parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island than to points north.
This is not surprising as southeastern Yonkers is largely inside walking distance of the Riverdale, Woodlawn, and Wakefield sections of the Bronx.
Many inhabitants regard easterly Mc - Lean Avenue, home to a vibrant Irish improve shared with the Woodlawn section of the Bronx, to be the true core of Yonkers.
Similarly, a portion of Midland Avenue in the Dunwoodie section has been called the "Little Italy" of Yonkers.
Landmarks of southeastern Yonkers include the Cross County Shopping Center, Yonkers Raceway, and St.
Getty Square, Yonkers's downtown, is the civic center and central company precinct of the city.
Much of southwest Yonkers interval densely along the multiple barns and street car (now bus) lines along South Broadway and in Getty Square, connecting to New York City.
Clusters of apartment buildings surrounded the stations of the Yonkers branch of the New York and Putnam Railroad and the Third Avenue Railway street car lines, and these buildings still remain although now served by the Bee-Line Bus System; The barns companies themselves assembled neighborhoods of different housing types ranging from apartment buildings to large mansions in areas like Park Hill wherein the barns also assembled a funicular to connect it with the train station in the valley.
Off South Broadway and Yonkers Avenue one can find residentiary neighborhoods, such as Lowerre, Nodine Hill, Park Hill, and Hudson Park (off the Hudson River) with a mix of building styles ranging from dense clusters of apartment buildings, blocks of retail with apartements above, multifamily row homes, and detached single-family homes. Other neighborhoods of these types, although with a larger number of detached homes, are Ludlow Park, Hudson Park and Van Cortlandt Crest, off Riverdale Avenue, right over the Riverdale border - the former alongside the Hudson River.
The region is also home to momentous historical and educational establishments including the historic Philipse Manor Hall (a New York State Historic Site that homes one of three papier mache ceilings in the United States), The Science Barge, Beczak Environmental Education Center, and a 2003 Yonkers Public Library. The revitalization of the Getty Square region has helped to nurture expansion for Southwest Yonkers.
There is also a new "Sculpture Meadow on the Hudson," renovation of a Victorian-era pier, and a new enhance library homed in the remodeled Otis elevator factory.
Peter Kelly's award-winning fine dining restaurant X20 - Xaviars on Hudson is positioned at the renovated pier with much success. There are new proposals along with the current projects which are intended to revitalize downtown Yonkers.
The Yonkers City Council consists of seven members, six each propel from one of six districts, as well as a Council President to preside over the council.
Yonkers is typically a Democratic stronghold just like the rest of Westchester County and most of New York state on the nationwide level.
At a small-town level, recent mayors of Yonkers have encompassed Republicans Phil Amicone and John Spencer, while the Yonkers City Council has mostly been controlled by Republicans.
In the State Assembly, Yonkers is represented by Democrats J.
Public schools in Yonkers are directed by Yonkers Public Schools.
Sarah Lawrence College, which gives its address as Bronxville/Yonkers, is actually positioned in Yonkers. Westchester Community College operates a number of extension centers in Yonkers, with the biggest one at the Cross County Shopping Center. The Japanese School of New York was positioned in Yonkers for one year; on August 18, 1991 the school moved to Yonkers from Queens, New York City and on September 1, 1992 classes began at its current locale in Greenwich, Connecticut. St.
Academy for Jewish Religion, a rabbinical and cantorial school, is positioned in the Getty Square neighborhood of Yonkers.
Yonkers has the eleventh-highest rate of enhance transit ridership among metros/cities in the United States, and 27% of Yonkers homeholds do not own a car. Bus service in Yonkers is provided by Westchester County Bee-Line Bus System, the second-largest bus fitness in New York State, along with some MTA Bus Company express routes to Manhattan.
Yonkers is the top origin and destination for the Bee-Line Bus service area, including Westchester and the northern Bronx, with the Getty Square intermodal core seeing passenger levels in the millions annually. Yonkers is served by two heavy-rail commuter lines.
Hudson Line Metro-North Railroad stations furnish commuter service to New York City: Ludlow, Yonkers, Glenwood and Greystone.
New York Water Taxi formerly directed a ferry service from downtown Yonkers to Manhattan's Financial District, but it ceased in December 2009. Major limited-access roads in Yonkers include Interstate 87 (the New York State Thruway), the Saw Mill, Bronx River, Sprain Brook and Cross County parkways.
The chief line of the former New York and Putnam Railroad running through the middle of Yonkers has been converted into a paved walking and bicycling path, called the South County Trailway.
It runs north-south in Yonkers from the Hastings-on-Hudson border in the north to the Bronx border in the south at Van Cortlandt Park where it is unpaved as of 2014 and is referred to as the Putnam Trail.
The historic Croton Aqueduct tunnel has a hard-packed dirt trail, called the Old Croton Aqueduct Trailway, running above it for most of its length in Yonkers, with a several on-street routes on the edge of the Getty Square neighborhood.
The town/city of Yonkers is protected by 459 firefighters of the town/city of Yonkers Fire Department (YFD), under the command of a Fire Commissioner and 3 Deputy Chiefs.
Founded in 1896, the YFD operates out of 11 Fire Stations, positioned throughout the town/city in 2 Battalions, under the command of 1 Assistant Chief per shift. The Yonkers Fire Department also operates a fire apparatus fleet of 10 Engines, 6 Ladders, 1 Squad, 1 Rescue, 1 Fireboat, 1 Air Cascade Unit, 1 USAR (Urban Search And Rescue)Collapse Unit, 1 Foam Unit, 1 Haz-Mat Unit, and various other special, support, and reserve units.
In the Twilight Zone episode, "What's in the Box" (1964) William Demarest's character, cab driver Joe Britt, mentions Yonkers as one of his customers' locations as a reason for coming home late from work.
Vincent, a 1997 Sundance Film entrant in the non-competition Spectrum section, and Yonkers Joe, a scheduled 2009 release by Magnolia Pictures, starring Chazz Palminteri and Christine Lahti. Yonkers' locations also furnish the setting for A Tale of Two Pizzas, a "Romeo and Juliet" infamous played out among two rival pizza owners.
Yonkers is also the locale for many primary recording projects: Catch Me if You Can, with Tom Hanks and Leonardo Di - Caprio; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet; Mona Lisa Smile, with Julia Roberts; A Beautiful Mind, with Russell Crowe, Big Daddy, with Adam Sandler, The Preacher's Wife (a remake of The Bishop's Wife), with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston; and Kate and Leopold, with Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman.
Yonkers was also used as a recording locale in the movie Riding in Cars with Boys.
Neil Simon's play Lost In Yonkers, set in the city.
A season 4 episode of Bar Rescue was filmed in Yonkers.
National Register of Historic Places listings in Yonkers, New York "Interactive Map: Dutch Place Names in New York | Dutch New York".
Nevius, Michelle & Nevius, James (2009), Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, New York: Free Press, ISBN 1416 - 58997 - X, p.177-78 "Wants Subway Extended: Yonkers Mayor to Ask City to Take Over N.Y.C.
The Routes Not Taken: A Trip Through New York City's Unbuilt Subway System.
"New York - Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Cities and Other Places: Earliest Enumeration to 1990".
"Sherwood Park Cemetery, Yonkers, Westchester County, New York, United States - Nearby Cities, Nearby Cemeteries and Genealogy Resources - Histopolis".
"Yonkers (city), New York".
"Yonkers Victorian Homes".
"Welcome to the Yonkers Public Library!-Hours and Directions".
Westchester Yonkers " and "1992.9.1 Connecticut Greenwich " "Ferry Between Manhattan and Yonkers Is Set to Stop", New York Times.
List of Fire Stations; City of Yonkers.
List of Fire Department Apparatus; City of Yonkers.
Filmmaker: "Tribeca Director Interview: Robert Celestino, Yonkers Joe"[permanent dead link], April 23, 2008 Magnolia Pictures: Yonkers Joe press notes "Tyler, The Creator Gets Odd In 'Yonkers'".
Kamza binjakezim me Yonkers Archived October 30, 2011, at the Wayback Machine., INA, 2011-10-28 (in Albanian) A Documentary History of Yonkers, New York: The Unsettled Years, 1853 1860 (Vol.
Weigold, Marilyn E., Yonkers in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014).
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Yonkers, New York.
Yonkers Arts - a origin for all cultural and creative affairs in Yonkers and a Directory of Yonkers Artists Municipalities and communities of Westchester County, New York, United States Mayors of metros/cities with populations exceeding 100,000 in New York
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Yonkers, New York - 1646 establishments in North America - 1646 establishments in the Dutch Empire - Cities in New York - Cities in the New York urbane region - Cities in Westchester County, New York - Establishments in New Netherland - Former suburbs in New York - Former villages in New York - Populated places established in 1646 - Populated places on the Hudson River
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