Page 75 - Westchester Magazine - January 2011

(8)We Have a Skyline Now
When standing in Westchester’s most metropolitan area in 2001, what did you see when you trained your eyes skyward or looked for the horizon? Chances are, not much.
Back then, our tallest building was the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, standing at a mere 271 feet tall. That’s hardly what anyone could call a skyline.
Pretty early in the decade, for better or for worse, our buildings started growing—mostly thanks to mega- developer Louis Cappelli. In 2001, he proposed a build- ing a mere 49 feet higher than the courthouse: New Roc Tower. He beat his own record again with the 35-story Trump Tower in White Plains—and then again with Trump Plaza in New Rochelle, which stands 40 stories. But the jewel in the crown of our city skyline is the Ritz-Carlton, Westchester, which celebrated its “topping off” in October 2006. Standing at 44 stories, the ultra-swank hotel is still the county’s tallest building—and it lets you know it, emanating a cool blue light for everyone along 287 to marvel at.
Okay, so our “skyline” is really two: one in New Rochelle and another in White Plains. You can’t capture it all on one postcard like New York City can, but, like the Empire State Building, these towers are a symbol of Westchester’s growth and desire to be noticed.
And we aren’t the only ones who have taken note. “Before moving to Westchester County,” says Mark R. LePage, partner architect with Fivecat Studio in Pleasantville, “I often traveled the 287 corridor through White Plains en route to my New Jersey hometown. Although the city was certainly a landmark, I always considered the bulky skyline dull and uninteresting. The city’s skyline was not much different than the city itself— outdated and depressed.”
A lot has changed in the past decade. “In the midst of a modern urban renaissance, White Plains has built a recognizable visual identity," Le Page says. "The emerging glass and steel skyline speaks of the energy and vibrancy of today’s White Plains.”
Best of all, what stands at our tallest point isn’t some tourist-choked observation deck—it’s the Best-of-the- Decade-winning restaurant, 42. Say what you will about our skyline—we really know how to enjoy the view.
Taxes have been the bulk of our county’s troubles for as long as most of us can remember. School taxes are no excep- tion. Rising steadily over the course of the decade, the average school tax has increased more than 39 percent since 2001. The leader in Westchester school tax rates in 2010 is the Briarcliff Manor Union Free School District, at $1,507.5 per $1,000 of assessed value. Just 10 years ago, Briarcliff Manor’s rate was $846.3 per $1,000, which, at the time, was the highest rate. That’s nearly a 100-percent increase in the high- est tax rate of schools in the county.
Quick: Where do you go when, on a warm and breezy day, you want to have a drink or a bite to eat along the Hudson River? X2O? Half Moon? Red Hat on the River? The Day Boat Café? The Boathouse?
A decade ago, none of these summertime staples would have been an option. The Hudson was not where we went to have fun. The river wasn’t for recreation—it was for work. (Not glamorous work, either—Riverkeeper called it the “region’s sewer.”) The water was polluted, the sites were choked off from the rest of the county, and it still had the workhorse vibe of lingering manufacturing industries, many of which had already taken flight, leaving chemical- filled messes in their wake. A county report in 1998—two years after the big GM plant in Sleepy Hollow closed its doors—found that of the 49 miles of Westchester’s Hudson waterfront, 12 miles were blocked by train tracks, seven miles were still being used for current and former industry, and nine miles were undeveloped altogether.
This decade, we reclaimed our waterfront from the grip of old industry. The Red Hat, for example, was once the site of a company that manufactured greenhouses and conservatories. Now, its rooftop bar makes it a prime des- tination for riverside drinks. Yonkers’s former Otis Elevator factory is now the public library. The parking lot adjacent to that GM factory is now Ichabod’s Landing, a community of 44 townhomes and a smattering of retail space.
And today, we can take boats, kayak, and, yes, even fish in the Hudson (although the jury’s still out on eating what we catch). As a result, we’ve added some prime Hudson-side parkland—some with kayak launches— such as the Irvington Waterfront Park (once 12 acres of contaminated soil), and the newest section of the county RiverWalk, which opened in Croton-on-Hudson in 2009.
Hopefully, next decade we’ll be saying the same things about the similarly scrappy Byram River. Revitalization is already underway, with funky restaurants like bartaco along its shores.
WWW.WESTCHESTERMAGAZINE.COM / JANUARY 2011 / 73
{9} We Value Education—With Our Dollars
[10]We’ve Reclaimed The River