Strange and wonderful New York!  After over 300 miles of walking in New England I have officially entered a new region of America, complete with its own myths, its own history, and its own quirks.  The first quirky thing I discover about New York is that the towns, villages, cities, or whatever political entity in which people find themselves living, are really confusing.  A case in point is the “Village” of Port Chester, the first place I find myself in Westchester County.  At a mere 2.5 square miles, it is a tiny place befitting its sobriquet of “village,” but the “village” has a population of about 28,000.  This density, over 10,000 inhabitants per square mile, is very unlike a village, and the character of the village is distinctly urban as befits a place so densely populated.  Port Chester belongs to a larger entity called the Town of Rye, which apparently includes a village north of Port Chester called Rye Brook, as well as part of Mamaroneck Village, but NOT the City of Rye, which borders Port Chester to the south and sits between Port Chester and Mamaroneck.  To make matters even more confusing, Mamaroneck Village is partly in the Town of Rye and partly in the Town of Mamaroneck.  Basically I am never quite sure where I am at any given moment for the first few miles I walk in Westchester County.  I could be in the Town of Rye or the City of Rye, the Village of Mamaroneck or the Town of Mamaroneck (or both I guess), or I could be in the Village of Larchmont, which is part of the Town of Mamaroneck.

        A partial explanation for all this confusion can be traced to the strange history of this part of Westchester County, which bounced back and forth between the colonies of New York and Connecticut until the end of the seventeenth century, when a somewhat solid border was drawn between the two colonies, and the town of Rye (which once encompassed all of the above-mentioned areas plus the adjacent communities of Harrison and White Plains) was decisively made a part of New York.  Settled primarily by Englishmen from the colonies of what is today Connecticut, the area was originally under Dutch jurisdiction.  After being taken by the English, then retaken by the Dutch and finally formally ceded to the English, the boundaries of the New York Colony were vague, and the inhabitants of Rye were quite happy to be a part of Connecticut.  However, a treaty to settle the borders in the late seventeenth century removed Rye from Connecticut to New York. The somewhat more liberal land laws in New York caused a great amount of friction between the townspeople of Rye and the government of the colony.  In particular, the granting of a large tract of land, called Harrison’s Purchase, to John Harrison, despite the vigorous protests of the town proprietor’s of Rye, who claimed to have purchased the land already, provided sufficient cause for the town of Rye to secede from New York and rejoin Connecticut.  Unfortunately for the unhappy residents of Rye, the crown saw fit to return Rye to New York in 1700, “forever and thereafter to be and remain under the government of the Province of New York” (1).

        In New England towns were somewhat more formal in their development but in New York the crown had more control over the disbursement of land, and land was often given away rather extravagantly to favored individuals, who had a significant amount of power over the people under their jurisdiction. New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania were all “Proprietary Colonies.”  In the case of New York, the colony was under the control of the Duke of York, who never visited the colony and chose to delegate to appointed governors the day-to-day running of affairs.  The Duke of York eventually ruled as James II until his defeat in the Glorious Revolution in 1688.  Subsequently New York finally and permanently acquired the right to an assembly.  Too late for the people of Rye, however, to reverse the course of their fate. 

        All of this is new to me as a New Englander.  I profess to a certain haughty notion that the history of Boston in the colonial period is of far more interest and importance to the subsequent events leading to the Revolution, but as I delve into the local history of Port Chester, Rye, Westchester County, and New York State, I can see that the history of this area has its own unique and important twists and turns.

        Sometimes the demographics can mislead me as they did in Port Chester.  The initial appearance of the area confirmed my image that it was the place where the people who work in Rye and Greenwich live.  When I say “work” I mean the cooks, the cleaners, and the gardeners, as Port Chester is a heavily Hispanic and low income area. The first half mile along North Main Street is dull, and the neighborhood is fairly grim, which I expected. However, when I cross the railroad tracks things immediately pick up as I enter the lively downtown. It is true that Main Street in Port Chester is lined with unprepossessing (which I have found does not mean poor quality) Latin American restaurants and somewhat shabby-looking stores catering to the Hispanic community.  But this ethnic diversity is infused with a bit of the happening and the hip as well, which is immediately apparent as I pass a gourmet store cum cafe called Bastianich and Batali’s Tarry Market, which is owned by yes, that Bastianich (Joe) and that Batali (Mario).  So obviously, this little town has got some buzz.  I do stop in for a pastry and a cafe latte but not until I pick out one of the enticing restaurants lining Main Street in which to eat lunch.  I choose a Peruvian place called El Festejo, which turns out to be a great choice because my ceviche is excellent and because they are showing on the television highlights of Premier League games I have missed this week while walking. The program is in Spanish of course but I enjoy the practice trying to translate.  The mix of quality but unfussy ethnic restaurants and the type of cafe I would expect to see in Madison Square or Chelsea, along with the pleasing density of the downtown area, makes Port Chester seem somehow much more alive than many of the towns I have visited along the roads. I have to admit I was quite pleasantly surprised.  Then I discovered a July 2010 article in the New York Times essentially saying the same thing.  So if you don’t take my word for it, listen to the Gray Lady.

*****

            The original name for Port Chester was Saw Pits--I am not making this up-- but the townspeople sensibly changed the name in 1837 to one slightly more mellifluous and subsequently incorporated as a village in 1868.  The name Saw Pits is clearly shown on Colles’s map of the post road from 1789, the name deriving from the primary occupation here in the colonial era, which was sawing logs to build boats.  The area hardly had enough population to warrant a mention even at the end of the eighteenth century, but its useful location on the Byram River and the burgeoning ship building industry contributed to its growth in the nineteenth century until, in the census of 1870, Port Chester’s 3800 residents made up half of the total population of Rye. 

        An ancient path known as the Westchester Path once made its way from Manhattan to the ford at the place the Byram River Bridge is now located.  This path is very difficult to trace today and was essentially superseded by the establishment of the Boston Road, or King’s Highway, in 1679, which roughly followed Main Street through Port Chester. At the south end of Downtown Main Street divides into two streets, Grace Church Street, which forks left and Boston Post Road, which forks right.  Both roads end up at the same place, the center of Rye.  Grace Church Street is slightly longer but winds through a lovely old neighborhood. Boston Post Road is lined with malls almost non-stop to Rye and crosses two interstate highways (95 and 287).  My heart tells me to take Grace Church Street but my head says that Boston Post Road, in this instance, is probably the right path to follow.  I take Grace Church Street anyway, because I know that if I am wrong I will follow the Boston Post Road regardless as I am obliged to stay overnight in a hotel near it anyway.  The street is hilly, and it is clear that the alternate route passed along a valley floor, but I hold out hope that perhaps the low-lying ground was a swamp in the seventeenth century. After I cross over the Interstate I enter the City of Rye, and the neighborhood immediately is transformed from a somewhat mundane neighborhood into a lovely area, lined with very expensive-looking homes with big yards. After half an hour I reach the center of Rye.  I head into the Rye Free Reading Room and discover after an hour or so of research, that Grace Church Street was not the correct route and that Boston Post Road is the original route, despite the unpleasant aspect it has today.

        I should have known.  The Episcopal Church is shown on Colles’s Map near mile 31 of the post road, a little east of the main road on a road that branches off;  the road must be Grace Church Street as I passed right by the church on Grace Church Street (hence the name of the street, for the original name of the church established around 1700).  I also found a reference to a record of the town issuing an order to build Grace Church Street in 1701, much later than the establishment of the King’s Highway.

        In the event I decide to retrace my steps along Boston Post Road for 1.5 miles until I reach the junction at which I turned onto Grace Church Street.  My hotel is nearby so it is not the end of the world.  Along the way I cross over the railroad tracks and overlook Rye Station (uninteresting), then I cross over Interstate 95 (noisy and ugly), then Interstate 287 (ditto). Then follows a long stretch of commercial development (awful); only places like Staples, Kohls, Petco, McDonalds, etc. stand out amongst the sea of ugly buildings.  I cross the railroad tracks again and finally reach Main Street at the original junction, thus completing a loop.  Despite the fact that I was forced to walk an extra couple of miles through a commercial wasteland I am pleased to be back in the center of Port Chester for a little while longer.

        The sun is setting, it is cold, and I have walked from Stamford to Rye, New York today, a total of 12 miles on the route of the old post road but substantially more with all the detours and backtracking I have done.  Time to kick off my shoes for a while, rest up, and prepare to head back to Rye and beyond tomorrow.  My stop is the Courtyard Marriot near the highway; Sarah Knight stopped in Rye center at the house of a French family in December 1704.  My hotel is nice, even if it is in a boring location.  Knight spends almost a page of her diary lamenting her visit to the inn at which she stopped for the night, complaining about the poor quality of the food (“ I desired a fricasee, which the Frenchman undertaking, mannaged so contrary to my notion of cookery, that I hasten’d to bed superless”), finding fault with the passageway to her room (“which had such a narrow passage that I had almost stopt by the Bulk of my Body”) and bemoaning the uncomfortable bed (“I found my covering as scanty as the bed was hard”). She rose at 3 a.m., such was her “haste to depart this place.”(2)

        This episode, though not atypical of Madam Knight’s acerbic commentary, encapsulates for me the exotic strangeness of this part of the journey. I am in a new state with a very different history, much more influenced by the introduction of people from countries other than England: the Dutch, the French, and today’s exotic blend of Central and South American residents of Port Chester.  New York already seems different, more exotic, than New England. Charles Baird, in his History of Rye, tells us that the man who ran the tavern at which Sarah Knight stopped was a Frenchman, a Huguenot refugee from France who anglicized his name to Stang but whose French name was Daniel L’Estrange-- translation-- STRANGE!!