NEXTCHESTER:
The Rise, Fall & Redesign of Westchester County, New York, USA, Earth.
A Real-Time eBook by Evan Kreeger
Begun on Friday, February 20th, 2015 @ 3:24pm EDT
in Tarrytown, NY, USA.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Part I. Prelude: Circa 107,985 B.C — Thursday, September 3, 1609
Part II. Rise: Thursday, November 1, 1683 — Tuesday, January 3, 1961
Part III. Fall: Sunday, September 14, 2008 — Thursday, October 2, 2008
Part IV. Redesign: Wednesday, January 1, 2020 — …
Reader’s Notes
Appendices
Illustrations
Index
Author’s Note
[This is a work-in-progress, just like life]
I first moved to Westchester County with my family from New York City’s Manhattan Island’s Upper West Side’s Riverside Drive in the spring of 1974. When people ask me where I come from, I often reply, “The Seventies” instead of New York. The older I get, the more the past seems like an actual place.
My DNA comes from the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe. My ancestors first migrated to New York in the early 20th century. My mother’s family started out in the garment trade and eventually found their way into real estate and philanthropy. My father’s family began by doing odd jobs and wound up working in the film and television industries. Ever since I first learned my ABC’s and 123’s on Sesame Street as a wee little lad, I have been a lover of English and Math.
Living in Westchester has been my common core life experience. I’ve lived in Armonk, Larchmont, Rye, Somers and now Tarrytown. I have been to every one of the cities, towns and villages in my home county. I truly love it here. It’s not perfect, but it’s home. In some ways, Westchester seems to exist within an inner dome.
When I was playing Pong in the mid-70s in my family’s suburban Windmill Farm home in Armonk, there were nearly 900,000 residents in Westchester. Now, there are nearly a million. Let’s now compare that population statistic to my birthplace. When I was born on Tuesday, October 27, 1970 @ 5:51am Eastern Daylight Time @ New York Hospital on East 68th Street & York Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, there were approximately 7,894,862 New Yorkers (as in residents of NYC’s 5 boroughs.) As of this writing in 2015, there are estimated to be 8,405,837 New Yorkers living in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.
When I was born in 1970, there were about 18,236,967 people living in New York State. Now, there are 19,746,227. In 1970, there were 203,211,926 Americans living, working and playing in the United States. Now, there are 320,386,661. In 1970, there were almost 4 billion Earthlings living on all 7 continents and various islands. Now, there are over 7 billion.
If you’d like to get a sneak preview of what is happening every moment of every day on Spaceship Earth, all you need to do is point your Web browser to the US and World Population Clock @ http://www.census.gov/popclock
By the Fifties — the 2050s — the United Nations projects that there will be over 9 billion human beings. When my parents were growing up in the Fifties — the 1950s — there was just over 2.5 billion folks on our planet. When Giovanni Da Verazanno became the first European to sail into what would eventually be called New York Harbor on Thursday, April 17, 1524, there were only 548 million Earthlings.
Nextchester is a story about many things, one of which is mathematics. In 2015, 42.11% of New York State’s population lives in .56 % of its total geography. While it is certainly true that mainstream environmentalists favor large numbers of people living in densely concentrated cities, there is a growing minority of eco-heads who feel somewhat differently. I am one of those people.
Chronologically, it makes perfect sense to me why so much of the Empire State currently lives in New York City. Logically, however, it makes very little sense. IMO, NYC was never really designed to offer a democratic quality of life to a majority of its residents beyond the 3.5 million population demographics post-19th century. I am well aware that my perspective is not a popular one. It is probably fair to say that my POV can be interpreted as just plain bananas.
But it doesn’t take King Kong on the top of the Empire State Building to understand that NYC, Version 2015.0 and beyond, is a very curious phenomenon. You may be wondering why I am devoting so much time to the Big Apple when this is supposed to be a story about Westchester County. Ever since Westchester County was founded in 1683 by the brand new New York State Legislature in Albany, a mere 19 years after New York City was founded by the British in 1664, a mere 40 years after New Amsterdam was founded by the Dutch in 1624, Westchester and Gotham have been umbilically connected to one another.
In computer science, when you alter a line of code to a parent object in an object-oriented programming language, you alter the code to its child object. In maternity, when a mother eats food, its baby in utero is nourished. For good or for ill, what happens in New York City, happens in Westchester County. Ditto that for all of NYC’s other immediate environs (Long Island, New Jersey, etc.)
This eBook takes the rather unorthodox stance that New York City is going to lose a significant amount of its population over the coming decades to upstate, out-of-state, out-of-region and out-of-country migrations. How do I define significant? Any drop in NYC’s population would be significant because it is hard-wired to “grow, baby, grow!” So whether the figure is in the hundreds-of-thousands or the millions, this would be a paradigm shift.
Since census data was first collected in the City That Never Sleeps Nor Rests Nor Naps in 1698, there have only been two times that its neo-native population declined. One was during the 1950s — the Golden Age of Mass Suburbanization — and the other was during the 1970s — the Ford To City: Drop Dead Era — both time periods which were not coincidentally strongly impacted by the ability of oil to freely flow — or not so freely flow — into America’s exponentially-increasing automobile tank population.
Which is to say, this eBook also foresees that Westchester County will experience a similar drop in population density as its parent city-state in the days, weeks, months, years and decades to come. A recent New York magazine cover story spoke volumes about the extreme fiscal state of NYC’s skyline. “New York is the new Swiss Bank Account” the headline boldly proclaimed. The article exposed just how much concentrated global wealth is invested in New York City’s ultra-wealthy skyscrapers.
When you push any complex system to its limits in an extreme fashion, strange things start to happen. Exceptions become the new rules and old rules become the new exceptions. Now, money isn’t everything. Nevertheless, in a culture that still has a lot of collective nausea from the global financial collapse meltdown mishegoss OMG WTF of ‘08, the clock is ticking loudly indeed. Now that we’ve gotten all of that jazz out of the way, let’s improvise our way back to the main character of our story.
North, south, east, west; on many levels, Westchester is a fantastic community. To the north, the glorious Hudson Valley. To the south, the dynamic Big Apple. To the east, pleasant New England and the Long Island Sound. And to the west: New Jersey, Rockland County and the Hudson River. Every place-name has it own particular ebb and flow.
Tick, tock, tick, tock; on another level, Westchester is a county whose residents face a lot of daily challenges. To the north, a fairly dysfunctional New York State Assembly and Senate government in Albany. To the south, a deeply partisan Congress in Washington, D.C. To the east, a seemingly infinite loop of wars in the fossil fuel-rich Middle East. And to the west: the Spectra Energy Corporation in Houston, Texas.
If there was a tipping point that compelled me to write this narrative, it was my growing awareness of Spectra’s Algonquin natural gas pipeline expansion in the Northeast, which finds its way into Westchester during its 1,000 mile+ journey from New Jersey to Massachusetts just shy of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant in Buchanan before it continues its quest northeastward beneath the Hudson River. I learned about this local county development from Susan Van Dolsen and her fellow progressive activists. Ms. Van Dolsen co-founded the grass roots Westchester For Change group in 2010. In 2013, she co-founded the Stop Alongquin Pipeline Expansion organization (a.k.a SAPE.) Susan and her change agents’ ongoing efforts can be tracked @ http://www.meetup.com/Westchester-for-Change and @ http://sape2016.org.
The founding fathers of Spectra’s Algonquin expansion project is led by their CEO Greg Abel. Originally from Canada, Mr. Ebel has aggregated a very impressive career in politics, banking and non-renewable energy. Spoiler alert: although my personal values are about divesting from fossil fuels, I do not view Team Spectra as “the enemy” or “villains” in this story. I view them as exactly what they are: a remotely located billion dollar corporation based upon the principles of fracking, which is now illegal in New York State. The reason their pipeline is being expanded in Westchester is because the fracking extraction doesn’t actually happen within New York State’s boundaries.
Spectra’s HQ in the real world is @ 5400 Westheimer Court, Houston, TX 77056–5310. If you are a fan of Alexander Graham Bell, you can reach them @ (713) 627–5400. If you are an admirer of Tim Berners-Lee, you can find them @ http://www.spectraenergy.com. If you have followed the virtual rabbit through the looking glass of Zuckland, they are located @ https://www.facebook.com/SpectraEnergy. If you speak corporate, their biz presence resides @ https://www.linkedin.com/company/spectra-energy. If you are a little birdie, read their birdsongs @ https://twitter.com/spectraenergy. If YouTube is your friend, screen their vids @ https://www.youtube.com/user/SpectraEnergy. If photo essays speak to you, click on over to https://www.flickr.com/photos/spectra-energy.
The paragraph you just read is data. Here now is my metadata. Houston, Texas and the Southwest in general is a fossil fuel mecca. When you hear the chant, “drill, baby, drill!”, you have the Southwest to thank for a lot of that lingo. Drilling for oil has been going on for centuries in the Don’t Mess With State. If you are a publicly traded corporation on Wall Street like Spectra is — just over 35 miles to the southwest from Westchester’s county seat in White Plains — you don’t stay in your backyard for long. Multinational corporations are designed for infinite expansion beyond the mere mortal boundaries of regular citizenry space-time.
In order to even begin to engage with the complicated intersections of my home nation’s troika of governmental branches — Executive, Judicial and Legislative — that feeds into the roots of enabling and subsidizing fossil fuel-heads like Spectra, I have elected to create a design principle called the happy hexagon. Said principle utilizes the six sides of this geometric shape to visualize how data and experience interacts with human beings and their pursuits of happiness. The happy hexagon also envisions how people become unhappy due to happenstance and habit. In regards to any David and Goliath scenario like the Northeast and Spectra or Keystone XL and the Northwest, I created a variation on the happy hexagon entitled the GiFSiCLe Continuum and the LiCSFiG Conundrum.
As you probably already know, a continuum is defined as “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct” and a conundrum is described as “a confusing and difficult problem or question.” Thank you, Mac OS X dictionary for your words of digital wisdom.
What you probably don’t know is that GiFSiCLe and LiCSFiG are both backronyms that are logical inversions of one another. GiFSiCLe = Global, Federal, State, County Locality. LiCSFiG = Local, County, State, Federal Globality. GiFSiCLe is pronounced “gift-cicle” — as in an icicle made of presents — and LiCSFiG is pronounced “licks-fig” — like the tasting of a fruit.
In the King James Bible within Genesis within the tale of the Garden of Eden, the archetypal theme of forbidden fruit is explored by the interaction between the characters of Adam and Eve and the Serpent and an Apple Tree. This religious story can be interpreted in many ways. One such way is to glean the meaning of “be careful of what you wish for.”
In the Declaration of Independence which led to the United States Constitution which led to the Bill of Rights which led to the post-postmodern profession of the American lawyer in the 21st century, the essential motif of “so much to do, so little time” is a daily time crunch for these experts of printed numbers and words. But if language is in fact “a virus from outer space” as William S. Burroughs once theorized — note: Burroughs knew a thing or two about numbers and words not just because he was a prolific novelist but because he was literally the grandson to William Seward Burrows I who invented the Burroughs adding machine — then anybody who is a linguist on Planet Earth needs to keep their mind wide open.
I am trained as both a storyteller and a designer. I see characters and I see patterns. I believe that we all have the ability to create our own reality. I also believe that we are all shaped in many ways by the habitats we grow up in; both natural and built. Whether or not our life stories are shaped predominantly by external forces or vice versa has to do with the balance we strike in sustaining habit with novelty.
Spectra’s HQ in the real world is @ 5400 Westheimer Court Houston, TX 77056–5310. If you are a fan of Alexander Graham Bell, you can reach them @ (713) 627–5400. If you are an admirer of Tim Berners-Lee, you can find them @ http://www.spectraenergy.com. If you have followed the virtual rabbit through the looking glass of Zuckland, they are located @ https://www.facebook.com/SpectraEnergy. If you speak corporate, their biz presence resides @ https://www.linkedin.com/company/spectra-energy. If you are a little birdie, hear their birdsongs @ https://twitter.com/spectraenergy. If YouTube is your friend, screen their vids @ https://www.youtube.com/user/SpectraEnergy. If photo essays speak to you, click on over to https://www.flickr.com/photos/spectra-energy.
If however, you live in Westchester County or any of the American counties in the Northeast where their Algonquin Pipeline is rapidly being expanded, you may need to consider looking closer to home.
Westchester County, just like any of America’s other 3,142 counties, is full of geographies, languages, histories, themes and experiences. In a day and age when humanity feels so digital, it is individuals and groups who are truly living in real time.
This eBook is being written in real time. Specifically, I am self-publishing on the very public space of Medium, a platisher. As a writer, it is sometimes intimidating to try to rise above all of the noise and speed that our post-postmodern culture is made up of. I hope that these words can offer readers a sense of quiet and slowness. Goodness knows I need more of that in my own life.
The name of this work is Nextchester, which I chose after rejecting several variations on this imaginary title (e.g. Bestchester, Stresschester, Taxchester, etc.) After years of feeling future shocked, I felt it was time for a change of pace. I decided to compose a literary valentine to the county that I call home: Westchester.
This transition has required me to ask myself a lot of tough questions: What do I truly value in my life as I approach my 45th year on this big blue marble? Where do I see myself in the next 45 years?; if I can in fact make it to the 2060s (viva Greek yogurt!) How will I accomplish the goals I am now setting for myself personally and professionally? When do I see myself moving out of Westchester County? My answer to that last query, dear eReader, is never. My roots run deep in this here land whose flag features a lady in robes, a sideways triangle and the colors of orange and blue. I hope you enjoy the journey we are about to take into the deep past, the nearby now and the friendly future.
Part I. Prelude: Circa 107,985 B.C — Thursday, September 3, 1609
Chapter 1. Ice Age Origins
We begin our exploration as close to the beginning as we can possibly get. Imagine yourself as a tiny frozen snowflake, glistening on the surface of an icy glacier over 36,500,000 days ago. The dinosaurs are extinct and human beings have not yet appeared on the world stage.
Chapter 2. The Bridge To Beringia
Chapter 3. Welcome To Muhheakantuck
Chapter 4. The New Netherlands’ Maiden Voyage
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Part II. Rise: Thursday, November 1, 1683 — Tuesday, January 3, 1961
Chapter 5. Old York Westchester
Chapter 6. New York Westchester
Chapter 7. Old New York Westchester
Chapter 8. New Old York Westchester
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Part III. Fall: Sunday, September 14, 2008 — Thursday, October 2, 2008
Chapter 9. Wall Street Meets Its Maker
Chapter 10. Home Is Where The Hurt Is
Chapter 11. Fast Money Makes Not So Good Company
Chapter 12. County and Country
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Part IV. Redesign: Wednesday, January 1, 2020 — …
Chapter 13. The New Twenties
Chapter 14. The New Thirties
Chapter 15. The New Forties
Chapter 16. The New Fifties…
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