At Home-on-Hudson
Turns Out Tiny Hastings, N.Y., Is a Lot Bigger Than She Thought
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 28, 2001;
Page C02

By 13, we'd outgrown the place. Hastings, we'd moan, as if we lived in the northernmost outpost of Nova Scotia. Our town was two square miles and a kid could walk anywhere if she didn't mind the hills. We knew most of our classmates from kindergarten. Those of us who could made the half-hour trip to Manhattan, the bigness of which made us do stupid things, like wear three coats of mascara.

For our parents, of course, this pocket of old suburban quietude known as Hastings-on-Hudson was a refuge. One of several river towns just north of the city, Hastings sits on the waterfront with views of the Palisades across the river, and contains over 160 acres of woods and parks. Popular with writers and artists, and less pretentious than other parts of wealthy Westchester, it has a quaint and contemplative quality unmatched by cities or subdivisions.

The psychic heart of the village is the aptly named Center Restaurant, located near the intersection of the downtown's two main streets, one of which is naturally named -- wait for it -- Main Street. It's a diner, really; the kind of place where four kids can get four cups of coffee and a plate of fries and monopolize a table all through the dinner rush. It's probably only a slight exaggeration to say that I could navigate the path from the front door of the Center to my favorite booth with my eyes closed, in zero gravity. This would be the booth with a mirrored pillar next to it, which allowed us, as adolescents, to check our looks by only slightly shifting our gazes, like a news anchor reading a Teleprompter.

When I went back a few weeks ago on a Saturday morning, I ordered a toasted corn muffin, no butter, in honor of an eighth-grade friend who was always dieting. And I recognized at least a quarter of the patrons. Hastings is, as you might politely say of a friend's cramped apartment, "cozy."

Yet what I've realized only recently is you can live in one village your whole life -- roll your eyes at the local hangouts and familiar faces, hop the train on Saturdays to escape all that sameness -- and still discover parts of your home town you've never seen before. To achieve this, you must look for the small things. Not insignificant, just small. You are a biologist studying the amoeba: The tighter your lens, the more you see. A few months back, my mother coaxed me into walking with her along a dirt path past the town dump, a path I had always assumed ended in mud. It doesn't. Last fall, village citizens cleaned up this area, known as Rowley's Brook, which was once jammed with garbage.

Surrounded by huge clusters of thick, twisting brambles that nearly obscure a small brook, it appears a wild, forbidding land. But it offers a clear, exhilarating view of that familiar stretch of slate blue, the Hudson River. Hordes of birds scream from the trees, as if they haven't realized they're no longer the only ones here.

I imagine this is what parts of the waterfront must have looked like back when Jasper Cropsey set up his easels by the river. One of the star painters of the Hudson River School, Cropsey painted the area during the second half of the 19th century. His paintings are all luminescent skies and lush trees. The river appears untouched, save for the presence of an occasional cow that splashes in the water to cool off. (Cropsey's work is on permanent display at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, a yellow palladian villa in Hastings.) Land like Rowley's Brook is precious in Hastings. For the past 200 years, the village's waterfront has hosted numerous industries -- a sugar refinery, chemical and cable factories -- that used the Hudson both as a source of energy and a convenient dumping ground. Today, parts of the waterfront are laden with PCBs. For the past 25 years, this village of 8,000, incorporated in 1879, has been trying to reverse its environmental history. It was only in 1993 that Hastings established a public park on the waterfront.

It isn't just Hastings, though, that beckons the amateur historian. The communities all along the east side of the Hudson are thick with old stories, and on a recent weekend my mother and I took her car to explore some of it. En route to a museum I used to visit as a child, she abruptly turned up an unfamiliar driveway, in the city of Yonkers, that I'd passed a thousand times before. This, she said, is Untermyer Park, where she used to go as a teenager to escape the Bronx. (It turns out my mother was in twisted company; in the mid-'70s, David Berkowitz and his Son of Sam cult frequented the Untermyer mansion -- now gone -- to conduct their animal sacrifices.) A historic location that Yonkers now uses to showcase performing arts, the land was donated by Samuel Untermyer, a Wall Street lawyer who died in 1940. A previous owner was former New York governor and presidential candidate Samuel Tilden, the Al Gore of 1876, who won the popular vote but lost the election.

The main attraction of Untermyer are its Grecian gardens, built in the early 1900s. Conical yew trees frame canals, staircases, a Greek columnated temple and a pool, much of it covered in gorgeous neoclassical mosaics. Despite restoration efforts, the park still has that private, creepy, half-ruined appearance that makes you feel as though you've stumbled across the past paused, untouched by any hand but time's.

North along the river, in Sleepy Hollow, is one of the oldest churches in the country, the Old Dutch Church. It was built in 1685, and some of the headstones in its graveyard are so old they are written in Dutch. Among the buried are more than 30 Revolutionary War soldiers, and plenty of people with "olde" names like Silas and Alletta. Strange -- even headstones are subject to fashion. You can trace the evolution from the grim winged skulls of the late 1600s to the willow-and-urn design of 100 years later.

Just last weekend, I went back to Hastings again, to settle one unresolved curiosity. There's a bar and restaurant downtown on the corner of Warburton Avenue and Spring Street that I've never been to. Hastings House is just across from "the wall" at the VFW, where we used to sit as teenagers and practice looks of stolidness. Aside from a car dealership, it must be the only business in Hastings I've never entered. The reasons are complicated and have to do with small-town conventions that I obeyed but never fully understood.

There's a divide in this village, between the workers who kept its industries going until the bulk of them had closed by the '70s, and the commuters who make Hastings their bedroom suburb. The blue-collars traditionally made their homes closer to the train tracks and the river, the white-collars up in the hills. Hastings House was long a haven for factory workers, and after that, an aging and dwindling group of people. My great-grandparents worked as domestics in Hastings, but my parents both worked in the city, and we never went in that particular place, and that's just the way it was. It belonged to the history of Hastings, not to me. So I took a friend Saturday night and we went in. At just after midnight, there were only four other customers, including the bartender -- none of whom I knew. The air was stale with the cigarette smoke of 40 years. On the jukebox: Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra. In a case on the wall: commemorative mugs from the '50s, a glass memorializing the moonwalk.

We ordered a couple of Sam Adamses and sat at the wooden bar. And then the six of us talked, about cars and beer and trivial things. It was the kind of bar-wide conversation you have with strangers in a place you are new to, a place you have just come to know.

GETTING THERE: Hastings-on-Hudson and nearby river towns are on the Hudson line of Metro-North railroad, out of Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. Of f-peak fare is $5 one way and takes less than 40 minutes. The drive from Washington takes about 4 1/4 hours.

STAYING: The Westchester Marriott (670 White Plains Rd., Tarrytown, 914-631-2200) offers an indoor pool, with weekend double rates starting at $109 a night. For a more upscale experience, the Castle at Tarrytown (400 Benedict Ave., 914-631-1980) is a turn-of-the-century structure with views of the Hudson River, offering 31 rooms and suites, starting at $305. North along the river, the Alexander Hamilton House Bed and Breakfast (49 Van Wyck St., Croton-on-Hudson, 914-271-6737) features Victorian furnishings, with rates starting at $100.

EATING: Hastings boasts three impressive, moderate- to high-priced restaurants. Sun, Moon & Spoon (100 River St.) offers views of the Hudson, and serves wonderful fusion cuisine with Japanese and Italian influences. Harvest on the Hudson (1 River St.) also overlooks the river and its own beautiful gardens, and serves Italian-influenced nouveau cuisine, with an emphasis on seafood. Down by the train station, Buffet de la Gare (155 Southside Ave.) serves fancy French cuisine. For more moderately priced fare, try the Center Restaurant (540 Warburton Ave.).

BEING THERE: In Hastings, call ahead to visit the free permanent Jasper Cropsey collection at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation (25 Cropsey Lane, 914-478-7990). Untermyer Park (945 N. Broadway, Yonkers, 914-377-6450) offers gorgeous Grecian gardens. The Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow (42 N. Broadway, Tarrytown) has burial grounds that date back to the 1600s. Also, you can tour the mansion and grounds of Tarrytown's Lyndhurst Castle (635 S. Broadway, 914-631-4481, admission $10), built in 1838.

INFO: Hudson River Towns of Westchester, 914-232-6583, www.hudsonriver.com.