House & Home/Style Desk; Section F
STARTING OVER: DISPATCHES FROM CITY AND SUBURB
Still on the River, Shifting Views
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

10/11/2001
The New York Times
Page 1, Column 1
c. 2001 New York Times Company

FOR New Yorkers, to stay or to leave, whether in crisis or not, has always been a kind of daily
universal question. But with the nation warring, the pressure to make peace with a place, or to
secure a sense of safety, seems greater than ever.

For a young couple with a young child, like Andrew and Gabrielle Bordwin, whose daughter,
Tamar, is 2, the move in January from a loft on Broadway, the artery of New York City, to a
leafy cul-de-sac in Hastings-on-Hudson , a village of 7,600, raised and has yet to resolve the
other big debate, that of living in the suburbs versus the city.

The fears and hopes -- the full emotional escort of uncertainty -- accompanied Andrew, 36, a
photographer and an artist, and Gaby (as friends and family call her), 34, a graphic designer,
when they left.

''It's true -- everybody joked about the 'passport,' '' Andrew said, stretched out on the stalky
grass, resting on his elbow. ''I think it's an illusion, that fear. Once you start looking for it, you
find it's not really there.''

''Would you stop philosophizing?'' Gaby said, seated next to him. ''You hand in your credibility
card when you move all the boxes out.'' Cicadas underscored her voice.

''Half an hour ain't too far,'' Andrew said, joking defensively about the commute. He keeps a
studio in the city. Gaby works on the Upper East Side at a publishing house.

''Half an hour -- I imposed that rule,'' she said.

The Bordwins' new house, a three-story Georgian Colonial built in 1919 on a quarter-acre of
land, rose in a shaggy, shingled stack behind them. Dressed in a high-waisted smock, her
red-haired bob a lighter version of her mother's, Tamar spun wide loops on the lawn. She
seemed to understand, in her sail forward, that this was now her world to circumnavigate, to the
edges of its hill and hedges.

When I saw them as a guest at a going-away party at their loft shortly before they moved out of
the city, I told the Bordwins that I would never see them again. Outside their seventh-floor
windows, City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge glittered like a stage set seen from a theater box.

''We thought you were joking,'' Gaby said last week -- 10 months later -- during my first visit to
their new home. Black Gucci sunglasses shaded her eyes, but the dry touch in her tone
reprieved me.

The Bordwins moved downtown in 1995, part of the avant-garde few who were living by City
Hall, happy with inconveniences in exchange for relatively inexpensive real estate, historical and
architectural interest and urban adventure. The dry cleaner was a subway ride; the
1,200-square-foot loft was $220,000. The view was like living inside a postcard.

Six years later, now sleepless new parents worn thin by noise -- five Broadway bus lines once
seemed like big-city bustle -- and hemmed in by space that diminished as the baby grew, they
moved out, renting a house in Hastings with a six-month lease. Capitalizing on an unsure market
that was still strong, the Bordwins sold the loft for $725,000. They bought the home on Fraser
Place the next month for $695,000 -- the owners' asking price. They looked in the morning and
bid when they finished lunch. As apartment dwellers during 17 years in New York, they had
never owned, renovated or maintained a house. Their loft building -- alternative living -- had a
superintendent and a porter.

The Bordwins are now experts on their house.

''We replaced 80 percent of the wiring, took out all of the radiators and put in a completely new
heating system,'' Andrew said. ''When you do a home renovation, you understand your house
really well.''

The work, they hope, will end at the end of this month. The Bordwins are living in the living
room, like a miniaturized version of their city loft -- with pink-rose carpeting, which was left by
the previous owners. Most of their furniture is stacked in the cottagelike garage: slick coffee
tables and midcentury-modern dining chairs that look like wealthy travelers shipwrecked in
evening dress. They may never reach shore in the quaint new house.

Hastings was at the top of a short list when the Bordwins decided to look for a place to live
outside New York. Montclair, N.J., which they visited with good friends who lived in their loft
building and had also decided to move, was too large.

''The high school is several thousand children,'' said Gaby, who had heard of Montclair, as she
had Irvington and Hastings, the other communities the Bordwins looked at, in a new mothers'
group she attended when Tamar was born, where talk was frequently about ''staying or leaving.''

The Bordwins liked the idea of being on the Hudson River, in a river town.

''We became really attached to the Hudson, using the parks there, when we lived downtown,''
Andrew said. ''I feel like it's a lifeline to the city -- that we're really not that far away.''

It is a Manhattan migratory pattern, for a type of New Yorker.

''People from the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village and downtown tend to come to river
towns,'' said Arthur G. Riolo, an agent with Peter J. Riolo Inc., a Hastings-based real estate
company that his father started 65 years ago. The price for a three-bedroom house is $450,000
to $550,000, Mr. Riolo said; there were only six houses for sale last week.

Mr. Riolo said 75 percent of his clients were people leaving New York City, whether buying or
renting.

Hastings is a village, incorporated in 1879. The average family size is three. Thirty percent of the
population are children; 24 percent are under 18. The largest population group is baby
boomers, 45 to 54. The second-largest is 35 to 44. Hastings is a haven of homeowners -- 66
percent of the residents own their houses.

The development of its summer estates and old farms began in 1907, when a group of teachers
and other professionals from New York City bought 17 acres and built year-round houses. By
the 1920's, Hastings was an industrial town with two waterfront employers: a chemical plant and
a cable and wire company. When they closed in the 1970's, the village was as much a bedroom
community as it was blue-collar -- a balance in backgrounds that people like the Bordwins,
moving to Hastings, consider as much a strength as good schools.

Merchants on Main Street and on Warburton Avenue, the village's downtown shopping district,
are largely local -- a carefully guarded vestige of its working-class roots.

''There's a Thomas's Cafe,'' said Mr. Riolo, whose office is on Main Street. ''It's exactly what
Starbucks would be, but it's a family-run business. We don't have commercial square footage
that would allow commercial chains to come in. Because of parking requirements, chains
wouldn't be interested. Zoning would be too restrictive.''

Hastings had ''a buzz,'' Gaby recalled, a reputation that has attracted artists and other
independently employed people over the years.

Lewis Hine, the photographer and social documentarian, lived in Hastings in the 1930's, a fact
that intrigued Fred Charles, an architectural photographer, who moved with his wife, Eileen, a
copywriter, to Hastings from Chelsea in 1992. The Charleses, with their two children, are
neighbors of the Bordwins.

In 1991, on assignment for Time magazine, Mr. Charles photographed Kentlands, a
development in Maryland designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, parents and
proponents of ''new urbanist'' suburban planning like Seaside, Fla., which they also designed,
the vaguely Victorian town that was used as the location for the 1998 film ''The Truman Show.''

''Hastings is what Kentlands wants to be,'' Mr. Charles said. ''A mixture of house sizes, not the
lock-step single-level suburban homes. There's a porch culture -- you can speak to neighbors
from your porch.''

The Charleses and the Bordwins also live next to the Old Croton Trailway, a 19th-century
aqueduct that is now a 26-mile-long state park. The pedestrian presence of people biking,
jogging and strolling next door added a level of villagelike urbanity to suburban life, Mr. Charles
said.

Having the option to walk around town, rather than rely on driving, which the Bordwins insisted
upon in choosing a new place to live, was a revelation, though.

''It's funny,'' Gaby said, curled on the grass as the sun set. ''You come out here and you think,
'Oh, I'd love to get a little peace and quiet,' and you step outside your house, and there's
nobody there.''

What sounded like a monstrous bullfrog -- the volunteer fire department's horn -- went off
somewhere beyond the tops of the trees, croaking in the dusk.

''I would put Tamar in her snowsuit and take her to the park, and it would be empty,'' Gaby
recalled. ''We'd walk in the neighborhood, and she would say, 'People?' ''

Diversity was also a problematic surprise for the Bordwins, especially as parents. Though
economically and religiously diverse, Hastings is not racially diverse. It is 90 percent white and 2
percent black, according to the 2000 census; 4 percent of the populace is Asian, and 4 percent
Hispanic.

''I think by and large that the neighborhoods are pretty segregated in the city,'' Gaby said. ''But
the broader community, on the street and in the buses and subways, in public places and at
work, are more mixed. I wanted a like-minded community, but I didn't want to move to a place
where everybody is like me.''

With a hungry child insistently interrupting, Andrew and Gaby got to their feet, making plans to
eat at a restaurant by the river. The porch lights shone yellow on the house as we walked to it --
the color of a kind of nostalgic view of suburbia.

''You just make a bargain,'' Gaby said, pulling a small sweater onto a small body with its arms in
the air. ''You say, 'I'm willing to move out of the city if I can preserve some of the things that I
like.' ''

People will say that they move for the children, but I began to suspect that children were often
only the excuse for being able to give something up with grace. The Bordwins looked older, not
in age, but in maturity, as though they had shifted generations, from growing up to bringing up.

''I never felt like an especially edgy person,'' Gaby said. ''But I felt like New York was what
gave me my edge. That was the badge of honor.''

''I do think I'm duller now,'' she said, organizing Tamar for the car and the drive to dinner. ''But
it's also kind of a relief.''



Photos in original version:
VILLAGERS -- Andrew and Gabrielle Bordwin with Tamar in Hastings -on- Hudson.
They moved from New York in January. (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)(pg. F1);
COEXISTING -- Downtown Hastings, left. Above, the Bordwins' new living room, where a
refrigerator is temporarily parked.; A NEW LIFESTYLE -- The Bordwin family in their
backyard. (Photographs by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)(pg. F6)