The Hartsdale School District: myths and facts; Part 1: Population Boom and Racism

The Legend of the Hartsdale School District 
Deep in the inner recesses of the consciousness of Hartsdale residents lingers a vague, vestigial memory of a long defunct Hartsdale school district. Legends surround this school district, distorted by a haze of misinformation.  Yet it is true that long ago, Hartsdale did have its own compact school district serving the neighborhoods of Manor Woods, College Corners, Windsor Park and Ridge Road.

The following discussion is intended to dispel common misunderstanding by presenting accurate information about the Hartsdale School District and its demise fifty years ago.  This first posting will address the demographic transformation of previously small, sleepy school districts in the 1950s, and the racism that plagued the county and shaped changes to come.

Population Boom
When looking back to the post-WWII development of the Town of Greenburgh school districts, the crucial factor is the population explosion of the 1950s.  Between 1950 and 1960, Greenburgh grew 60%, from 47,500 to 76,000 residents (Greenburgh grew another 12% in the 1960s to reach 86,000 residents by 1970, and has increased very little in the subsequent 50+ years).  As an example of this dramatic population boom, registered voters in both Ardsley and Fairview doubled from just 1950 to 1954.  

Inevitably, school districts saw their enrollments explode along with the general population.  For example, Fairview schools (Greenburgb #8) saw the number of students quadruple in 15 years, from under 600 to over 2700.  This dramatic growth precipitated major changes in previously tiny school districts, many with only a few hundred students.  Before the population growth of the 1950s, most Greenburgh school districts were still too small to support their own high schools.  There were no high schools in the unincorporated school districts:  Greenville (or "Edgemont") customarily sent its 11th and 12th graders to Scarsdale High School.  Hartsdale sent 10th, 11th and 12th graders to White Plains High School (as did Fairview).   

The old Greenburgh school districts were identified by their numbers:  Ardsley was #5, Edgemont #6, Hartsdale #7, Fairview #8, Elmsford #9, etc.   Edgemont, Ardsley and Elmsford schools have basically retained the same borders but housing developments have taken over the farms and undeveloped land which had once comprised much of those districts' property. Fairview #8 included the remainder of the modern Greenburgh Central School District neighborhoods: Poet's Corner, Orchard Hill, Fairview, Parkway Gardens, Juniper Hill, etc.    

Racism's Persistent and Ugly Legacy
In addition to enormous population growth, the second important factor to consider in the development of the Greenburgh school systems is blatant racial segregation. Racism runs deep in Westchester County and there is not space to go into detail here.  In the 19th century, Westchester County, like New York City,  expressed no sympathy for emancipation or black civil rights.  Westchester opposed the Civil War and voted against Presidents Lincoln and Grant. The county staunchly supported the Democratic Party until almost the end of the century.

The "Second" Ku Klux Klan," revived in the late 1910s, was active in Westchester County until dying out by the mid-1930s.  KKK organizations existed in Peekskill and Port Chester with small affiliated cells in Mount Vernon, Mount Pleasant, Yonkers, New Rochelle and White Plains.  In Greenburgh, only Hastings is reported as having a KKK cell. (Scarsdale Inquirer, Dec. 31, 1928; https://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan)  Cross burnings appear intermittently in newspaper reports of the time, although it is not clear how many were KKK directed as opposed to KKK mimicry.  The New York Amsterdam News reported in May 1932 that a large cross was burned on a hill overlooking Fairview (I'm guessing this means Juniper Hill) in response to the election of Reverend Louis Hughes as the first African American member of Fairview #8's Board of Education.  [New York Amsterdam News, May 18, 1932].

Racism was not relegated to shadowy, secret, social groups.  One of the most insidious expressions of racism, whose legacy shapes the county today, was the establishment of restrictive covenants.  Restrictive covenants on real estate deeds prohibited a wide range of "undesirables" from owning residential property in contravention of community prejudices.  One study showed that in Westchester County, at least  50% of developments of 20 or more houses had restrictive covenants (Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics, 1947).

Restrictive covenants were most notoriously wielded to exclude blacks and Jews from various suburban communities.  The barriers against Jewish home ownership had begun to crumble in most places in the late 1940s, but even after the US Supreme Court barred restrictive covenants in 1948, the exclusion of blacks continued through the collusion of mortgage lenders, banks, federal government home ownership programs, real estate brokers and local insistence.  As a consequence, black families found very limited opportunity for home ownership and were restricted to narrow, geographic areas.  With no realistic option to pick up and leave, blacks renters could be exploited by landlords who charged disproportionately high rents and who had little incentive to improve inadequate properties.  Black home buyers too were limited in terms of choice and, often denied access to government-backed mortgage programs, frequently entered into disadvantageous home purchase contracts.  Often, too, black homeowners and renters lacked political leverage to demand that municipalities invest in infrastructure in their neighborhoods. As a result, even in suburbs, "ghetto" or "slum" conditions became notorious.  [For background, see Richard Rosenstein's The Color of Law http://a.co/d/2MEMLdU]

In Greenburgh, the legacy of racial housing restrictions became obvious.  Parkway Gardens, in a largely isolated section of the north-east corner of the Town, was developed and marketed starting in the 1940s as a black suburban neighborhood of small homes on limited parcels of land.  Fairview- Manhattan Park, also mostly African American, and pre-dating Parkway Gardens, remained largely unpaved and subject to flooding and abject conditions.  In the 1950s and 1960s, local newspapers reported for their white readership about Fairview's "slum" conditions as landlords allowed properties to deteriorate and overcrowding persisted while the town neglected infrastructure.

In contrast to the largely African American neighborhoods of Fairview and Parkway Gardens, nearby Hartsdale and Greenville/Edgemont, also within unincorporated Greenburgh, were almost entirely white.  The boundaries that divided school districts may have been invisible, but posed an insurmountable racial barrier.  One report observed that in the mid-1960s, Hartsdale's school enrollment of almost 900 students included only one African American child.  In late-1950s Edgemont, the appearance of a black transfer student from Yonkers was remembered as a notable and singular event.   Ardsley schools were only "integrated" in 1965 when a teenager from South Carolina was brought north to live with a white Ardsley family as part of an educational program.   https://patch.com/new-york/tarrytown/first-african-american-integrate-school-1965.  Thus, through the late-1960s, Ardsley (and Edgemont and Hartsdale) educated essentially no children from unincorporated Greenburgh's thriving African American community.  Nearly all of Greenburgh's black children were enrolled in the Fairview #8 school district where, as of the early 1960s, they comprised almost 1/3 of the students.

In the next posting, I'll describe the school merger mania of the 1950s and 60s and the series of events that doomed Hartsdale's school district to extinction.