Mapping Black Households in 1950 Greenburgh: A Study of Suburban Segregation

Several years ago, I wrote a blog post mapping Greenburgh's African American home ownership using data from the 1940 U.S. Census.  My purpose then was to investigate whether Black homeownership patterns in mid-20th century Greenburgh gave evidence of housing segregation.  I concluded that essay writing that  the cumulative impact of examples I offered of segregation practices, such as the widespread use of restrictive covenants in Westchester, the practice of steering, changes to zoning codes, and incidents of neighborhood intolerance highly suggested that the ownership patterns illustrated by that 1940 map did not result from freely made housing choices by Black home buyers.  

Now that the 1950 US Census has been released, we can reexamine that question a decade further on. 

I. Where did Black people live in 1950 Greenburgh?

Sources: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-1/vol-01-35.pdf ;   https://www.ancestry.com/ ; https://www.familysearch.org/en/.  [Note: on both familysearch.org and ancestry.com, the 1950 US Census transcriptions are replete with errors and should be confirmed before cited],  

TOV (unincorporated Greenburgh):  
Black population in Census Enumeration Districts 117 (Parkway Gardens/north east Greenburgh) and 119 & 120 (Fairview):    2,101                                                                                                              Black population in remaining TOV (Hartsdale, Edgemont, Ardsley TOV, North Elmsford):     232.  This number includes 102 residents of the Fulton Park apartment buildings.   Of the remaining 130 TOV Black residents, 86 are domestic employees living in white households (including a few country club employees living on premises). 

While Black people comprised just over 6% of the Town of Greenburgh in 1950, 91% of Black residents lived in one of four neighborhoods, as follows:

1.  Tarrytown Village downtown:  nearly the entire Tarrytown Black population lived west of Broadway and north of what is now 87/287, with the focus being "downtown" Tarrytown centered on Wildey St. and Mechanics Ave.  
2.  Elmsford Village north/east of Main St./ Tarrytown Road.  It is startling that the 1950 Census shows no Black people living in the half of Elmsford Village south  of this line.  
3.  North-east Greenburgh: the Presidents streets neighborhood of Parkway Gardens and also Parkway Homes, partially in the Valhalla School District. 
4.  "Fairview"the square (about 2/3 of a miles on each side) strictly defined by Knollwood Ave on the west,  Prospect Ave and the Metropolis Country Club on the south, Hillside Ave on the east, and Old Tarrytown Road on the north.  In 1950, 1,958 -  2/3 of Greenburgh's Black residents - live in this compact area.  

II.  Charting Black "Households" in 1950 Greenburgh. 

Now that the 1950 census has been released and is indexed, we have the opportunity to measure changes, if any, over the interim decade. An exact comparison is impossible, however, because the 1950 US Census, unlike the 1940 Census, does not identify home ownership.  

When looking through the 1950 Census population lists, there is the quandary of domestic workers.  About 111 Black people in Greenburgh living outside the green shaded areas were domestic employees living in white households or sometimes at country clubs.   It would be misleading to include the residences of these domestic employees - typically in the wealthiest white neighborhoods -  in a study of segregation patterns.  In response to this problem, I decided to map "heads of households." 

For each residence, the 1950 Census identifies a "head."  The head of a household could be a home owner living with a family in single family house, or one person living alone in an apartment.  

Black heads of households in the Town of Greenburgh, 1950

The green-shaded areas are the four neighborhoods with large concentrations of Black residents that I listed above.  The figure in each green area is the number of Black heads of households in the particular area.  The red dots represent Black "heads of households" located outside of the four green-shaded neighborhoods. The largest red dot (on the east-side edge of the map) is the Fulton Park apartments with twenty-two households comprised of 102 Black residents. 

In 1950, 94% of Black-led households in the Town of Greenburgh were located in the green-shaded neighborhoods.

When examining these households more closely we see de facto segregation in operation on the ground level, specifically its impact on  the town's school districts.   It is startling to see that no school-age Black children live in Ardsley and Irvington villages in 1950. In fact,  the Census identifies no Black residents in Ardsley village in 1950.  A Black 18 year old woman lives in Dobbs Ferry in an apartment on Broadway with her 25 year old sister and another woman -the only Black headed household in Dobbs Ferry -  but the census does not indicate if Evelyn Davis still attended school.  The other six Black residents in Dobbs Ferry village are domestic employees living in white households. In Irvington village has one Black household consisting of the three Patterson siblings - each 55 years or older. The remaining 14 Black residents in Irvington in 1950 are adult, domestic employees  living in white households.  

The village of Hastings, however, is somewhat of an exception with all 21 Black residents of the village living in one of three households headed by Black men.  Interestingly all three of these Black men who are heads of households are immigrants.  Dr. Albion Chase and Dr. Cyril Dolly, both born in the Caribbean, lived with their families in adjacent single family homes on Pinecrest Rd. The third household is headed by a Brazilian married to a woman (and a stepson) listed as from Puerto Rico and who are not listed as Black by the census taker, but instead as Philipino which was probably the census taker's stand in for "Latin,"  It is not known if children from these three families attended the Hastings public schools.

While 1950 shows minimal integration improvement over 1940 in household locations, the segregation patterns along school district lines suggested in 1940 is well-established in 1950.  There were no Black children residing in what would have then been the Hartsdale Schools District or the large portion of the Ardsley school district located in unincorporated Greenburgh, and there was one four-year-old child in the Edgemont School district in 1950.  While there were 622 Black children of 18 years or younger in unincorporated Greenburgh in 1950, if it unclear if any - and certainly not more than a two or three Black students - attended the Hartsdale, Edgemont and Ardsley school districts where about one-half of the TOV population resided.  Anecdotes support this perception: the Hartsdale School District was described by the New York Times on April 21, 1966, as having 850 enrolled but only one Black student.  A memoir of growing-up in Edgemont recalls the late 1950s appearance of a black transfer student from Yonkers as notable and novel.  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.  

Greenburgh will undergo enormous growth (from 47,527 in 1950 to 76,213 in 1960), but to map the impact on Black residential choices,  we'll have to wait until 2030 for the release of the 1960 US Census.