ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, October 28, 1996 TAG: 9610280168
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NORTH TARRYTOWN, N.Y.
SOURCE: JOSEPH BERGER THE NEW YORK TIMES
This is a village with an identity crisis.
For more than 100 years, its claim to fame has been as the home of a General Motors plant, a behemoth that hulked alongside the Hudson River and gave this onetime farming community of genteel Dutch patroons a gritty blue-collar heart. But the plant produced its last minivan in June and is scheduled to be torn down.
Now a large chorus of residents is saying the village should stake out a new identity - or more precisely, return to an old one - by reaching back into history and legend to the days when a love-scorned schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane rode his old nag up the Albany Post Road, was mugged by a headless horseman near the Old Dutch Church, and vanished, leaving behind a shattered pumpkin.
This group wants to change the name North Tarrytown to Sleepy Hollow, after the Washington Irving fable, ``The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,'' which generations of schoolchildren have read at Halloween time. The proposal has gotten enough signatures to schedule a vote, most likely Dec. 10.
The campaign has stirred passions to a high pitch in a village of 8,152 people already uneasy about the fault lines between the half-million-dollar homes on its leafy margins and a larger working-class core, between old-timers and arrivistes, and among whites and Latinos.
The controversy has also raised wider questions about what it means to live in a particular place, what is evoked esthetically by a place's name, and the effect that name can have on the local economy.
In 1972, suburban East Paterson, N.J., changed its name to Elmwood Park to sever the association with crime-plagued Paterson.
The antagonists seem to be asking: Who will inherit North Tarrytown?
What's in a name? The Sleepy Hollow Society says the rustic-sounding moniker would perk up interest among home buyers, attract restaurants and maybe even a hotel or two, and beguile tourists who come to the area to visit Phillipsburg Manor and the Rockefeller estate but spurn the more ordinary shops of Beekman Street, the village's center.
``North Tarrytown says you're the northern part of somewhere else,'' said Christopher Skelly, a 46-year-old computer programming instructor and Greenwich Village native who is president of the society. ``I can't think of any village with such a nonentity for its name when it is sitting on a treasure of great value, a world-famous identity.''
Society members such as Henry Steiner, a 47-year-old filmmaker, predict that literature buffs and schoolchildren will want to trace Ichabod's fictional ride along what is now Route 9, since several sites are still there, such as the Old Dutch Church and the footings of the wooden bridge the horseman dared not cross.
Bill Lent, sexton of the 1685 stone church, already offers tours of the Colonial-era cemetery and has grown a long Rip Van Winkle-like beard to add to the spell he casts on listeners.
But hundreds of residents are loyal to the name North Tarrytown. They rooted for the former North Tarrytown High School in its football rivalry with neighboring Tarrytown, or worked for General Motors when being part of a company town filled them with pride.
``Why change something that's been there for 122 years?'' said Edna Belanich, whose husband, Mario, is a retired General Motors worker. ``Our deed says North Tarrytown. We raised two children here. It doesn't make sense to change things for the sake of change.''
Another opponent of the name change, town historian Theodore Hutchinson, fears that a new name could give this genuine workaday village the synthetic aura of a Disneyland.
``There would be some hole-in-the-wall souvenir shops featuring plastic models of the headless horseman lovingly rendered by some artist in Hong Kong,'' Hutchinson said, with a drollery that Washington Irving might have admired.
After writing ``The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' and ``Rip Van Winkle'' in England around 1820, Irving, who lived from 1783 to 1859, became America's first internationally known writer. He returned to the Tarrytowns to close out his life at Sunnyside, his nearby estate.
No one has mentioned the impact that a tourist-driven revival, combined with tentative plans to build 600 upscale homes on the 95-acre GM site, might have on the large Latin American community that has settled in the clapboard homes and brick apartments once occupied by the factory workers.
Any gentrification could push out some Latinos, who make up a third of the populace and have seized their own work opportunities sprucing suburban lawns and homes and buying up village stores.
The area around Tarrytown and North Tarrytown has long been known as Sleepy Hollow Country. An animal hospital, auto body shop, country club, Mazda dealership and plumbing business all have Sleepy Hollow in their names.
This is, after all, where Washington Irving, on jaunts from his New York City home as a teen-ager, would caper over the local tombstones or listen to a black millhand spin yarns about a headless horseman.
His marble tombstone stands among the other graves in the Old Dutch Church's burial ground.
``I believe it was the very peculiarity of the name, and the idea of something mystic and dreamy connected with it, that first led me, in my boyish ramblings, into Sleepy Hollow,'' Irving wrote in 1839. ``The character of the valley seemed to answer to the name; the slumber of past ages apparently reigned over it; it had not awakened to the stir of improvement, which had put all the rest of the world in a bustle.''
Skelly and Steiner, a lifelong resident of the area, have made a study of local history. They say the valley of the Pocantico River, a Hudson tributary, was long called Sleepy Hollow and was derived from adjacent Slaeperingh Haven, or Sleepy Haven, the harbor where Dutch boats plying the Hudson River would stop over on their way to Albany.
But Hutchinson, Steiner's former history teacher, would now give Steiner a poor mark, saying that Sleepy Hollow was never an actual place name but was drawn from an old Mohegan Indian legend about a spell put on the inhabitants of a spot a mile from North Tarrytown.
What is undisputed is that the village was once part of Tarrytown, then was known as Beekmantown, after a wealthy family that broke up its estate into home lots. It was incorporated in 1874 as North Tarrytown, a name that Steiner says it acquired as the northern branch of the Tarrytown post office.
Although some residents have always been uneasy with the name, a 1988 vote to change it was defeated almost 2 to 1. The vote could be much closer this year, because there are fewer people with ties to General Motors and North Tarrytown High School.
The village's mayor, Sean Treacy, has tried to remain neutral, but he says ``with the closure of the GM site, we have an opportunity to recast ourselves as something other than a blue-collar community.''
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