One Saturday, my friend Loretta invited
me to take a drive up the Hudson River so that I could see New York
state distinguished from New York City. We stopped in Dobbs Ferry
for brunch and then drove to Irvington (part of Tarrytown) to visit
Washington Irving's property there - Sunnyside Farm. The house sits
on 10 acres and the tour includes the working part of the farm.
Aside being famous for his fiction,
Washington Irving and an older brother created a satirical magazine
called Salmagundi in which Irving used the term Gotham to
refer to New York City. Gotham, an old Anglo-Saxon term, means
"goat's town." Irving published a couple of books under
the pseudonym Deidrich Knickerbocker and soon the word knickerbocker
was applied as a nickname for all New Yorkers. Go Knicks!
There's a "Washington Irving
House," complete with plaque on the corner of Irving Place and
17th Street in Manhattan that has been preserved as a historical
landmark. However, that designation is from a rumor started by an
interior decorator who lived there and wanted to gain some publicity
for herself. Mr. Irving never lived in that house at all, but Irving
Place that runs from 14th Street to Gramercy Park is named for him.
[Lady Mendl's Tea Room, which I recommend, is sort of catty-corner to
the Washington Irving house that Washington Irving never lived in]
At any rate, Loretta and I stopped at
Irving's farm in Westchester County and looked around his barn and
house. It sits against the bank of the Hudson River and has a
beautiful view. The house has a Dutch appearance with the stepped
decoration at the roof and a fairy-tale, unreal cottage feeling on
account of the shape of the roof of the addition (which he called
Spanish castle). Irving died in his bed, which remains in his
bedroom. That's something to consider.
After we left Sunnyside Farm, we drove
north through Sleepy Hollow. Irving wrote down one of the legends of
ghosts and hauntings of this place and made it famous. We didn't
stop there. Instead, we drove on to Ossining, home of Sing Sing
Prison. Ossining is ranked #2 in the best places to live in
Westchester County. This is based on such things as housing cost,
proximity to NYC, safety, and nightlife. We were there during the
day and I have no way to judge nightlife, but for me, the town gave
off a feeling like old, crusty food. The downtown streets were
basically empty and the few stores that were open were selling
t-shirts with sayings about Sing Sing. It felt anything, but lively,
and the fact that it was dominated by a maximum security prison may
have weighed it down.
The Quakers invented the penitentiary
and solitary confinement. They felt that if prisoners were given
time alone to be penitent, they would change their mentality
and become productive citizens. What the Quakers found was that
solitary confinement led to insanity - and that has not changed. The
supermax prisons where inmates are in their cells 24 hours a day
(like John Gotti, for example) inevitably go insane withing 3 months.
What's worse is that solitary confinement might be preferable to
what could happen in general population.
Sing Sing Prison was built before indoor plumbing, so one presumes that the inmates had chamber pots in their cells. In this picture, there is a trough running along the floor. This may have been in the event that rain came in through the windows or it could have been where the prisoners emptied their chamber pots in the morning. At any rate, imagine the smell before indoor plumbing with all those people housed overnight.
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| by acroterion |
I hear there is going to be a Sing Sing
museum created from one of the earliest cell blocks. I think it
would attract a lot of people.
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