Yonkers, NY news and local guide

Near the mill site stands Philipse Manor Hall, built around 1682 by white workers and enslaved people for Frederick Philipse and his wife, Margaret Hardenbroeck de Vries. Philipse's estate came to include the Bronx, Yonkers and much of southern Westchester, and by the mid-18th century the family had one of the largest manors and slaveholdings in the colonial North. His great-grandson Frederick Philipse III was a prominent Loyalist who fled to England during the Revolution, and New York confiscated and sold the family's lands. The Enslaved Africans' Rain Garden on the waterfront remembers the people enslaved in Yonkers and Westchester. Yonkers began as a farm town shipping peaches, apples, potatoes and grain down the Hudson to New York, and water power brought mills. Elisha Otis invented a safety elevator in 1853, and the Otis Elevator Company opened the world's first elevator factory on the Hudson there. The Alexander Smith and Sons Carpet Company grew to 45 buildings, 800 looms and more than 4,000 workers, one of the world's leading carpet makers. In 1888 John Reid founded Saint Andrew's Golf Club in Yonkers. In World War II the carpet mill made tents and blankets and the Otis plant built tanks, but manufacturing declined after the war. Sources Wikipedia: Yonkers, New York