Roughly 40 miles north of New York City, the small town of Katonah, NY, is the farthest away from the city you can be but still work there.

Some things to remember:

• Katonah is terminally cute.
• Katonah is quaintly nice.
• Katonah is outrageously expensive.
• Katonah is a uniquely wonderful place to raise your children.

Actually, the first sentence in this entry is inaccurate. Katonah is not a town. It's not a city. It's not a village, either, despite the fact that the public library is called the Katonah Village Library. No, Katonah is a hamlet of the larger, but not by much, town of Bedford, New York. The fact that Katonah is actually, legally and officially, a hamlet just adds to the mystique of this little 'burb. It's just so darn cute!

Katonah is composed of a smallish central town, essentially one main commercial street with lots of offshoots, with few if any buildings over three storeys. Just next to the town is a residential area of small- to medium-sized houses, each with a plot of land of up to an acre or so. Further out of town, Katonah gets positively rustic. Forests abound, chock full of deer and other wildlife. The area is crisscrossed with dirt roads, linked together by a few larger paved routes, or state highways of one lane each way. Here, the houses range from medium to large to very large, and the plots of land around the houses start at approximately four acres and range upwards from there.

There is some tension in Katonah between the people who live near the town and those who live further away, as the latter group tend to be considerably wealthier than the former. This tension rarely results in fixed battle, however, and even skirmishes are generally infrequent.

Recently, celebrities have begun purchasing property in and around Katonah. Calvin Klein, Richard Gere, Ralph Lauren, Glenn Close, Eartha Kitt, Bryant Gumble, Tommy Matola and various others own large houses in the area. Katonah is becoming alarmingly fashionable, much to the annoyance of the 'locals', those who have lived there since at least the 1970s.

Around Christmas, lights go up in the trees, wreathes are hung from telephone poles and Christmas carols chime from speakers hung on streetlights. Local Jews, of which there are many, don't seem to mind.

Shopping

The town itself is pleasant but useless. Katonah boasts a number of small, privately-owned stores, almost none of which offer anything practical. There are two hardware stores, a paper shop, a vegetable market, a few delis and, until recently, a small bookstore. With the exception of banks, gas stations and the local supermarket - all of which are removed from the centre of town - not a single chain store exists in the hamlet of Katonah. There is no Starbucks, no Blockbuster, no ACE Hardware, no Barnes & Noble, not even a McDonalds. The local consensus is that, although chain stores might well bring lower prices and vast resources, they would spoil the charm of the town's centre.

The legendary but misnamed 'Charles' Department Store' has been around for over 100 years, but is really only any good for buying country-looking shoes, select kitchen appliances, backyard grills and various other doo dads. Other than these plucky little enterprises, however, Katonah is dominated by gift shops, ugly clothing stores, and purveyors of gourmet food. Odds are, if you were in Katonah and suddenly realised that you needed to buy a specific item, you would have to go somewhere else.

Katonah is very protective of its small-town image. Recently, it convinced the state of New York that it needed to build an entirely new highway in order to stop the endless convoy of 18-wheeler trucks from barreling through the middle of town. The State of New York readily complied, acknowledging that there was a huge problem, yet few townspeople can remember any trucks going through town before the highway was built.

History

Katonah has an interesting bit of history. At the end of the 19th Century, the City of New York decided that it needed to build a network of reservoirs in the surrounding rural areas from which the city could obtain its water. In order to accomplish this, the city needed to build innumerable large dams to create and contain these new bodies of water. It was Katonah's bad luck that it happened to be in the way of one of these reservoirs. So, one day, the city said 'OK, everybody out! We're flooding the place!' Katonah, in its charming, compliant way, complied, taking their buildings with them. Over the course of a few weeks, the entire town picked up and moved over a few miles to get out of the way. Houses were propped up on enormous pieces of wood and dragged by teams of horses to the new location. Many of these buildings can still be seen today. Indeed, the aforementioned Charles' Department Store was one of the buildings moved as part of this endeavor.

The practical result of the move is that, when there is a drought and the water level of the reservoir drops considerably, the foundations of the buildings of 'Old Katonah' emerge from the depths.

Food

A bit of practical advice: it is strongly recommended that you get a sandwich from Healey's deli, a few stores down from Charles' Department Store and a few stores up from Just Looking Too, the cutely-named sequel to Just Looking, the clothing store across the street. The egg salad there is excellent.