Katonah, New York
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Roughly forty miles north of New York City (which has been informally officially designated as close to the farthest away one can live from the city but still work there) lies the small town of Katonah, New York.
Katonah is terminally cute.
Katonah is quaintly nice.
Katonah is outrageously expensive.
Katonah is a uniquely wonderful place to raise your children.
Katonah is gleefully useless.
Actually, the first sentence in this entry is innacurate. 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 (though not 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 burg. 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 stories. 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 to together by a few larger paved "routes", or state highways (one lane each way). Here, the houses range from medium to large to very large, and the plots of land start at around 4 acres and range upward from there.
There is some tension in Katonah between the people who live near the town and those who live farther away, as the latter 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" (or those who have lived there since at least the 1970s).
The town itself is pleasant but useless. 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.
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 center 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 McDonald's. The local consensus is that, although chain stores might well bring lower prices and vaster resources, they would spoil the charm of the town's center. The legendary but misnamed "Charles' Department Store" has been around for over 100 years, but is really only 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 realized 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 a problem so huge that not once in my 25 years of living in the town have I seen a truck going through.
Katonah has an interesting bit of history, however. At the end of the 19th century, the City of New York decided that it needed to build a network of reservoirs in the country 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, by this author's recollection, the aformentioned 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, which, when you're 10 years old and can get there without your parents knowing about it, is really, really cool.
As a bit of practical advice for hitchhikers who happen to find themselves in Katonah, I strongly recommend a sandwich from Healey's deli, a few stores down from Charles' 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 is excellent.
Katonah is terminally cute.
Katonah is quaintly nice.
Katonah is outrageously expensive.
Katonah is a uniquely wonderful place to raise your children.
Katonah is gleefully useless.
Actually, the first sentence in this entry is innacurate. 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 (though not 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 burg. 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 stories. 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 to together by a few larger paved "routes", or state highways (one lane each way). Here, the houses range from medium to large to very large, and the plots of land start at around 4 acres and range upward from there.
There is some tension in Katonah between the people who live near the town and those who live farther away, as the latter 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" (or those who have lived there since at least the 1970s).
The town itself is pleasant but useless. 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.
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 center 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 McDonald's. The local consensus is that, although chain stores might well bring lower prices and vaster resources, they would spoil the charm of the town's center. The legendary but misnamed "Charles' Department Store" has been around for over 100 years, but is really only 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 realized 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 a problem so huge that not once in my 25 years of living in the town have I seen a truck going through.
Katonah has an interesting bit of history, however. At the end of the 19th century, the City of New York decided that it needed to build a network of reservoirs in the country 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, by this author's recollection, the aformentioned 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, which, when you're 10 years old and can get there without your parents knowing about it, is really, really cool.
As a bit of practical advice for hitchhikers who happen to find themselves in Katonah, I strongly recommend a sandwich from Healey's deli, a few stores down from Charles' 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 is excellent.
