When Miriam and I traveled to New York City in September we stayed in White Plains in Westchester County. I loved it there.
White Plains sits barely twenty-five miles from midtown Manhattan, but the experience of being there is entirely different. White Plains is a city in its own right, with its own downtown, skyscrapers, train station, shopping malls, and so on. But it’s also home to thousands of commuters who travel to New York City each day for work. These commuters live in charming homes on shady lanes, or stylish old apartment buildings on tree-lined streets, and eat dinner or go shopping on Main Street or Mamaroneck Avenue. They appear to have ample access to recreation in the warmer months at several parks and golf courses. What I loved best about White Plains was that it felt like a city, had all the characteristics of a city, but still felt easily navigable on foot.
White Plains, like most of the cities and towns in the Northeast or New England, is old – as old as the United States itself. As an old city it shares most of the characteristics of communities that developed before the automobile: the center of town is relatively compact; access to public transportation is easy; public buildings and spaces are prominent and easily accessible. I loved all of that. And though it’s harder to explain why, I loved one building in particular more than others.
The Westchester County Center is an eighty-year-old art deco gem that perfectly suits its purpose of hosting a variety of entertainment- and sporting events. When it opened in 1930, Percy Grainger performed at the piano, and ever since it’s held concerts, car shows, dances, boxing matches, and, the week we were there, roller derby.
Suberbia Roller Derby was hosting “Derby in the Burbs”, the 2010 Women’s Flat Track Derby Association’s Eastern regional championship. New York City’s Gotham Girls were clearly the superior team. They crushed most of their competition, beating Providence by three hundred points, which was simply astonishing. But the Philadelphia Liberty Belles were also good, and I also enjoyed seeing Pittsburgh’s team, and their terrific “Steel Curtain” maneuver.
The event wasn’t as heavily attended as I would have imagined, but that might have just been an illusion of the venue. The facility is very large, with a big open floor with a stage at one end. A balcony circles the room, but, brilliantly, no concrete or steel supports the balcony, giving unobstructed views to those beneath it, and increasing the usable floor space substantially. Meanwhile, concessions and restrooms are available on each floor. There were even custom benches made without nails or screws. It’s the exact kind of facility that I wish Gainesville had.
In White Plains, Miriam and I stayed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the intersection of Hale Avenue and Maple Avenue. Our room overlooked a parking garage and a cute neighborhood. The hotel offered free transportation anywhere in White Plains, and we used that extensively, though we walked around, as well. In the evenings we went to the city’s main drag, Mamaroneck Avenue, and got dinner. One night we ate at a tasty pizza place, another night at a much less tasty tavern. We ate a couple times at the charming City Limits Diner, where the food was good, and the atmosphere even better.
We spent a lot of time at the train station in White Plains, which lay halfway between our hotel and the Westchester County Center. The station itself is nothing special, but it’s one of the busiest places in town, and was the site of perhaps the most ridiculous confrontation I ever witnessed. As Miriam and I waited for a train, two women got into a fight. One was the incredibly rude lady I mentioned before, who had repeatedly cut the ticket line a day or so before, and who asked the unfortunate Englishman so many questions on the train to Grand Central. She didn’t start the fight, and anywhere else a fight would not have happened, but her behavior from earlier in the week caused us to have slightly less sympathy than we might have had otherwise. The rude woman was talking loudly on her telephone in the waiting room of the station. Another woman, also in business attire, was sitting on a bench next to her. After a while, the second woman–we’ll call her “The Fighter”–said to the first woman, whom we’ll call her “Rude Lady”:
“You know you’re talking really loud, don’t you?”
“This is a public place.”
“Yeah, but we all don’t want to hear your conversation. I mean, what if I started singing right here?”
The Fighter then proceeded to sing loudly right in the direction of Rude Lady, who continued to talk on her phone. I blame The Fighter for acting so childishly, but Rude Lady was being rude, and it wasn’t hard to understand The Fighter’s frustration. Still, it was completely ridiculous.
It rained on our last day in White Plains, which was a Monday. That morning I had an appointment to meet with the president of the Percy Grainger Society who was going to give me a tour of the composer’s house, only a few blocks from the hotel. I will tell that story soon. Meanwhile, I had to borrow an umbrella from the front desk so I would down to Cromwell Place. While walking back I got a phone call from Miriam who asked me if I wanted to meet her for lunch at the gigantic mall directly next to our hotel that I hadn’t even noticed because it didn’t really look like a mall, insofar as it wasn’t surrounded by hundreds of acres of parking. I met her at the food court inside, and she already had my food waiting for me, like a sweetheart. I sat my umbrella down and ate. When we got up to leave I, of course, forgot the umbrella. I had been thinking how I needed to not forget the umbrella, because I knew that they made a note of my borrowing it, and would charge me if I failed to return it. But we were already exiting the mall when I realized I’d forgotten it. Meanwhile, we needed to catch the shuttle to the airport to make our flight, and that ride was only available once per half-hour. So, in spite of my having just eaten a huge meal, I ran across the gigantic shopping mall–which was deserted, thankfully–and found the umbrella, still leaning up against the chair where I had left it. I ran back across the mall to find Miriam, and we caught a ride to the airport.
The Westchester County Airport is one of the few things I didn’t like about White Plains. It is small enough that upon arriving you are conveniently situated near exits and taxis. The drawback is that when you are departing, you must sit in one room that must accommodate everyone waiting to board an airplane. On the day we were leaving that included hundreds of people. It was standing-room-only. But our flight back to Orlando was safe, and my overall impression of White Plains remains extremely positive.
Filed under: Geography, Sports, Travel on January 9th, 2011 | No Comments »
