The Inside Press

Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester

Martin Wilbur

Design Consultants to Be Hired as New Castle Moves ChapLine Forward

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The Town of New Castle is soon expected to select a consultant that will begin the design of the long-awaited ChapLine, a proposed 1.7-mile trail for pedestrians and bicyclists extending from Chappaqua Crossing to downtown.

At the upcoming August Town Board meeting scheduled for August 12, officials will likely announce the consultant that will undertake the design, which will include a survey, design documents, an updated construction estimate and assistance in complying with the state Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), said New Castle Supervisor Victoria Tipp. A Request for Qualifications for services was put out by the Town Board in April.

Tipp predicted that the ChapLine when it is completed will have “a truly transformative impact” on the town and the lives of its residents, especially with the potential of enticing more people to walk from one side of the hamlet to the other, which would potentially reduce motor vehicle trips. About 6,500 people live in the immediate area of the Chappaqua hamlet, and there are 91 townhomes and 64 residential units in the cupola building at Chappaqua Crossing, she said.

“It’s going to be an impactful project that will have a positive effect on the town’s growth and well-being, and it will be a vital part of our infrastructure by linking key areas of our town and making them more accessible,” Tipp said.

The project would be completed in three separate phases. Construction for the first phase would likely start on Roaring Brook Road and proceed to the town’s bird sanctuary near Lawrence Farms South, Tipp explained. Phase 2 would pick up from that point to the north end of the Metro-North easement, which is at the northern point of the Chestnut Oaks condominium property. The final phase would proceed through the south end of the railroad easement and end at Bischoff Street and North Greeley Avenue, she said.

Each phase will be independent of the other, so the trail could be used by the public after the completion of each stage, according to Tipp. The path would consist of asphalt and sections of boardwalk and a truss bridge over a gorge near the northern end closest to Roaring Brook Road. The wooden boardwalk portion would rise over wetlands and stream crossings to minimize disturbance.

Tipp said there would also be bike sharing options, benches, water-fill stations and signage.

It would follow a county sewer trunk line through the woods limiting environmental impact on the area, the supervisor said. It would also only use town-owned land, thereby avoiding the need for easements and permission from private property owners and the Chappaqua Central School District.

“This would not be an original disturbance of the area,” Tipp said. “The area has already been cleared and disturbed by the Westchester County sewer trunk line.”

Tipp expects work on the design to begin in the fall but was unable to provide estimates on how long it would take or the duration of the construction phases.

New Castle has set aside $7.25 million for the ChapLine, including a $5 million Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP) grant secured with letters of support by State Senator Peter Harckham, Assemblyman Chris Burdick, Westchester County Executive Ken Jenkins, Westchester Board of Legislators Chair Vedat Gashi, the Chappaqua Central School District, Teatown Lake Reservation and the Saw Mill River Audubon Society. That grant, which will be overseen by the state Department of Transportation, requires a $1.25 million match from the town. At that time, the estimate for the project was roughly $11 million, but an updated cost will be provided by the consultant.

Burdick said he and Harckham were pleased to help New Castle secure a significant piece of funding for a project that has been discussed for nearly a decade. A presentation for the $5 million grant was made to the Town Board in January for money that is highly sought after from communities throughout the state.

“We worked very hard to get this,” Burdick said. “What we tried to do is ensure the pots of money are there for grant applications that the municipalities are bidding for.”

The TAP money will be combined with a previously obtained $500,000 Climate Smart Communities grant, which requires a full match from the town. Additional grant applications can be submitted as the town moves the process along, Tipp said.

“More grants are likely once you have shovel-ready projects, and this will be more than shovel-ready,” she said.

Other town officials pointed to how the ChapLine promises to enhance the recreational experience for residents.

“We are always looking to expand our recreational opportunities in town,” said Town Administrator Robert Deary. “The ChapLine trail will provide our residents with accessible space for walking, biking, running or just enjoying nature. I’m confident the community will enjoy this amenity for years to come.”

Ike Kuzio, the town’s superintendent of Recreation & Parks, said he views the ChapLine’s development as something that will bring New Castle closer.

“I think it’s a great opportunity just to connect the two areas,” Kuzio said. “Between downtown Chappaqua and up toward the Reader’s Digest property with all the development that’s going on up there, plus the high school, I just think it’s a great opportunity to connect these spaces.”

Student athletes from Horace Greeley High School, including members of the track and cross-country teams, have been seen training along Route 117 without sidewalks. The ChapLine would provide them with a safer place to run.

In addition to recreation, Tipp said the trail would help support the revitalization of the Chappaqua hamlet, provide additional commuting options, make the bird sanctuary a significant educational asset and improve the quality of life, including socially, for residents who live in different parts of the community.

“It’s important to understand the varied economic, environmental, educational and social benefits the trail will have in connecting the Chappaqua hamlet to Horace Greeley High School and Chappaqua Crossing,” Tipp said.

She credited the support from county and state officials and the school district as well as the environmental groups for New Castle to keep the vision of the ChapLine alive.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to see the project begin to take place with a clear plan,” Tipp said. “I am deeply grateful to everyone whose hard work made this possible, especially our staff whose ongoing efforts have been essential in getting us to this point.”

What’s Poppin’ in Pleasantville

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PHOTO BY DONNA MUELLER

There’s an exciting new food shop in Pleasantville, which is really like 25 restaurants rolled into one.

The village welcomed Wonder on March 20, the rapidly expanding food delivery and takeout service, which moved into about half of the empty retail space at 70 Memorial Plaza. It is the 39th location for Wonder, mostly in the tristate area, and the fourth to open in Westchester County, following previous incursions into Scarsdale, Larchmont and West Harrison.

What makes Wonder unique are the vast array of restaurants whose food can be ordered on its app, through its website or in person. Many of the acclaimed partner restaurants and chefs – as diverse as Bobby Flay Steak, Texas Barbecue, Yasas by Michael Symon, which is Mediterranean cuisine, and Brooklyn’s famed Di Fara Pizza – are noted eateries from throughout the United States that are represented at the Pleasantville location featuring a wide assortment of tasty cuisine.

“It’s kind of a very unique proposition, and what’s really cool about our model is you can access all of these 20-plus restaurants in a single order, and they come out at the same time, piping hot, made to order, also available for pick-up and dine-in as well,” said Daniel Shlossman, chief growth and marketing officer for Wonder. “So, it’s a really unique model.”

Wonder’s opening is the latest jolt of excitement for Pleasantville’s downtown. Long buoyed by the Jacob Burns Film Center, which has brought crowds for nearly 25 years, the central business district has been flourishing with the opening of new businesses and two major mixed-use projects at 70 Memorial Plaza and at 39 Washington Avenue. The two buildings combine for more than 100 apartments.

Businesses, including Lulu’s Kitchen, and Hudson Dental Co., which took over half the space of the old Pleasantville Pharmacy on Wheeler Avenue, have contributed to maintaining and enhancing a vibrant downtown.

For Chamber of Commerce President Bill Flooks, the ability for visitors and many village residents to walk through downtown Pleasantville helps drive customers to businesses.

“I think the only thing it can do is help because you’re bringing more people in, they’ve got to shop somewhere, and again, when they park their car, they can walk to anything that they need except to Home Depot or Berger Hardware. I think there are enough shops around Pleasantville where you can get what you need,” Flooks said.

Foodies Delight

Aside from the Jacob Burns, the multitude of restaurants and other food-related businesses that attract diners into the downtown has played a significant part of Pleasantville’s success. Flooks said the community has become “a foodie town,” which helps other establishments as well.

“Everybody comes to eat stuff, and depending on when you come in, it’s going to bring you into the other shops if they’re still open,” he said.

Mayor Peter Scherer said Pleasantville has been able to navigate a changing world where much of traditional retail has moved online, so the community is grateful for the support of new establishments like Wonder. Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, old surveys found that more than half of village residents’ retail dollars were spent in the downtown, he said.

“It’s clearly a world that no longer exists, but responding to the changing world we’ve actually been very successful in attracting new food and service kind of businesses, which continue to prosper. I dare to say the average Pleasantville resident spends more on restaurants and take-out food than then they did a generation ago,” Scherer said.

Now adding to those choices is Wonder. Shlossman said while there are about a dozen locations in Manhattan and several others in Brooklyn and Queens, the majority of their outlets are in the suburbs, of Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey and more recently Connecticut. The company, which was launched by entrepreneur Marc Lore in 2019, has a goal of greater density in areas where the clientele will tend to eat out regularly.

Another objective is to make sure that deliveries are made to the customer within a maximum of 30 to 35 minutes from the time the order is placed. They deliver within a radius of about 10 minutes in the city and several minutes longer in the suburbs, he said.

“It allows for a better customer experience overall when it gets to your door,” Shlossman said. “Ultimately, when you order that pizza hot, you want it to be hot when it gets to you. You don’t want to turn on the oven and pop it in the oven to reheat it. So that’s what’s really, really interesting for us, and that’s what makes a lot of sense for us to densify and keep our locations pretty close together.”

One of the few laments that Scherer has is that most new Pleasantville businesses seem to be food related.

“Apparently, we’re living in a world where everyone is interested in food,” Scherer said. “It’s much harder to get anyone to invest in bricks and mortar retail.”

Pleasantville in a Good Place

PHOTO BY DONNA MUELLER

Several downtown merchants agreed that Pleasantville is one of the top places to be in the area. Enzo Cutaia, owner of Fleetwood Bakery on Wheeler Avenue, said having a spot that can draw customers with a healthy supply of foot traffic is beneficial to most businesses.

“We’re a draw for the other stores in a neighborhood, and it goes the other way. There’s so many good restaurants and delis here, so when they go to those places, they’re looking around and they come shop at Fleetwood Bakery. So, it benefits everybody.”

Having multiple attractive businesses and destinations nearby is also an advantage for Second Mouse Cheese on Manville Road. Located across the street from the Jacob Burns Film Center, it’s also a draw in its own right as one of only three cheese stores in Westchester, according to owner Ivy Ronquillo.

There are always challenges – economics, parking, spiking food and utility prices and the recent Manville Road construction, to names several – but generally much of Westchester can withstand fiscal downturns, she said.

“This location was too good to be true,” said Ronquillo, who opened Second Mouse six years ago. “I think this space was twice the size that I wanted and just about twice the expense but being across the street from Jacob Burns gave me kind of a built-in clientele. It didn’t take much to reach the folks who go to Jacob Burns, who are more likely to go to specialty food markets as well.”

Michael Kagan, a partner at Root 2 Rise NY, a plant-based café on Manville Road, said Pleasantville is an excellent community to have a niche business where there isn’t much competition. Many customers are looking to know where their food is coming from as well as the ingredients.

There have been drawbacks, mainly because of the construction surrounding Manville Road streetscape. Root 2 Rise NY opened in 2021.

“The area, overall, it’s a good place to be,” Kagan said. “Just the last few years there’s a good number of changes going on and I know for a fact that businesses have been hurt by that.”

PHOTO BY DONNA MUELLER

Minimal Vacancies

While definitive figures about downtown storefront vacancies weren’t readily available, Flooks estimated that it was likely below a manageable 20 percent. A large vacancy on the ground floor at 39 Washington Avenue will eventually be filled by the pharmacy White’s Apothecary. Scherer said the pharmacy is paying rent and he expects the storefront to be filled by the fall.

Elsewhere, the only major vacancies are half of the space that had been occupied by Pleasantville Pharmacy and in the recently departed King’s Scribe storefront, both on Wheeler Avenue, the old Florsheim shoe store location on Pleasantville Road where a deli and convenience story went out and the remaining 3,000 square feet of empty retail space at 70 Memorial Plaza.

“We have a few spaces, but relative to many downtowns, I think it’s been pretty vibrant,” Scherer said. “I’m pretty optimistic that at least reasonably priced retail spaces get turned into something.”

Off The Air: Pleasantville’s PCTV To Go Dark

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Pleasantville Community Television (PCTV) has filmed important moments in the village during the past 25 years. Its studio on Lake Street, and for many years before at its Jackson Alley space, has attracted the likes of actor Rob Lowe, bestselling author Stephen King and many other celebrities and highly accomplished figures.

One of the most prolific community access stations in the area, PCTV has amassed an archive of more than 10,000 programs, most of which were hosted or produced by local residents on a dizzying array of topics. There is Ben Cheever’s “About Writing” where he talks to authors, exercise shows from the Clinton Street Senior Center and more than 300 episodes of “The Listening Place” featuring discussions about healing that was launched by Nancy Rosanoff after 9/11.

It has regularly filmed the Pleasantville Music Festival each July and its cameras have captured Village Board, Planning Commission and Board of Education meetings and ribbon-cutting ceremonies for countless local businesses.

Longtime station manager Shane McGaffey, 54, who has run PCTV for the past-quarter century in the community where he moved to as a child with his parents and where he has raised his two children, said it isn’t a coincidence that PCTV has been a magnet for well-known guests. He’s convinced that having a local community access station that also covers live events figured into part of the calculus for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to come to Pleasantville to sign the state’s property tax cap legislation into law in 2011 and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins many presentations.

“The fact that Pleasantville was on the map enough for these people to come here and be interviewed and be filmed to give a message to the community members here, I think it makes a difference,” McGaffey said.

However, the days of making a difference are quickly dwindling. This spring PCTV, a non-profit village entity, is closing operations, a victim of evolving technology and persistent funding challenges throughout the station’s history. While there was no official closing date given when local officials made the announcement early this year, Pleasantville Mayor Peter Scherer said the goal is to have the station cease operations by or before the end of the village’s fiscal year on May 31.

Bringing Pleasantville Together

For 12 years, operations manager Evelyn Latella took on multiple responsibilities for PCTV, handling many of its administrative tasks. In her estimation, PCTV has helped bind the community with programming that cannot be found elsewhere. PCTV would not only film the Memorial Day parade and the ceremony that followed along with Veterans Day recognition, but it also highlighted stories of local veterans.

Its close relationship with the Pleasantville Chamber of Commerce where the station would collaborate on the organization’s annual Person of the Year, was another example of helping integrate PCTV into the community.

“It was really very successful, and it really brought the community together, it brought the village together, the people in the community together,” Latella said. “It kind of helped raise our fundraising, our arts donations every year, and it was just the planning and execution of making a difference, I thought.”

When McGaffey returned home after five years in Russia, he soon learned there was a fledgling local television studio and sought to lend his talents. He was quickly attracted to the community-minded approach and the ability for community members to bring unique programming to residents.

“I started to get a real high from that and I felt that what I was doing was important,” he said.

Consistent Headwinds

Despite being an asset for many years, there was always the hurdle of village funding. In the current fiscal year, the village budgeted about $120,000 for the station, Scherer said. But at a time where costs continue to rise and modes of communication have made it easier for the public to produce and post content themselves, what was once a groundbreaking model has in many ways been surpassed by social media.

“I think we’re in an environment now where so many people have so many different ways of creating the content they might once have found tethered to a public access station,” Scherer said. “Now, to the extent that they want to put together a show, they can do it with limited equipment in their living room and get it up on YouTube and all of those places and honestly get broader distribution than they were getting through PCTV.”

The village will continue to record its meetings through technology and post them on the village’s website, he said.

But for McGaffey, a graduate of the All-Russian University of Cinematography in Moscow after earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Rochester, PCTV’s looming closure will leave a void that cannot yet be calculated for the roughly 55,000 households who could access the channel in Pleasantville and in neighboring towns. The recordings comprise a catalogue of Pleasantville’s recent history, at least since the archives were established in 2009. While many viewers have become used to the quick hits of seconds-long videos on TikTok and Instagram, there is still demand for long-form interviews and programs that extensively delve into a topic, he said.

McGaffey also predicts that it will make communication more difficult for the residents. “I still think you need the full story so people can take a deep dive (on an issue), and make up their own mind,” McGaffey said. “I think you may have some five-minute things, but they’re not going to be able to delve deeper anymore.”

Good News, Bad News

The likelihood of a closure caught McGaffey by surprise at PCTV budget meetings last fall. PCTV had secured several grants to help offset funding, including $50,000 and $20,000 state grants related to educational purposes and $8,500 and $10,000 county grants. Only the $8,500 was a grant that required a match from the village.

“We had identified what we wanted to do,” McGaffey explained. “The Village Board at our last budget meeting was really happy with the direction we were providing. They were really thrilled, and then the grants starting rolling in. All that work was starting to pay off. We had a real vision and everybody was on the same page.”

The grants would augment extra revenue the station had been pulling in from commercial work, a concerted effort that was made several years earlier to offset costs. McGaffey thought they were in an improving position.

“If there was ever a time, this wasn’t it, just because we had an agreed upon mission, or so we thought, and we were bringing in a lot of revenue to make that happen,” McGaffey said.

Michael Inglis, the PCTV board president, said in a statement that with the village pulling funding for the station, there did not seem to be a path forward.

“The PCTV board thanks the Village for its funding over the years, and all the past board members who have been involved with this public endeavor. We also wish to acknowledge all the producers who have created so much outstanding local content over the last 25 years and thank our partners and sponsors for their support,” the statement read in part.

Scherer said with continued rising expenses, including an estimated $265,000 to replace the roof on the water district building where the studio is housed, the Village Board needed to decide. Plus, village officials were concerned about any ongoing obligations from the grants.

“You arrive at a point every year with the budget season right now with a challenge to figure out what needs more money and what needs less,” Scherer said.

“We felt that the number of people taking advantage of it was small enough where we needed to invest that money in other more effective ways in communicating,” he added.

“So many of these shows were really like a college education,” McGaffey said. “The depth and breadth of programming created through the station will be difficult to replicate. For example, I never would have known that Pleasantville was part of the Underground Railroad if not for PCTV. I got to meet a lot of really cool people and filmed a lot of interviews where I learned a lot.”