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List Price: $19.99 | | Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Salesrank: 2049650
Released: August 6, 2003 |
| Our Price: $11.00 |
| Used Price: $26.08 |
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| Media: Paperback |
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Editorial Review:
Yorktown explores the rich history of one of the northernmost towns in Westchester County. With vivid images, the book follows Yorktown from its early establishment as part of the Van Cortlandt Manor, through its key role in the American Revolution, to its development as a thriving residential and business community. Nestled in the Hudson Valley, Yorktown retains its pristine natural surroundings, including Teatown Lake Reservation. It has been a farm community, a hamlet with nurseries and orchards, and a summer colony with a local theater district and artistsí colony. It once served as a breadbasket and milk bar for New York City and played a part in providing the city with clean water. Ý
Yorktown (NY) (Images of America) Reviews:
Yorkyown (A Postcard History) 
2008-08-31 - Yorktown is not a glamorous place. It does not have great natural wonders, popular amusements, or sites of great historical importance. Relatively it is not even a very old town having sprung up as a commuter community from the railroads that pushed northward from New York City. One might easily wonder why anyone would even bother to produce a book on this place. But Yorktown, like the thousands of other such towns across America is the place where we buy our groceries, fill up the tank of our car, watch our children grow, live our lives. There are many things close to home that can bring us as much joy as those we find on exotic vacations, that is if we open our eyes to them. This book is a reminder of life's small pleasures, the things that we should keep ourselves more closely attuned to for they are apt to disappear before we know it.
While Acadia Publishing has produced many books on small towns it must be noted that this volume is part of their Postcard History Series, and indeed nearly every illustration in this book comes from a postcard. This is significant because for the most part postcards represent images that were important to a community as a whole, not just one person as a photograph can be. They may be biased representations but ones that give us insight into what people once thought important rather than just being an impersonal slice of life. The cards found in this book seem to range widely in significance from an image of a farmer's Holstein Bull to the large public bridges built over the Croton Reservoir, yet they were all deemed equally important at that time to be placed on a postcard.
The book begins at a logical point highlighting the railroad that turned this once rural farming community into a town. It is followed by chapters on the countryside in which hotels and bungalows sprang up to provide rest and recreation for city dwellers among the areas many lakes. It also covers places that relate to the local economy from the downtown stores to the area's agricultural heritage. It goes on to cover Yorktown's notable private homes, historic churches, and municipal buildings. There is even a section on the bridging of the Croton Reservoir that so strongly impacted the area's geography. While most of the images seem to predate the First World War they are not restrained to any one period to give us a full history up to the present time. Postmark dates are often referred to, which is a nice touch. A map is also included showing the Town's older structures overprinted on a more modern map. Though the scale makes it difficult to read it remains a valuable addition to those closely involved with the Town's history.
But perhaps the most interesting illustrations are those that depict the quiet streets and roads of the area that create a deep sense of character. This is very much a book of place where the landscape is not the setting for a story but the leading player in it. Many images taken from the small villages within the town such as Mohegan Lake, Shrub Oak, and Amawalk all contribute to this feeling. Despite the rural nature of this township it is surprising how much has changed over the years. After awhile I was happy to find a picture of a building that hadn't burnt down or a farm that wasn't turned into an apartment complex.
It is obvious that a great deal of effort was put into labeling each postcard for much insightful information is attached to each. That alone makes this book a valuable resource for anyone interested in Yorktown or even Westchester County's history. While the various subjects that comprise each chapter combined with the exacting captions of each picture add up to a good summary of the area's history, it is unfortunate that there is no narrative outside of the small introduction to tie all this information into a more clearly understandable story. A small history of postcards is also included but it is too brief to provide a clear perspective on the book's illustrations. Those truly interested in the area's history can easily overlook these flaws. The visual information that was gathered to make this book possible paints a rich history of Yorktown. History was once relegated to the story of Kings, now it's about all of us.
"Yorktown NY" and "Yorktown Postcard History" reviews 
2003-09-12 - Yorktown (NY) (Images of America) September 12, 2003
This book is a collection historical sketches about the Town of Yorktown, NY, stretching from the early settlements of the 1700s through the present day. For Yorktown residents it is a worthwhile acquisition, if only for the photographs of bygone eras. Horse-drawn vehicles were pervasive in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Automobiles were few and far between. Photographs of Commerce Street in the 1920s are charming. The book serves as a reminder as to what we have lost, but also to what we still have to preserve.
The book tells the story of Yorktown during the American Revolution and the Civil War, the creation of the Croton water supply system, the railroad which ran through town until 1962, famous Yorktown residents, and the communities that make up today's Yorktown.
Yorktown is a rectangular political entity which was carved out of a map over 200 years ago. It has no natural borders, just the straight lines superimposed on a less regular landscape. It comprises many individual communities: Shrub Oak, Mohegan Lake, Jefferson Valley, Yorktown Heights, Croton Heights, Huntersville, and Teatown to name some of them. Over the years, these communities have grown together to form one entity. It is a tribute to the people of Yorktown and also to its dedicated public servants that the town has grown a sense of greater community.
If the authors err, it is on being overly focused on the division of the town into neighborhoods and business hamlets. In fact, the individual communities are not so well defined as they may once have been. Today, the lines are blurred, communities overlap. We are more than a collection of hamlets and neighborhoods. What effects one part of Yorktown now effects the whole town.
Yorktown (Postcard History: New York) April 11, 2009
This is the third book by Arcadia Publishing concerning the past of the town of Yorktown. This latest book is well worth the purchase price. The previous two, the The Croton Dams and Aqueduct (Images of America: New York) and Yorktown (NY) (Images of America) are also well worth acquiring.
This edition, the Postcard History, is less a history and more a snapshot in time. During the period of about 1910 to 1930 apparently there were postcards made of just about anything. Clearly, photo postcards showing our cute train depot might be expected. But why would there be postcards made of seemingly ordinary roads, stores, and houses? For whatever reason they were produced, we are fortunate to have these documents of Yorktown's past. We are less fortunate in some of the transformations that have taken place.
Particulary amazing were the photos of sections of State Road and Whitney Avenue, now Commerce Street. The postcard images show Victorian houses, fenced yards, and unpaved roads. The landscape has changed so much in one hundred years that it is totally unrecognizable as the Commerce Street of today. Of the dozen or so victorian houses that can be seen in the photo on page 73, only one remains! It is now the real estate office on the corner of Commerce Street and Veterans Road. Somehow I think that we could have done better. How have we managed to replace those beautiful homes with the strangest collection of chaotically styled and placed buildings in Northern Westhester?
Some areas of town have done better over the course of the last century. East Main Street in Shrub Oak has retained many older structures, probably because the center of development there shifted to nearby Route 6. As the book notes, the major difference for East Main Street is that the road has been paved.
I plan on taking the postcard book with me around Yorktown to see if I can identify the locations where the photos were taken. There is one view of Underhill Avenue, a narrow unpaved path with a large rock on the side of the road. John Tegeder, one of authors and our town planner, told me that the rock was still there. I will have to go look for it.
Note: For some reason, Amazon has coupled the pages for these two books so that you cannot review each separately. Thus, the double review.
