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Gentlemen's Agreement in Bronxville:
The “Holy Square Mile”
- Abstract
BRONXVILLE, New York, is a pleasant, handsome suburban village in lower Westchester County, fifteen miles north of New York City. In most respects it differs little from other fashionable metropolitan suburbs, although the average income seems somewhat higher, the residents more homogeneous, the schools superior. Photographers use the Bronxville railroad station as a backdrop for advertising pictures and TV commercials, but Larchmont’s station is used more often. Bronxville’s business district is restrained and architecturally consistent, but Scarsdale’s is more so. Bronxville, however, is unique in one respect. It doesn’t like Jews and won’t admit them as residents.
There are other areas in Westchester, Nassau, and other suburban counties around New York which try to stay demonstrably “Aryan.” But these are places without sharply defined boundaries; their exclusionary practices are being steadily eroded. Bronxville, on the other hand, is an incorporated village, with legal boundaries within which Jews are unwelcome, except as visitors or customers. And Bronxville continues to enforce its anti-Semitic pattern though it lies clearly within the metropolitan area in which wholesale discrimination was supposed to have been wiped out.
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