The coat of arms of the Village of Bronxville is a surprisingly handsome design, for which we can thank a gentleman named Lt. Col. Harrison Wright.

Known to most as Hal, Wright (1887–1966) was one of those citizens who seemed to have had endless time to devote to those around them. In the Great War he served in a variety of roles and had the pleasure of personally delivering a Packard automobile to General Pershing.

He helped coordinate the village police when its captain’s ill health forced an unexpected retirement and was an active member of the American Legion post.

Wright was also Scoutmaster of Troop 1 and served as the local District Commissioner for the Boy Scouts. In that role he had under his purview a young scout from my old troop — Troop 2, Bronxville — named Jack Kennedy.

During the Second World War, Wright deployed his significant logistical expertise as an officer at the U.S. Army’s New York Port of Embarkation but, with his artistic skills and heraldic interest, he also found time in 1942 to design Bronxville’s coat of arms. (more…)

Not even the peaceful hills and dales of the Hudson Valley were left untouched by the liturgicalism of the Oxford Movement

SUCH WAS THE influence of the nineteenth-century “Oxford Movement” in the Church of England that it engulfed the great preponderance of the Anglican Communion. It is surprising when you consider that Anglican priests and even a bishop were jailed in England for such scandalous acts as calling the Communion service “the Mass”, wearing vestments, and putting candles on the altar; these are now so widespread in the Church of England to be commonplace. But the Oxford movement also spilled out into other Protestant groups as well. The liturgical movement changed the Church of Scotland in the 1900s, and many of the Kirk’s medieval church buildings that had been converted into pulpit-centered preaching halls were reordered in a way emphasizing the “Communion table” that was an altar in all but name. (Those who can find before & after shots of the ‘Toon Kirk’ of Holy Trinity in St Andrews, Fife will notice this marked contrast).

(more…)

Millions of tax dollars taken from hard-working Americans are going to subsidise one of the wealthiest school districts in the country

The Bronxville School (as it is called, since all grades from kindergarten to 12th are in the same building) ostensibly has a number of things going for it. It has a rather splendid collegiate gothic building in an excellent setting in one of the handsomest villages in all of the Empire State. Its school district is a mere square-mile, meaning most students can walk to school and it doesn’t even have a bus system. It has a private foundation funded independently by parents and alumni to support the school. What more could a public school possibly need?

Well, according to the geniuses down in Washington, D.C., $5.4 million in federal grants. The school, you see, is built on a site which frequently floods. Our main street in Bronxville is called Pondfield Road for a reason: the field with the pond is the open space where the school now stands. It’s been flooding for decades and so floods should come as no surprise. The nor’easter that blew through town a year ago flooded the school severely, closing it for over a week. The flooding was particularly bad during the last nor’easter because the school had spent a great deal of money (privately-raised, not from the public purse) to replace its natural football field with a lower-maintenance fake turf alternative. They did this instead of saving the money for, oh, say, one of those floods that happens every so often.

The money has been secured from the Federal Emergency Management Agency by our congresswoman, Nita Lowey (D). “When a natural disaster occurs, the federal government has a responsibility to help communities recover,” said Lowey, who neglected to provide any legal or moral backing for such an untruthful and baseless claim.

The school district of one of the wealthiest communities in the country is filching off the hard-working people of America in order to clean up the mess that is a direct result of its own poor spending decisions and inability to plan properly. Is there no shame?

I do miss my library. In a perfect world, I would spend half the day wandering through various libraries of lower Westchester and the City. Of course we have a university library here in St Andrews, but its selection is fairly poor, especially in the subjects in which I am particularly interested. (more…)

I tabulated the following for a number of institutions in the Village of Bronxville: name of institution, tax-assessed value of property, total size of property (unreliable), and number of properties owned. The results are not surprising. The top five in terms of value are, in order, the village’s only college, the hospital (where I was born), the public school, the village government itself, and the main church. (I think the stats on acreage are generally unreliable).

Source: http://www.bronxville.us/

Here’s a window from the Goodhue-designed Christ Church Bronxville, with a close-up of one panel below.

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