{"id":603,"date":"2016-10-10T22:26:21","date_gmt":"2016-10-11T02:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roundupnewswires.com\/wire\/city\/harrison-ny\/?page_id=603"},"modified":"2016-10-10T22:32:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T02:32:18","slug":"about-harrison-ny","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/roundupnewswires.com\/wire\/city\/harrison-ny\/about-harrison-ny\/","title":{"rendered":"About Harrison, NY"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harrison<\/b> is a village and town<\/a> located in Westchester County<\/a>, New York<\/a>, approximately 22 miles northeast ofManhattan<\/a>. The population was 27,472 at the 2010 census.\u00a0Harrison was ranked sixth in the list of the top 10 places to live in New York State for 2014 according to the national online real estate brokerage Movoto.<\/p>\n

According to Forbes<\/a>, Harrison is the 326th wealthiest place in the United States with a median sale price of $1,230,625, slightly below that of Chappaqua<\/a>.\u00a0Fundera<\/a> ranked Harrison the best place in New York for small business.<\/p>\n

History<\/span><\/h2>\n

Harrison was established in 1696 by a patent granted by the British government to John Harrison and three others, who had a year earlier bargained with local Native Americans to purchase an area of land above Westchester Path (an old trail that led from Manhattan to Port Chester) and below Rye Lake.Local custom holds that Harrison was given 24 hours to ride his horse around the area he could claim, and the horse couldn’t swim or didn’t want to get its feet wet, but this is folklore.\u00a0In fact, the land below Westchester Path and along Long Island Sound had already been purchased and partly developed by the settlers of Rye, NY.<\/p>\n

The area that became Harrison had also been sold in 1661 or 1662, and again in 1666, to Peter Disbrow, John Budd, and other investors or early residents of Rye.\u00a0Disbrow and Budd evidently lost their paperwork and the land was ultimately granted to Harrison and his co-investors in 1696. So upset were the people or Rye that they seceded to the Colony of Connecticut until 1700, when the King of England ordered Rye to rejoin the Colony of New York.<\/p>\n

The first permanent residents of Harrison’s Purchase, as it was called, arrived in about 1725, and many early settlers were Quakers, who set up a Friend’s Meeting House at a settlement located in the part of Harrison now called Purchase<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>Harrison’s Purchase was administered jointly by the settlers of Rye until it was incorporated as a town on March 7, 1788, by an act of the New York State legislature.<\/p>\n

Merritt’s Hill in West Harrison was the site of the Battle of White Plains<\/a> during the Revolutionary War<\/a>. Regiment 182 of the Continental Army<\/a>, of the 367 regiments there, was the Harrison Regiment, composed solely of people from Harrison.<\/p>\n

During the 1830s, David Haviland settled in Harrison where he produced Haviland China<\/a> which he sold in his store in New York City before returning to his native France<\/a>. Today there exists a Haviland Street in a neighborhood of Harrison known as “South Downtown”, whose only street marker looks rather quite older than the rest in the town, composed of wrought iron<\/a> in scrolled shapes.<\/p>\n

In 1867 Benjamin Holladay purchased the land that is now Manhattanville College<\/a> in Purchase<\/a>. On the property is a Norman-style<\/a> Roman Catholic chapel built for his wife. There is also Reid Castle, once called the Ophir House, before being renamed for a later purchaser. The castle hosted the King and Queen of Siam<\/a> in the early 1930s.<\/p>\n

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PHOTO:\u00a0Harrison<\/a> Metro-North Railroad<\/a> station house<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What is now the Metro-North Railroad<\/a>‘s New Haven Line<\/a>, running from Manhattan<\/a>, New York City<\/a>, to Greenwich, Connecticut<\/a>, first came through Harrison in 1848, though the first station was not built until 1870. Before that time, Harrisonites had to flag down<\/a> the train to get a ride. Harrison remained generally free of factories through the Industrial Revolution<\/a>, while large factory districts grew in the neighboring towns of White Plains<\/a>, Port Chester<\/a> and Mamaroneck<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 1929, the Hutchinson River Parkway<\/a> was extended to Harrison.<\/p>\n

Political history<\/span><\/h3>\n

In 1967, 200 residents stated support for a plan to incorporate Purchase<\/a>, a community in Harrison, so that corporations could not build in the community.\u00a0In response, officials from the Town of Harrison put forward plans to try to become a city to try to stop Purchase from seceding from Harrison.\u00a0<\/span>The resolution was for the Town became a hybrid “Town \/ Village,” which it remains today.<\/p>\n

John A. Passidomo (1921\u20132005) was first elected Mayor in 1965 by only 67 votes. Re-elected eight times, he served until 1983 when he resigned to become Commissioner of the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles<\/a>.\u00a0In his two and a half years at that job, he helped pass one of the nation’s first seat-belt laws<\/a> despite the law’s unpopularity.<\/p>\n

Harrison’s “Platinum Mile”, a string of corporate office parks along I-287 in the Purchase section of Harrison, developed under Passidomo. The mayor played an instrumental role in attracting large corporations such as PepsiCo<\/a>, MasterCard<\/a> and Texaco<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the early 1970s, under Passidomo’s supervision, a group in the Purchase section of town, concerned about the town’s overdevelopment, attempted to incorporate as a village and thereby separate from the town of Harrison. Creatively, to avoid being served papers that would have begun the legal proceedings for Purchase to incorporate as a village, Passidomo entered his office through the fire escape. He then immediately made sure that the town Harrison became a village but remained as a town to end to the possibility of Purchase’s secession, since a village cannot legally be formed in another village.<\/p>\n

The list of supervisors\/mayors begins at 1965; however, there were mayors before that.<\/p>\n