Yonkers

Yonkers is a city in Westchester County, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River just north of the Bronx. Elisha Otis built the first safety elevator in a Yonkers workshop in the 1850s, and the company he founded there made tall buildings practical.

The name comes from the Dutch word jonker, a young gentleman, the title of Adriaen van der Donck, who received the land in 1646 from the Dutch West India Company. Frederick Philipse, a Dutch merchant, later built a manor on the Saw Mill River, and the stone Philipse Manor Hall from the late 17th century still stands in the center. Yonkers grew in the 19th century with mills and factories along the river, among them the Alexander Smith carpet mills, which made carpets on power looms. It was chartered as a city in 1872, with a long row of factories along the Hudson waterfront.

Kawasaki Rail Car builds subway cars for the New York City Transit at its plant in Yonkers. Domino Sugar refines cane sugar at its refinery on the waterfront of the city.

The Hudson River Museum, set in a 19th-century mansion called Glenview, shows art and science exhibitions and has a planetarium. Untermyer Gardens, laid out for the lawyer Samuel Untermyer in the early 20th century, has a walled Persian garden and a temple of love above the river. Yonkers Raceway, opened in the late 1890s as a horse racing track, holds harness races and a casino. In the 2010s a stretch of the Saw Mill River that had run under a parking lot was brought back to daylight in a downtown park.