Irvington Board Moves To Bring Strawberry Lane Under Village Control
By Barrett Seaman–
With its twin stone walls and leafy boughs lining a straight ascent up from Broadway, Strawberry Lane evokes a sense of what Irvington as a whole must have been like a century ago. Like the country lanes in England’s Cotswolds, it is narrow—too narrow, in fact, in the eyes of the village’s volunteer firefighters. It would take just one vehicle parked on either side of the street to stymie a hook and ladder truck from reaching a burning house beyond.
It has been about a century since a developer, listed as Scarsdale Heights Corporation, created the road to service a 42-house subdivision called Irvington Estates. In 1929, village records show, the developer offered to transfer ownership of other streets built for the subdivision—Irving Place, Circle Drive and parts of Riverview Road—thus making the village responsible for maintaining them.
Somehow, Strawberry Lane was left out of that deal and has remained unattached ever since. The village collects residents’ garbage and recycling, and the Post Office delivers their mail, but the lane’s residents are otherwise on their own. Residents whose properties abut the lane have shared the costs of maintaining it. Abbott House, the children’s home housed in an old estate at the top of the lane, has generously provided plowing in winter.
Technically, Scarsdale Heights Corp. still “owns” Strawberry Lane, but the most recent reference to the firm that Village Attorney Marianne Stecich could find was in documents related to a tax foreclosure in the 1940s. “Scarsdale Heights Corporation does not seem to be in existence anymore,” Stecich reported to the village’s Board of Trustees at its August 10th work session. “Nobody can find anything on it.”
Why that matters now is because of a pending application by the Chappaqua-based property company, Wilder Balter Partners (WBP) to build a 65-unit affordable housing complex on approximately four acres, currently owned by the Maxon Corporation. As proposed, the complex would abut Strawberry Lane on its north side. WBP’s initial plans call for entering and exiting the complex from the lane. Immediate neighbors protest that the narrow lane cannot bear the increased traffic that the project would create. The only practical alternative would be Broadway, which is not only a busy thoroughfare but also one that is controlled by the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT), noted in these parts for its deliberate decision-making process.
To be sure, entering that stretch of Broadway’s four lanes from any side street is considered risky, and there is widespread agreement that the fewer such intersections there are, the better. Strawberry Lane stands out because of tightly limited sight lines that make a left-hand turn onto Broadway particularly perilous. In a letter on the matter, NYSDOT Permit Engineer Brandon Roebuck wrote that the preferred solution would be to “eliminate the exit movement from Strawberry Lane onto State Route 9.” That naturally begs the question of how residents would then get back out. Mr. Roebuck’s preferred solution, as expressed in the letter, would be to merge a new outbound Strawberry Lane with a road in and out of the proposed housing complex.
Members of the Board, including Mayor Brian Smith, have made it clear that they want the WBP affordable housing project to succeed, but in order to further discussions, they feel they need to resolve the question of Strawberry Lane’s ownership. Their solution, approved unanimously at the August 10th work session, was to start the process of condemning it and re-dedicating it as a village street.
The August 10th vote launches the village on a procedural journey likely to take months—providing there are no serious obstacles. If, as planned, the Board calls for a public hearing at its August 15thmeeting, that hearing will most likely be in October. By then, it is hoped they will have resolved whether Scarsdale Heights Corp. in fact no longer exists and that they can proceed to deal with the homeowners, some of whose properties overlap with the road as it is officially defined on village maps.
Trustee Mark Gilliland observed that the Board will have to produce a detailed map that reflects where the road actually exists and where it is just what is called a “paper road.” The village will have to hire a title company, after which it must specify exactly what portion of the road it wants to be public and what should be left as “paper. As Gilliland acknowledged, “It’s complicated.”
There is a host of other requirements related to the timing and publication of hearings. For instance, all of the property owners must be notified at least 10 days prior to the hearing by certified mail (including one sent to the last known address of Scarsdale Heights Corp.). Anyone wishing to challenge the change of status must commence proceedings within 30 days of the last of five required newspaper notices. Any property owner who files a legal challenge must do so strictly on the basis of objections raised at one of the official public hearings.
These procedural issues could all be resolved quickly, of course, so that Strawberry Lane’s future ownership could be settled by Thanksgiving. There are a number of potential pitfalls, however, many of them rooted in the fact that almost everyone living on Strawberry Lane is against the proposed plan for the Maxon property—and against condemning their road.
David A. Kaplan, a lawyer who wrote about legal matters for Newsweek and Fortune Magazines, has a driveway onto Strawberry Lane. He was out of the country at the time of the Trustees’ decision but nonetheless opposes the move. “If necessary, we will vigorously contest any attempt to condemn Strawberry Lane,” he wrote in an email from overseas. “There’s no need to condemn it, all the more since a simple alternative exists for the developer to gain access to the property on a private driveway off Broadway it can construct.”
Kaplan finds the village’s newfound endorsement of condemnation ironic, as more than 20 years ago he urged a previous board to condemn it in order to enforce speed limits (later resolved through other means). “I was told it would be too expensive to bring the road up to code, too impractical, too legally uncertain, given the ownership of the road, and [that it] would set a bad precedent for other private roads in the Village,” he recalls.
Kaplan is not the only attorney living on the lane and given the broad opposition (albeit from a small cadre of village residents), any one of the obstacles cited could slow the process to a crawl.
It is indeed a complicated puzzle. The ability of the village, the developer and the state to determine how future residents drive in and out of the 65-unit housing complex may ultimately determine its fate. If the issue is not resolved in a reasonable period of time, it is quite possible that Wilder Balter could roll up their site renderings and move on.
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