Irvington Celebrates Its Long-Lived Local Newspaper, The Gazette

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The Irvington Historical Society exhibit's poster on the Gazette's "Local News" feature

April 25, 2025

By Barrett Seaman–

Once upon a time, villages in the rivertowns had their own newspapers. Shortly after the turn of the century (the 1899-to-1900 one), several sprang up: the Dobbs Ferry Register, the Ardsley Tribune, the Hastings News—all weeklies, and the Tarrytown Daily News.

In Irvington, a gentleman named Frank Morrell, who owned a print shop at 81 Main Street, launched his own weekly paper in 1897. The Irvington Gazette, as it was called, would last only a year before folding. But Morrell would revive it in 1907, beginning a 60-year run under different management and in various formats.

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Frank Morrell, founder of The Irvington Gazette

The Gazette’s fascinating history is now on display at McVickar House, headquarters of the Irvington Historical Society. There, visitors may read its stories, including a couple of juicy scandals, examine its photographs and read background material on the men and women who made it happen—all curated by Marion Osmun, a freelance editor and writer who lives in the village. The display will be open to the public until next fall. Visiting hours are Thursdays and Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m..

Frank Morrell was not a journalist by training. He was a printer, previously trained at Cosmopolitan Magazine, then based in what is now the Trent Building on South Astor Street. In its early years, the Gazette ran mostly what Osmun calls “ready print,” which is basically cut-and-paste items that came in over the transom. He also wrote, “but his writing was terrible,” Osmun says candidly, while allowing that “he was so enthusiastic that I got to like him.”

There were no bylines, as content was either created by Morrell, a tireless reporter, or submitted by village residents into a section called “Local News” that was demonstrably unedited yet somehow charming. In the February 2, 1912 issue, it was noted that “Mrs. Michael Kiernan has been ill for the past week with a serious cold,” and that “Dr. and Mrs. John B. Calvert returned from a visit to Kinderhook in the Catskills on Wednesday evening.”

Items weren’t necessarily all so mundane. It was noted in that same issue that “the girl murderer Albert Wolter” had been executed at Sing Sing earlier that week, adding that he was “well remembered in this village, having worked at the home of Joseph Reader for a number of months about four years ago.”

Morrell continued to edit The Gazette for 30 years. In 1910, he brought in two investors: Herbert Reynolds, who owned the hardware store, and Cyrus Bishop, a local attorney. For the next 25 years, Morrell maintained “free editorial reign,” said Osmun. His coverage went beyond Irvington proper and included all of Greenburgh.

Morrell invited columnists, one of whom was George “Scoop” Smith. In one of his columns, Smth accused Malcolm Roy, then village attorney and a co-founder of Sunnyside Federal Bank, of colluding with village trustee Alexander Simpson to profit from zoning changes in the Spiro Park neighborhood. The two officials sued the Gazette for $225,000 (about $4.1 million today). The case ended when Morrell published an apology that Osmun characterizes as “the only time Frank Morrell wrote anything actually coherent.”

The exhibit’s display of the Roy/Simpson lawsuit

The other big story The Gazette carried was in 1938, when Hedi Heusser, a 27-year-old Swiss national, occupied the second floor of the spacious Irvington home of businessman Rollo Blanchard, refusing to decamp until Blanchard fulfilled his alleged vow to marry her. Blanchard hired private detectives who tried to force her out by threatening to cut off food, water, gas and electricity. Blanchard alternated his time between his Tarrytown-based yacht and a hotel in White Plains.

Editors at The Gazette deemed the standoff as too salacious to devote more than one story, but the national press, including the New York Times and TIME Magazine, had no such compunctions.

Not long after the Roy/Simpson lawsuit was settled, Scoop Smith died of Rheumatoid Arthritis. Frank Morrell himself died suddenly in 1936 at age 62. He was succeeded by none other than Malcolm Roy, who had started out as a sportswriter before enrolling in law school. He bought The Gazette in 1937 and ran it until his own death in 1960. He made changes, widening the paper from six to seven columns. One of his sons (all of whom became lawyers), Donald, took over, reverting the paper to tabloid size in 1963.

Osmun calls the period from 1917 to 1947 the heyday of advertising in local papers like The Gazette. By the sixties, however, ad dollars were shifting away from local weeklies to national media, especially television. With a gloomy forecast ahead, the Gazette’s last issue was published on August 28^th, 1969. Its place in the community was taken by the Rivertowns Enterprise, a weekly that opened in 1975 and closed in January of 2024, as well as this news web site, The Hudson Independent, which was a monthly printed paper from 2005 until the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

Since then, The Indy has been available as a nonprofit at www.thehudsonindependent.com). The Enterprise has since been replaced by The Rivertowns Dispatch. Struggling nationally as a category, local news outlets generally continue to seek a return to that heyday that allowed The Gazette to thrive in a simpler world.

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