Sleepy Hollow Strives To Continue Where Anne White Left Off

By Elizabeth Tucker–

The news of Anne White’s death at the age of 88 came as a shock to many in Sleepy Hollow. “I thought she was immortal,” said trustee Jared Rodriguez at a memorial service held Wednesday, December 10. Only a week before, she had attended the swearing-in ceremony for the newly elected mayor and trustees and the monthly meeting of Sustainable Sleepy Hollow, which she co-chaired until January, 2025. At the meeting, Anne announced that she would be stepping down from the board. Recently seeming somewhat less energetic, she continued to run circles around those half her age. She had planned to continue working on getting the Combined Stormwater Outflow point at Horan’s landing closed and improving inter-village collaboration for stormwater management. She was taking a related course on environmental law at Pace University.

These activities were typical of Anne, who was a steadfast participant in village affairs and an unflagging champion of a host of causes, which she pursued with intellectual rigor and tenacity. In addition to her environmental advocacy, she served on the committee to reform the Sleepy Hollow police department, mandated by Governor Andrew Cuomo for all New York municipalities after the killing of George Floyd, and worked to introduce restorative justice in Westchester County. As a resident of St. Paul, Minnesota, until 2015, Anne had been a member of the Governing Council that studied walkability surrounding the Central Corridor Light Rail transit system in order to improve mobility equity and boost ridership. In acknowledgment of her contributions, St. Paul declared April 27, 2016 “Anne White Day.” She brought this experience to the monthly meetings of Livable Tarrytowns, where she urged members to do more outreach, form stronger relationships.

Anne had also previously served as the League of Women Voters representative to the UN. At the memorial service, Sleepy Hollow mayor Marjorie Hsu spoke of the significant role Anne had played in the recent election. The entire slate of newly elected trustees were present and acknowledged owing their success in a large part to Anne. Susanne Jones of Sustainable Sleepy Hollow described Anne’s persistence in persuading her to take over the role of chair, and a number of other speakers agreed that Anne had prompted them, directly or through example, to challenge themselves and participate more fully.

Anne’s husband, Wayne Richter, took a moment to tell Anne’s later-life friends about “the original Anne,” as he put it. They met as teenagers at the Putney School in Vermont. Wayne described himself as a shy person who only mustered the courage to talk to the worldly Anne while experiencing the after-effects of a concussion that “temporarily changed his personality.” After a first marriage from which she had four children, Anne met Wayne again at their forty-fifth high school reunion. “I thought she was really cute,” he said, “although she hated that word.”

By profession, Anne was a photographer, running the booking agency The Photography Bureau, Inc. until she retired in 2005. In 1977, she spearheaded the creation of the education department at the International Center of Photography in New York City. She traveled with her sister, the anthropologist Alison Baker, to take photographs for Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women and a second book about China (unpublished). The sisters spent summers in Maine, on Leadbetter Island and North Haven. Anne’s daughter Alison Pena remembers the fun of their family projects. “When our family expanded and the Wooster Cove house got too small to hold us all, Grandpa, mom’s sister Alison, and mom decided we would build a kit house as a family from scratch. To tile the roof, we had to nail a board halfway up to lay the upper half. I’ll never forget Mom dancing on that board with delight. Wayne almost fainted but she was like a goat up there.”

For the past seven years, Anne and her daughter were fixtures at the Hudson Valley Writers Center open mic, where they read their poetry “about family, love, politics, Maine, and the planet,” in Alison’s words. A poem by Anne can still be read near the entrance to the Sleepy Hollow lighthouse, on the Wishing Wall. In the poem she imagines the wall as “a multi-colored ribbon tying people and ideas and neighborhoods together.”

As someone who counted herself a friend of the remarkable Anne, I felt the finality of her death when, in the course of writing this, I kept wanting to know more about what she had done and no longer had the option of asking her about it.

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