Getty Square is the name for downtown Yonkers, New York, centered on the public square. Getty Square is the civic center, central business district, and transit hub of the City of Yonkers. A dense and growing residential area, it is located in southern Westchester County, New York. The square is named after prominent 19th-century merchant Robert Getty.
History
European colonization
The square is named for Robert Parkhill Getty, a prominent merchant and civic leader in the 1800s. The area was the heart of a Dutch patroonship granted to the first lawyer in the New World, Adriaen van der Donck, who built both saw and grist mills on what was then the Saeck Kill, later to become the Nepperhan River and today's Saw Mill.
Getty Square's two oldest, still-standing buildings, Philipse Manor Hall (circa 1682) and St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church (built 1752 by Frederick Philipse III), were built in close proximity to the river. The Hudson River, bordering the western waterfront of Getty Square, provided a transportation route to markets beginning in the 1600s. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 increased water-borne traffic from upstate New York down the Hudson to Manhattan.
Industrialization
In 1853, Elisha Graves Otis, inventor of the safety elevator, established the Otis Elevator Company on the Hudson River and Vark Street, along the new railroad tracks that ran along the Hudson's banks. As the company grew, a larger facility was built just north of the Saw Mill River, what is now Van der Donck Park. Vast Otis factory buildings covering blocks of land extended north to Ashburton Avenue.
Later, three separate railroad companies established lines through Getty Square. The New York and Putnam Railroad built the terminal for its Yonkers Branch line in Getty Square, with the original 1880s headhouse and train shed station in the square later upgraded to an office building and railway platform at 20 South Broadway. (The office building remains, but the railway platform has been replaced by a parking garage.) The New York Central Railroad operated out of the still-in-use Yonkers train station. The Third Avenue Railway trolley company ran multiple streetcar lines through Getty Square, and stored its streetcars (also called trams) in the still-standing Yonkers Trolley Barn on Main Street in Getty Square.
Like many downtowns in the northeastern United States, Getty Square suffered gradual and severe de-industrialization and non-automobile infrastructure disinvestment beginning after World War II. The Otis Elevator Company factory, with vast buildings covering much of the Getty Square neighborhood north of what is now Van der Donck Park, closed in 1983. Rail-based transportation also diminished. The closing and quick demolition of the Yonkers Branch of the New York and Putnam Railroad, despite an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, occurred in 1944, and the Third Avenue Railway trolley service finally ended in 1952. The Saw Mill River, once the economic engine of Getty Square, was buried in flumes underground in the 1920s; the pavement above was used mostly for car parking lots at Chicken Island, Mill Street Courtyard, and Larkin Plaza. New York State widened Nepperhan Avenue to create an arterial highway along the eastern side of the neighborhood, demolishing a Carnegie library in the process.
The farmers' market at St. John's Church is the oldest in Westchester.
21st century
The reconstituting of the vacant Otis Elevator Factory campus into the iPark corporate business center spurred an influx of advanced industrial initiatives. Capitalizing on the iPark location connected to the existing rail network, Kawasaki Heavy Industries brought its railcar assembly plant to Getty Square. In 2011, iPark installed the largest solar-panel array in Westchester on its roof to provide low-cost electricity to its manufacturing tenants. In 2011, ContraFect, a biotechnology firm, relocated from Manhattan to Getty Square's iPark, followed in 2013 by Mindspark Interactive Network. Also in 2013, the YONY initiative to spur increased technology company activity began.
In 2007, the Science Barge, a solar and wind-powered demonstration farm, using hydroponics and aquaculture, docked at its permanent home next to the train station at the mouth of the Saw Mill River. The Science Barge draws thousands of researchers and students in the STEM fields, environmental science, and agriculture to Getty Square from around the world, and has been featured by the news media as far as Brazil, Japan and South Korea. In 2013, Sarah Lawrence College established an academic research center at the existing Beczak Environmental Center.