A Walk-About in Glenwood Lake

Communities For All Ages in New Rochelle organized the first-ever Walk-About in the Queen City on the Sound on Saturday, March 23.

A Walk-About is a historic walking tour of a particular neighborhood, with the goal of learning about the neighborhood while taking a sort of inventory of the area. Approximately 30 people had the pleasure of walking around the Glenwood Lake section of New Rochelle to discover its architecture and document its points of interest.

Residents of the neighborhood as well as members of the Communities For All Ages Team braved the chilly spring morning to explore the tight-knit neighborhood. Participants included people ages 5 to 75.  Community members Theresa Beyer and Quentin Jacobs, as well as City Historian Barbara Davis all contributed by sharing their extensive knowledge on the neighborhood tour.

Participants learned about the interesting architectural elements of homes in the area, while absorbing the feel of the area by walking its streets.  Here are some interesting tidbits they learned:

• The original Temple Israel of New Rochelle on Webster Avenue now houses a Seventh-day Adventist Church — one of many examples of recycling of religious institutions in the City.
• Webster School’s 1990 expansion is almost not detectable due to the carefully matched brick in the new portion.
• Glenwood Lake is a glacial body of water.  Though urban legend tells that it is bottomless, the last measured depth is approximately 60 feet.
• Don Hewitt, the longtime producer of 60 Minutes, received his first taste of journalism racing against deadlines for the Webster School’s paper.

This is the first of several Walk-Abouts that Communities For All Ages plans to host throughout the city.

Each outing will help build a New Ro Neighbors Collection in the local history room of the New Rochelle Public Library. This collection will also contain relevant archival materials: photographs, postcards, maps, real estate brochures, cultural inventory surveys of individual structures and districts, clippings, digitized oral history interviews, and other items already maintained by the library. 

For more information on Communities For All Ages and future Walk-Abouts, please go to:www.newrochellecommunityservices.org

Communities For All Ages is an intergenerational initiative that seeks to build communities though cross-sector collaboration and by addressing community issues with an intergenerational lens. New Rochelle joins Port Chester, Yonkers and Peekskill in Westchester County as a Community For All Ages. Twenty such communities currently exist in the United Sates. This initiative is funded by United Way of Westchester and Putnam and the Helen Andrus Benedict Foundation. The CFAA headquarters is based at Temple University’s Intergenerational Center.