Local city information for Irvington, NY

Irvington, sometimes known as Irvington-on-Hudson, is an affluent suburban village in the Town of Greenburgh in Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, north of midtown Manhattan in New York City and is served by a station stop on the Metro-North Hudson Line. To the north of Irvington is the village of Tarrytown, to the south the village of Dobbs Ferry, and to the east unincorporated parts of Greenburgh, including East Irvington. Irvington includes within its boundaries the community of Ardsley-on-Hudson, which has its own zip code and Metro-North station, but which should not be confused with the nearby village of Ardsley, New York.

The population of Irvington at the 2000 census was 6,631. The estimated population in 2007 was 6,682.

Before the site where Irvington is now located was settled by Europeans, it was inhabited by the Wickquasgeck Indians, one of the Lenape (Delaware) tribes which dominated lower New York state and New Jersey. The land was originally part of the Bisightick tract of the Van der Donck grant purchased by Frederick Philipse in 1682, but in 1785 the state of New York confiscated the land from his grandson, Frederick Philipse III, after he sided with the British in the Revolution, and sold it to local farmers. This is presumably how part of it came to be the farm of William Dutcher. Dutcher sold half of his farm to Justus Dearman in 1817, who then sold it to Gustavo F. Sacchi in 1848 for $26,000. Saachi sold the parcel to John Jay that same year, and Jay laid it out as a village which he called "Dearman", and sold lots at auction in New York City starting on April 25, 1850. At that time, a ferry point ran across the Hudson from Dearman to Piermont on the west bank, and the hamlet of "Abbotsford" (which would later become Ardsley-on-Hudson) was forming along Clinton Avenue.

In 1854 the village changed its name, by popular vote, to "Irvington", after the American author Washington Irving, who was still alive at that time and living in nearby "Sunnyside" – which is today preserved as a museum. Influential residents of the village prevailed upon the Hudson River Railroad to change the name of the train station to "Irvington", and also convinced the Postmaster to change the name of the local post office as well. It was thus under the name of "Irvington" that the village incorporated on April 16, 1872.

The side streets off of Irvington's Main Street, which originally were designated "A", "B", "C", and so forth, are today named after many of the area's early settlers, such as Barent and William Dutcher, Captain John Buckhout (who lived to 103) and Wolfert Ecker (or "Acker"). It was Ecker's house, then owned by Jacob van Tassel, which was burned by the British in the Revolutionary War because it had become a notorious hang-out for American patriots. Washington Irving later wrote about it under the name of "Wolfert's Roost", and purchased and re-modeled the house to become "Sunnyside". Another early settler was Capt. Jan Harnse, and the Harnse-Conklin-Odell Tavern on Broadway was built in 1693. (see below British troops camped near Odell's Tavern during the Revolution.

Beginning in the 1850s Irvington's cool summer breezes off the Hudson and the rural riparian setting began to attract wealthy residents of New York City to the area to build large summer residences. For many years, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irvington was a relatively small community surrounded by numerous large estates and mansions where millionaires, aristocrats and captains of industry lived – the population was reported as 2,299 in 1890 and 2013 in 1898. Many of the estates and mansions are now gone, having been replaced by suburban sub-divisions, although a small number still exist, but Irvington still has many large houses, and is still an overwhelmingly well-heeled community.
Irvington is protected by its own 22 man police department, along with a volunteer fire department and volunteer ambulance corps.

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