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Written by: Joanne Wallenstein

Published: 10 February 2025

Created: 10 February 2025

Last Updated: 10 February 2025

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After years of community input, analysis and deliberation both the School and Village boards have indicated that they plan to move forward with some improvements to recreational fields and courts in the coming budget year.

The current draft of the proposed FY 2025-26 school budget includes $1,250,000 for field work and the Mayor has indicated that funding for fieldwork is also a priority for the 2025-26 Village budget.

No decision have yet been made on which projects will be taken on first. But in anticipation of the work, the Scarsdale Forum has released a report urging the school and village not to install any additional artificial turf fields and to consider replacing the existing turf fields with grass. The report, dated January 15, 2025, is the work of the Sustainability, Municipal Services, Parks and Recreation Committees of the Scarsdale Forum and is titled, “Health, Safety, Environmental Impacts and Exposure Risks of Synthetic Turf Recreation Fields and Courts.”

The report contends that artificial turf has potential negative health impacts for children and adults who play on them, poses adverse environmental impacts and costs more in the long term than natural grass.

The lengthy report reviews studies on the health risks of exposure to artificial turf materials including plastics and lead along with the greater incidence of injury for those playing on artificial turf. It discusses the increased heat levels on artificial turf and contends that artificial turf exacerbates flooding as it is an impervious surface that cannot absorb storm runoff.

Read the full report here.

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Written by: Joanne Wallenstein

Published: 03 February 2025

Created: 03 February 2025

Last Updated: 03 February 2025

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Former Scarsdale Mayors Marc Samwick and Jonathan Mark(This letter was submitted by former Scarsdale Mayors Marc Samwick and Jonathan Mark)

To the Editor:
We write in support of the nomination of Mayor Justin Arest for a second term as mayor of our Village. Over several years, we have worked with Justin on a variety of matters and observed his strong commitment to Scarsdale – initially in his role serving two terms as a Village Board Trustee, and then for two years as mayor. Based on what we have seen, we are impressed by the great amount of time and attention he has brought to these purely volunteer positions. In the past two years, he has spent countless hours leading the Board in its oversight role of Village management. He listens well, maintains organizational focus and does his best to guide decision making for the benefit of all residents.

As explained in the Citizen’s Nominating Committee (“CNC”) press release announcing Justin’s candidacy, nominating him for a second term as mayor is a break with the custom of having mayors serve for one term only. We understand from what the CNC explained in its release that this variation from custom was not done lightly. It was noted that it reflects due consideration of those legal and other matters the CNC deemed necessary and appropriate and ultimately resulted from that committee’s conclusion that Justin was the best person to fill the position of mayor for the next two years. We see a number of benefits from this conclusion, including perhaps most importantly, the ability to benefit from the institutional knowledge Justin has acquired from his six years on the Village Board. While such a variation from precedent is unusual, we are very comfortable that it reflects the collective decision of a committee of 30 of our neighbors who bear the same broad interests in our Village as the rest of us do.

It is therefore with full confidence that we endorse the candidacy of Justin Arest for a second term as mayor. We urge all registered voters in the Village to take the time to vote on March 18th for him – and the other candidates on the CNC slate, Dara Gruenberg, David Goldschmidt and Jason Kofman -- to show support for these committed volunteers and for a nonpartisan system that has served our Village well for decades.
Respectfully submitted,

Jon Mark,
Mayor of Scarsdale 2015-2017

Marc Samwick,
Mayor of Scarsdale 2019-2021

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Written by: Joanne Wallenstein

Published: 13 January 2025

Created: 13 January 2025

Last Updated: 17 January 2025

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(updated January 17, 2025) In 2012 the Scarsdale Board of Trustees engaged architectural historians to do a “Cultural Resources Survey” of the homes and buildings of Scarsdale. They provided a comprehensive document about the history of Scarsdale and of many of the notable homes that provide neighborhood character and make Scarsdale unique. Take a look at it here.

At the time, the consultants also delineated a list of “study areas” and recommended that the Village Trustees declare these areas as historic districts so that the homes could be protected from demolition.

One of the areas recommended for preservation was Dolma Road. Here’s what the report says:

“Dolma Road, running from Murray Hill Road to Birchall Road, is a short street lined with exclusive houses on large lots, most erected between 1926 and 1929 (one dates from 1935), primarily for wealthy businessmen and their families. Dolma Road was largely a project of Walter J. Collet, the Scarsdale builder who was responsible for the construction of many substantial houses in the village. Collet claimed that he chose the name Dolma in reference to a mountain range in Bengal, India; just why he made this choice remains a mystery. A long Dolma Road, Collet appears to have been not only the builder, but also the developer. Collet worked closely with the architect Eugene J. Lang, who designed nine of the fifteen houses in the study area. Collet remained the builder of the houses designed by other architects. The Dolma Road houses are large buildings in the American, English, French, and Spanish styles so popular throughout Scarsdale in the 1920s. Among the wealthy owners were life insurance dealer George Hofmann (No. 2); publishers (and, apparently, brothers-in-law) Frank Braucher (No. 4) and Frederick Dolan (No. 6); tobacco merchant George Cooper (No. 8); W. Wallace Lyon (No. 11), Wall Street broker and insurance man; Alden C. Noble (No. 15), chairman of the board of the Merchants Fire Assurance Corporation; Dr. L. T. Webster (No.17), a noted epidemiologist at the Rockefeller Institute; and J. Arthur Bogardus (No. 21), chairman of the board of the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company.

Considering the size and scale of the houses along Dolma Road, it is remarkable that they survive with such integrity. A few entrances have been altered and additions have been sensitively made, but the street retains the ambiance of a prime suburban locale of the early twentieth century.”

Sadly, Village Trustees never took the next step to designate historic districts, and in the thirteen years since the report was published, many of the noted homes and surrounding trees have been taken down by individuals and developers who replaced them with very large homes.

Dolma Road has not been spared and several homes have come down. A notable home at 11 Dolma Road, which the Committee for Historic Preservation and the Scarsdale Board of Trustees deemed worthy of preservation, has been largely abandoned as a case about its fate sits in court.

Now a developer has applied to take down another Dolma Road home at 17 Dolma Road. The house is not as grand as some of the others on the block but is historic none-the-less.

The Committee for Historic Preservation requested an opinion on whether or not it is worthy of preservation from Andrew Dolkart who was one of the authors of the Cultural Resources Survey.
In the report you can read here he notes the identities of the owners, the names of the architects, the architectural provenance of the house and its distinctive features. He calls it “an English Tudor inspired house modeled after the fifteenth century early Tudor manor houses in England,” with “brick laid in Flemish bond,” an “original oak door ornamented with iron boses” and “half timbering.” He notes that the Dolma Road subdivision was a project of Walter Collet and calls it “one of the finest and most cohesive subdivision in the Village of Scarsdale."

The original owner of the house was Dr. Leslie Tillotson Webster who the Scarsdale Inquirer called, “one of Scarsdale’s most distinguished citizens.” He was a successful medical researcher, on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute and “responsible for the establishment of the special branch of the science of epidemics known as “experimental epidemiology.”

Dolkart notes that the home meets some of the criteria for preservation but it is “not the strongest candidate for preservation as an individual building.” He says, “it is important within the historic group along Dolma Road, although several other houses in this development have recently been demolished.”

The application to raze was filed by neighbor who purchased the property and formed an LLC.

The Committee for Historic Preservation will consider the application at their meeting on Tuesday night January 21 at 7 pm.

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Written by: Joanne Wallenstein

Published: 31 December 2024

Created: 31 December 2024

Last Updated: 02 January 2025

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There were many unusual events in Scarsdale in 2024: a magnitude 4.8 earthquake just a few days before a solar eclipse and recent reports of mysterious drones circulating over schools and homes. More earthly events included hundreds of missing school tax bills, a building moratorium, an antisemitic graffiti attack by perpetrators who avoided security cameras and an overnight sneak attack by vandals who smashed 50 car windows without leaving a clue to their identity.

Beyond the uncontrollable the Village and schools confronted some issues that will remain on the agenda for 2025:

Village Trustees have committed to begin work on the pool complex at the end of the 2025 pools season in August, but the question is, what will replace the four pools and locker rooms, all who have exceeded their useful lives. Will we simply rebuild what is there, construct an enhanced version of the existing complex or build a year-round facility to allow for indoor swimming and community activities in every season?

Flooding and our water infrastructure will also remain top of mind. This year the Village did a major culvert project by the library on Olmsted Road and is currently dredging library pond. The school district is also planning to do work on the stream that traverses the Brewster Road side of the school to alleviate flooding. Upcoming Village budgets include $13 million to build stormwater systems to alleviate flooding, but the proposed projects seem to be deferred from one year to the next. Will this be the year the work begins on Sheldrake Road and in flood prone streets near the middle school?

As the year closed, the Mayor announced that weekly pick-up of recyclables would begin in January - a great step forward on the sustainability front. As more residents become concerned about the environment, we encourage the Village to continue to move forward with additional initiatives to improve sustainability in 2025.

Following a six-month building moratorium the Village passed some modest revisions to land use code that grants more power to the land use boards on site plan review, lot coverage, open space requirements, side yard setbacks, floor area ratio calculations and penalties that are designed to strengthen the review process for building applications, reduce the amount of lot coverage and impervious surfaces, reduce the disturbance of property, control stormwater run-off during construction, effect minor changes to home size and setbacks and impose penalties on those who defy the law.

However the Trustees failed to make meaningful revisions to bulk requirements or the tree code, so oversized homes are still being built on undersized lots. It remains to be seen if the changes go far enough to address residents’ concerns or if will more work need to be done to preserve open space and our tree canopy.

These are questions that the current Village Board, and the new Board and Mayor to be elected in March 2025 will need to address.

In the Village residents were alarmed by the slow demise of DeCicco’s. We endured months of empty shelves and calls to the support the struggling store until they finally gave up the ghost in November and announced they would close. Management of the new market need to do a full renovation of the site and they don’t expect to open until late 2025.

Without the draw of a market the downtown continues to struggle. The Scarsdale Business Alliance has taken many steps to improve the environment, including coordination with the county, Sunday Farmer’s Markets and frequent special events to draw more people to shop and enjoy the Village. Despite their efforts, the situation remains tough for leaseholders. Prohibitive rents and limited parking make it difficult to storeowners to garner a profit, and we are hopeful that the Village can attract new retailers to replace the beer bar and cheese shop that recently closed.

The school administration continues to respond to challenges posed by social media and technology. The district now requires high school students to dock their phones on the way into class, and a movement called “Wait Until Eighth” has arisen to urge parents to hold off purchasing smart phones for kids until eighth grade.

Another interesting debate occurred about the fifth grade sex education program. The inclusion of content about gender expression and gender identity and the decision to teach the classes in mixed gender groups raised objections from some parents and were cheered by others. As times and attitudes change, education changes too, and some were ready for it and others were clearly not.

Seeking to decrease the pressure on high school students, this year the high school implemented a new grading policy called the Rolling Gradebook. The goal is to smooth grading from quarter to quarter and give students the chance to recover from a single low grade or failed test that could skew their average. Some have cheered the change but others claim it has not been uniformly applied and is the cause of additional student stress.

As the school board embarked on their series of budget meetings for the 2025-26 school year, they received a sobering report of the district’s superintendent for business. He unveiled a long term model that showed that if the district continues to use reserves and excess revenues to fund the following year’s budget, in just two years the district will use up all their reserve funds.

Specifically, Lennon’s projection shows that for the 2027-28 school budget, if the district continues to meet the tax cap and no other changes are made to revenues or expenses from the projections reserves will go into negative territory.

Why the drain? In the past ten years, the number of full time employees has grown 11.7%, adding 70 employees to the headcount which grew from 596 to 666 at a time when school enrollment decreased from 4,821 students in 2014-15 to 4,703 students in 2024-25. Some of this increase comes from a move to expand the special education program and bring special needs students who were served outside the district into the district. More growth came from an expansion of the special education program to provide more class options and services for special education students at all grade levels. With Assistant Superintendent Rauschenberg calling for additional staff for 2025-26 the Board will need to make some hard decisions about balancing the special education budget against the long-term financial health of the Scarsdale Schools.

So what do all these Village and school decisions have in common? Though they are under the authority of two different boards, everything is funded from the pocket of Scarsdale taxpayers. We’ve all come to expect only the best from Scarsdale Village and the Scarsdale Schools and hope that both boards will reach consensus on solutions that will continue this level of service.

Barring any further rumblings from beneath the surface of the earth, or solar phenomenon above, here’s to another productive year in Scarsdale. We thank all the smart and savvy volunteers who have taken on this hard work and we wish them another successful year in our unique Village.