& Dock Street
P.O. Box 496
Yonkers, NY 10702
(914) 965-4027
The following poem was published in the August 29, 1891 edition of The Yonkers Gazette:
Was once nitiscent Nepperhan!
Aye, in the primal long ago
Its limpid music–making flow
Was down through plenty–foliaged gates
To where the Hudson corruscates.
And on its vision–op’ning breast
The savage lade with languid rest
Communed with Gitche–Manitou
In dreams, as glided his canoe.
The lotos fragrance fill’d the air
And beauty’s birth was everywhere.
Lenni Lenape’s eye ne’er did span
A stream more fair than Nepperhan!
’Twas not till Hendrik Hudson’s fame
O’er Ocean’s pulsing pathway came
And Civilization’s strangling arms
Were flung around all nature’s charms—
When Yonkers from the forest’s dead
Upraised her many timbered head,
That darkness fell across the stream
And shadows dimmed its crystal gleam.
O Stuyvesant! O Platt–Deutsch clan!
Why fouled ye fair sweet Nepperhan?
’Tis now, at Yonkers’s spreading feet,
A flow with odorous sins replete;
Its nitid bosom has become
A snake–like yellow scrawl of scum.
And from its fetid bed is blown
A smell would shame those of Cologne;
A festering nuisance day and night
To each olfactoried Yonkerite;
And now the cry from high and low
Is “Dirty Nepperhan must go.”
And as for Copcutt’s dams, oh my!
More dams than his assail the sky!
Oh, dripping, water loving Pan,
Please pipe a dirge for Nepperhan!
