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 Park Hill
In Park Hill, at the southern end of Yonkers, has been worked out successfully the scheme of creating near New York a complete community. Park Hill is undoubtedly one of the finest suburbs of New York city today, and while much of its great beauty is due to nature there is also much due to the skillful and sympathetic treatment which the landscape has received at the hands of its owners.
More than ten years ago the officers of the American Real Estate Company conceived the thought of creating somewhere in the vicinity of Manhattan Island, on its direct lines of communication, an ideal community, in which every modern improvement would supplement noble natural scenery. For this purpose, after examining the entire environment of New York, they came to Yonkers and by repeated purchases acquired Park Hill; and here for ten years, without deviating once from the original plan and purpose, they have created a Park of homes second to nothing of its kind in America.
The roads have all been laid out by a park engineer, and are on park lines. Sewers, water, gas, and electricity have been introduced everywhere; beautiful homes with artistic environment and landscape effects peep out from the green foliage at every turn.
Three hundred feet above the Hudson, opposite the center of the Palisades, overlooking Van Cortlandt Park on the south and the city of Yonkers on the north, within a few minutes of the heart of our city, with all the advantages of a community of fifty thousand people at its doors, Park Hill may still be called a glorious bit of country, unspoiled by cit environment; and from its lofty plateau it commands our southern entrance to the great metropolis. The owners of Park Hill are to be congratulated on the great success of their real estate venture, but Yonkers can at the same time felicitate itself that an ordinary suburban invasion has not destroyed the most beautiful natural spot in its beautiful borders.
That the advantages of Park Hill are being appreciated by our great southern neighbor is evidenced by the constantly increasing growth of the community, the greater activitvy of its community and club life, and the more permanent character of its improvements. It has often been predicted that South Yonkers would become a new Harlem; when this takes placeand with coming transportation facilities it is not far distantPark Hill will be a new Washington Heights, except that with the great care taken in its early development it will be even more desirable as a thoroughly restricted neigborhood.
In any event it is bound to receive the first waves of the overflow of New York northward which have now set in and are not likely to subside until they have invaded Yonkers, as they invaded Harlem before it, with an irresistible flood of population.
The Park Hill Country Club, with its charming surroundings, started on its modest career nearly ten years ago; then no one believed it would become the important center it is of a new social life in a section of Yonkers containing far fewer homes than today, and compelled to look elsewhere for entertainment and amusement.
The Park Hill Country Club from its inception set the social pace for the great community that has since grown up about it, and in turn has been supported in a way to make its continued growth a continual surprise to its most enthusiastic friends. Its summer outdoor sports have attracted to its grounds expert athletes and tennis players, while its winter program of indoor amusements affords a delightful season of pleasurable intercourse to lovers of bowling, dramatic entertainment, cards, dancing, lectures, and music, bespeaking a vigor and activity among its large membership that cannot be surpassed in the club life of any community about New York.
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