Controlling his anger, Chief Nelligan got up and took me to see the lockup. "This is a high-class can," he said, showing me one of four cells for males. "We got mattresses on the bunks, a commode, and a sink in every cell. The inmates are inspected every half hour. We only hold them for twenty-four hours, until they are arraigned in court the next morning. Then they are taken to the county jail." The female prisoners spend the night in a detention room and are looked after by a matron. "There's no big problem with crime in Mount Kisco," Chief Nelligan concluded, shutting the bars of the empty cell. "Thanks to me." Then, after a little pause in which he looked at me to see if I saw that he was joking, he went on, "Actually, we have the highest concentration of criminals in northern Westchester except for Peekskill and Ossining Village, but they go and commit their crimes in other towns."

       The Municipal Building of the Village of Mount Kisco-fireproof, brick, and in the Federal style-is the largest town hall in the northern part of the county. In this building, the mayor, the trustees, and the village manager put their heads together every other week to legislate the further developments in store for Mount Kisco and try to make sens.e out of what has already happened. Although an architectural review board was set up several years ago to "maintain some sort of harmony between the buildings of Mount Kisco," there isn't much it can do about the many varieties of small-town architecture which have been contributing examples of themselves there for the last hundred years. Few buildings in the village have serious architectural pretensions. The United Methodist Church, with its soaring spire, louvred belfrey, pointed-arch window openings, and board-and-batten siding, is one-a good example of the Stick Style, or Carpenter Gothic, that flourished in the Picturesque Revival period, between 1840 and 1860. A number of ornate Victorian residences, embellished with spacious porches, mansard roofs, turrets, pedimented dormers, flaring eaves, cast-iron porticoes, porte cocheres, projecting bays, and iron finials, can be found on Captain Merritt's Hill. But most of the structures in the valley-the gas stations, stores, diners, and residences-are examples of "vernacular" architecture: they're just regular old American buildings. Lacking the self-consciousness and the formality of statelier edifices, they have an integrity and power of their own.

       A few pieces of open land remain in Mount Kisco: a golf course, a reedy portion of the watershed, sixty acres of a former estate on Kisco Mountain. There are several schools of thought about this land. Some believe that Mount Kisco has already got out of hand, and that it might be wise to leave the last undeveloped tracts open. These people claim that the downtown streets are running double their capacity and I that the old character of the village is rapidly going down the drain. They fear that Mount Kisco, with the policy: of indiscriminate growth it has always I followed, may be taking what one of them called "a suicidal course." A more powerful contingent wants to see Mount Kisco keep growing. They feel it must seek out development or the development will go elsewhere and the town will no longer be "the hub of northern Westchester," as it has been called. "If it stops, it dies," a woman at the Chamber of Commerce told me. Some would like the last open land to become the site of a big-name department store. Others dream of condom.iniums or a high-rise parking garage. Too many residents, a so-called townhouse faction argues, are now renters of apartments. Mount Kisco needs to get back to the owner; he would do more for the town. As for the traffic problems additional people might create, Henry Kensing, the mayor, did not seem worried. "Normally," he said, "it takes five minutes to get from one end of town to the other."
 

       FROM about 1880 to 1940, a few people lived in a degree of material splendor that will never be known in Westchester again. The rich lived in mansions designed by the best architects, filled with the best art from Europe and the Far East, and looking out at the best views across carefully landscaped expanses of their own property.

       James Sutton built one of the first big houses. He married the only daughter of R. H. Macy, which brought him a great fortune. In the eighteen-eighties, he bought several hundred acres in Bedford and hired a well-known French architect to build a big house for him on the top of a hill. The long allee leading up to it was planted with young maples that have since grown into magnificent specimens. The entire hillside was converted into a rolling lawn of perhaps twelve acres, which was maintained by a horse-drawn mower. The horses wore specia] leather boots to prevent them from marking up the turf. But the building of the house seemed to take forever. At last, the architect came to the Suttons, presented them with a key, and told them to meet him in the front hall at nine o'clock the following morning. The house was ready. At nine, the Suttons put the key in the front door, opened it, and were greeted by the sight of the architect hanging by his neck in the stairwell. "Despite this rather gruesome beginning," their neighbor Gustavus Kirby wrote in his memoirs, "the Suttons lived in their home for many years."

       At the end of the nineteenth century, the big houses were built in a number of styles. There was a turning away from Victorian Gothic to a Colonial simplicity, of which the Van Cortlandt house on Guard Hill Road in Bedford, a farm house that was expanded and rebuilt by Stanford White, is a good example. In the nineteen-twenties, "bastard Norman" Newport and Narragansett houses, half-shingle and half-stone, became popular. After 1914-, people built French chateaux, and in the twenties they went in for the Tudor look. A few Regency houses went up, too, but the handsomest big houses were Georgian.

       The house of Dr. and Mrs. Robert L. Patterson is a large Georgian, e]egant in the purity and simplicity of its lines. It was designed by the firm of Delano & Aldrich and was built over 1905 and 1906 for William Sloane, whose father had developed a family rug-and-furniture business into an enormously successful N ew York department store. The house, in Mount Kisco, was put up as a surprise for his wife. The Sloanes' daughter Margaret became Mrs. Patterson. She was born in the house, and still lives there a good deal of the year. Inside the house are framed signatures of all the Presidents of the United States. Outside is one of the few grass tennis courts still maintained in Westchester. The lines are powdered with chalk, and the bounce is low, fast, and unpredictable. In a nearby coop are the Pattersons' peacocks. Every time a ball smacks the net, the peacocks let out a squawk that can be heard in the valley below. The tennis court was responsible for bringing Dr. Patterson and his wife together. He was a young doctor from Georgia doing his residency in orthopedics at Presbyterian Hospital, in N ew York. During a weekend visit to his uncle, who lived nearby, Patterson was asked to the S]oanes' for a game of tennis. Margaret, in a long skirt, slipped and scraped her knee. The young doctor offered to examine it. "I took one look at her knee and that was that," Dr. Patterson said.

       "It was a working farm," his wife said. Her face became luminous as she spoke of her childhood. "We milked cows, kept pigs and chickens, cut ice and stored it in an icehouse, There were two root cellars-one for potatoes and the other for apples. Mrs. Hughes used to bong the gong for lunch. She hit it with a sledgehammer. Our working horses were Belgian. They were sorrel-colored, with white manes and fetlocks, and absolutely enormous.  They plowed and they reaped and they hayed, and they ran away and busted down the grapes once. I used to drive my high-stepping hackneys down to the station. I had horses way into the thirties. We had a big old Pierce-Arrow, too, with isinglass windows and a canvas top you had to buckle on and off. In the beginning, there was no one here. Then the Myers and the Cooks and the Strausses came and built their houses. Eugene Myer was my father's classmate at Yale in 1895. He started the Washington Post. His sister m~rried Alfred Cook. Jesse Strauss was the Ambassador to France. They were very high-calibre people, who kept to themselves. Of course, they couldn't get into the country club." But the Tuckers had the greatest estate of all in the Bedford area. Threequarters of a century ago, Carll and Marcia Tucker bought all the land enclosed by three roads-something like five hundred acres-and hired Frederick Law Olmsted's architectural firm to design an estate for them. The designers called upon the Tudor, Norman, Gothic, Romanesque, and several other styles to give the Tuckers Penwood-a group of weighty stone structures whose last detail, whose every crenellation and machicolation would evoke the best traditions of European culture.

       Carll Tucker's family had published a magazine called The Country Gentleman, and he was himself what was known as a gentleman of leisure. His wife was Marcia Brady, whose father, Anthony Brady, was one of Thomas Edison's business partners, and left at his death one of the largest personal fortunes that had ever been accumulated. It was divided nine ways. Tucker managed his wife's money very well. Besides Pen wood, they had residences on Park Avenue and at Hobe Sound, and a huge schooner called Migrant, which was one of the largest private vessels afloat until it was commandeered by the Navy in the Second World War.

       Carll died a number of years ago, and Marcia died in 1976, in her nineties. The main house at Penwood has been closed and empty for about twelve years. The Tuckers' son Carll, Jr., became active in local affairs around Mount Kisco, founding a newspaper called the Patent Trader. Near Pen wood, he built an enormous French chateau, on the scale of the mansions of the teens and the twenties, but the year it was finished, 1968, he died of a heart attack, at the age of forty-six. His son Carll III used to invite me to play squash in the court at Pen wood until he moved into the city, where he is now the chairman and editor of the Saturday Review. The Tuckers are one of the few intact dynasties in Westchester, and their status is eclipsed only by that of the Rockefellers of Pocantico Hills.

       Several years ago, young Carll commissioned the architect Robert Venturi to build him a new house. The Tucker house, as it is already being called, looks very much like a large birdhouse. According to the architectural historian Vincent Scully, it represents "the ultimate reaction to Frank Lloyd Wright, the reassertion of the vertical." Now that most of the level ground in Westchester has been spoken for, we are probably going to see a lot of vertical housing on the slopes-woodland dwellings with the upper story in the canopy of the forest-of which the Tucker house will be a classic example.

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