Christopher Hazlehurst lives in the Bronx, New York City. His office for his HVAC business, on the same property, is in the Westchester County city of Mount Vernon. There are two mailboxes on the front of his home. One with four digits for his Bronx address, another with three digits for his Mount Vernon address.
“The mailman knows to put it in 788 because that’s Mount Vernon, 47 is the Bronx, so the mailman knows the Mount Vernon side versus the Bronx side,” said Hazlehurst.
It’s all part of life on the jagged border between the Bronx and Mount Vernon, which can be confusing when the two localities are, in some cases, divided by inches and feet. Street names change. White Plains Road in Wakefield suddenly becomes West 1st Street. The street signs are different colors. The rules of the road change too: you can make a right on red in Westchester, but can’t in the city.
It can almost be like living a double life.
What You Need To Know
- The city of Mount Vernon lies on the northern border between New York City and Westchester County
- Areas once part of Westchester County east of the Bronx River became part of New York City in 1895
- Mount Vernon remained part of Westchester County
- The Mount Vernon-Bronx border in some cases passes through residential properties creating a sometimes confusing situation
“My friend always says, I’m coming to Mount Vernon, my cousin always tells her friends I live in Mount Vernon, but I don’t I live in the Bronx,” said Teneshia Sadler, a Bronx resident who lives across the street from Mount Vernon on Mundy Lane.
It goes way back to before the Bronx was even a borough.
The border between the Bronx and Westchester is mainly a straight line, except for the border with Mount Vernon. Historian Angel Hernandez, of the Huntington Free Library and Reading Room, says the border formed in 1895 when several Westchester County towns voted to become part of New York City.
“People in the Bronx, or people living in that historic part of Mount Vernon, wanted to be part of New York City, and that’s why you see that little bump encroaching in to Mount Vernon territory,” said Hernandez.
Either way, Christopher Hazlehurst says it’s not a big deal with the border dissecting his driveway, juggling two different area codes from the same piece of property.
“I’m here over 20 years so now I got used to it,” Hazelhurst said. “If I pick up the phone from here and call my daughter, because my daughter lives upstairs, it’s a long distance call because I am a 914 and she is 718.”