The story of the "Leatherman" is a beloved piece of local history. I first learned of the Leatherman when I was in the Boy Scouts, probably around age 12 or 13. In the late 1800's, a peculiar traveling drifter appeared in Westchester and Western Connecticut clothed completely in a suit of leathe
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01/30/2011
How much snow do we have? Today I held a house open which was under contract and vacant, so we didn't have it plowed until this morning. Yesterday, I had to go inside prior to the clearing. The driveway entrance had a mound about 4 feet high and 5 feet deep-completely impossible to use. So, I had
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01/30/2011
We've heard the phrase repeated thousands of times, but there are still people who don't get it to their own detriment. The phrase? It is not the company that matters, it is the agent. If you were unjustly accused of a crime and faced the death penalty, you'd hire the best defense lawyer you co
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01/30/2011
When my parents moved up to Ossining from Yonkers in 1957, they missed St Theresa’s, less than a mile away in Briarcliff, and somehow found St Ann's. There, they met Monsignor Marino, who said that yes, they lived in the parish. And for 40 years, as my brothers and I attended St Ann school, my m
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01/29/2011
The Town of Rye, which is mostly the villages of Rye Brook and Port Chester, has agreed to study the possibility of dissolving the town and allowing the villages to be their own municipalities as a means of cutting tax costs. I applaud the idea. I have blogged before about the layers of taxation
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01/28/2011
$568,000 buys a nice pre-war colonial with a big yard. This particular home dates to 1919 and has 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths, a formal dining room, and both a rear and side porch. The character of the period has been preserved very well over the decades. Inside it has beautiful hardwoods, lots of
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01/27/2011
The Journal News has published a report on housing discrimination in Westchester, Putnam and Rockland Counties. The results are awful. A study conducted in 2010 found that in 17.5% of the instances of study conducted by Westchester Residential Opportunities that discrimination occurred. In 2005 a
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01/26/2011
Westchester Business Journal has published a story on the real estate market outlook from the point of view of agents, and I was among those quoted. I see quite a few parallels of the current market with the last crash in the late 80's and early 1990's. Back then we also had a banking crisis (th
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01/25/2011
Years ago, I listed a home in a nearby town which was next door to the residence of a celebrity. It was, as you might imagine, a nice place, and some of the phone calls I got from area agents were bizarre. "What are you doing here?" "Where is your office?" "How did you get that listing in my town
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01/25/2011
