Wacky Westchester: Where the heck am I? Why do you live in one place but your mailing address says another? What's the difference between a village and a town? And why are Westchester borders so weird?

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When he was a student at Purchase College, Dan Gabel never knew what town he lived in.

His mailing address on campus was Purchase, so he had no reason to think he lived in the town of Harrison. He only learned the wacky truth once he took a job editing a local weekly newspaper, where he found Westchester County geography unintentionally hilarious.

“It was confusing,” said Gabel, now 33. “Just understanding why the names even exist, why Eastchester’s in Westchester, and then there’s Port Chester — a lot of chesters.”

FUN FACTS: Westchester's confusing borders

GLOSSARY: What's the difference between a village and a hamlet?

QUIZ: How well do you know Westchester?

Westchester is a tangled and overlapping web of municipal lines, school districts, postal codes and loosely defined neighborhoods. Figuring out where you are, or even where you live, can get complicated.

Over nearly 500 square miles, there’s a dizzying number of boundaries and borders. Westchester has 45 municipal governments, 46 public school districts and more than 80 different postal zones.

Then there are neighborhoods, called hamlets, that may or may not have their own school districts or mailing addresses.

For example, if you live in the Edgemont school district, you also live in the hamlet of Edgemont. But you have a Scarsdale mailing address and you actually live inside the town of Greenburgh.

More than half the people who have Scarsdale mailing addresses don’t actually live in Scarsdale.

You may live in Eastchester, but send your children to Tuckahoe schools — or vice versa.

If you live anywhere in the town of Rye, you also live in Port Chester, Rye Brook or the Rye Neck section of the village of Mamaroneck. That's because every portion of the town has also been incorporated into a separate village.

There’s a city of Rye, but it’s a separate entity from the town of Rye.

There are two Mamaronecks, a town and a village, each with its own government and police and fire departments.

It takes a village (or not)

Nancy Wasserman, a commercial real estate broker, said “it’s all screwed up” that the two Mamaronecks have the same name.

“If I say Mamaroneck, people say the town or village?” Wasserman said. “I would tell you if you took a poll, a lot of people would not know. In real estate, you better know where you are.”

Even simple tasks are difficult, she said: If she passed out while a guest was over, would the guest know which entity to call for help? Wasserman has sold properties to clients in the village who then tell her they are going to submit development plans “to the town.”

The question for most people is what the difference even is between a city, town and village, Wasserman said. Villages give residents there stronger local control, and their genesis is often over “differing development philosophies” with a town, the state’s Department of State website notes.

All land in New York is either in a city or town and those borders never overlap, but the map gets a little more jumbled when you add in villages, which exist wholly within a town (or more than one). Property owners who live in villages pay both village and town taxes.

In Westchester, there are six cities, 19 towns and 23 villages. Briarcliff Manor and Mamaroneck villages each occupy portions of not one, but two separate towns.

Harrison, Mount Kisco and Scarsdale are towns and villages at the same time. These hybrids are called coterminous communities, and the three in Westchester are among only five in the entire state.

When Harrison elected officials hold government meetings, they conduct one meeting as the Harrison Town Board — adjourn but don’t get up from their seats — then conduct a second meeting as the Harrison village Board of Trustees.

All of this stems from the notion that state law requires that all villages be part of a larger town. Except the law doesn’t really say that, state Assemblyman Steve Otis said.

“As someone who has been in local government for a long time, you’re sort of taught word of mouth that’s a requirement,” Otis said. “Maybe people hadn’t really looked it up.”

Otis, who is from Rye — the city, not the town — tried to find the law during an unsuccessful effort to dissolve Rye town government three years ago. Then-Rye town Supervisor Joe Carvin said at the time he believed many people who lived in the town didn’t even know it.

Why Westchester got wacky

How the boundaries of the county got so confusing goes back to another time and another continent.

“Many of these were very arbitrary divisions from Colonial times that go back to the manors and patents of the 17th century,” said New Castle town historian Gray Williams, who also sits on the board of directors of the Westchester County Historical Society. “It’s amazing how the dead hand of the past lives on to rule the present.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Williams said. “It wasn’t carefully laid out and organized like in New England, and you don’t have the overlap between church and state the way you had in New England, which governed how the townships were divided. The whole thing is much more rational.”

The British crown carved out the manors from London, giving exclusive claim to wealthy landowners and turning vast tracts of land into Philipsburg Manor, Van Cortlandt Manor, Scarsdale Manor and others.

“They sometimes made sense and sometimes really didn’t, or at least were quite arbitrary,” Williams said.

Portions of those lands were later incorporated into towns, particularly after the American Revolution. For example, much of present-day Yonkers and Greenburgh, and a portion of Mount Pleasant, were once part of Philipsburg Manor.

The layering of Westchester’s boundaries and borders really took off during the 19th century, when portions of towns began to secede and incorporate into villages, smaller municipal jurisdictions that were generally contained within the larger towns.

Greenburgh, with six villages within its borders, “is like a piece of Swiss cheese with great holes in it from the villages,” Williams said.

But that was just the start.

Article continues below video.

Video: Wacky Westchester: Where the heck am I? Lohud reporters try to make sense of the boundaries and borders of Westchester County.

'They just were never tied together'

In the 20th century, school districts began to incorporate, in many cases consolidating schools from the old system of common school districts. Those were generally neighborhood school houses that served local children.

When they were consolidated into larger districts, municipal town and village borders were not always taken into account. School bus routes and political considerations played a larger role.

Then there are the post offices.

“Post offices used to exist all over the place,” Williams said. “They were very local and they changed their location every time there was a new administration, because they were considered political spoils.”

When the post office system came into place, and when the ZIP Code system was finalized in the 1960s, the postal boundaries also cut across municipal boundaries in many cases, as they did with the school districts.

“The lines are based on convenience of delivery, nothing else,” according to Williams. “They cut across towns. For example, town of New Castle, a lot of people have Mount Kisco addresses or Ossining addresses.”

As if that wasn’t enough, local neighborhoods called hamlets are dotted all over the Westchester map. Some are postal zones and some are school districts. Some are both. Some are neither. The only thing they have in common is that they do not have their own municipal government.

Some hamlets were old country crossroads or stops along railroad lines that no longer exist. Eastview, for instance, was a train stop on the old Putnam railroad and a settlement on the Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant border. It disappeared when the Rockefellers bought it out and moved everyone out because the hamlet could be seen and heard from their Pocantico Hills estate.

But more than two dozen hamlets remain today. In some, residents associate more with the neighborhood than their town, including Chappaqua, Edgemont, Fleetwood and North White Plains. Their borders, sometimes loosely defined, now co-exist with all the other boundaries.

“You kind of almost have to understand that it’s multi-layered,” said Chris Marinaro, librarian at the Westchester County Historical Society. “If you live in Edgemont, let’s say, you don’t just live in the Edgemont school district. You live in the Greenville Fire District, you also live in the town of Greenburgh, you also live in a Scarsdale ZIP Code.

“So these layers developed over time for various reasons, and they just were never tied together,” Marinaro said. “So there’s no town of Greenburgh school district, there’s no town of Greenburgh fire department. Things just developed separately over the years.”

The costs of confusion

Out of Westchester’s wackiness comes a difficult truth, said Alexander Roberts, executive director of Community Housing Innovations, a nonprofit that advocates low-income and workforce housing. The cost of housing has become unsustainable.

Smaller school districts and elite villages formed to give affluent areas stronger local control, he said, but have had the result of creating a structure in the area where social mobility is among the lowest in the country. Pockets of poverty and economic segregation exist as a result.

“It does have a lot to do with communities trying to become more exclusive,” he said. “At its core, it’s all about turf and basically wanting to have your own police department, your own school district, your own fire district.”

Small villages with boutique services and tiny, high-performing school districts are the backbone of the Westchester real estate market — but they come at a cost.

Westchester’s nearly 1 million residents pay an average tax bill of more than $16,000, the highest in the nation according to some measures. School taxes account for the majority of tax bills.

Knowing where you’re buying is vital, if sometimes tricky.

Fiona Dogan, who has lived and worked in Rye as a real estate agent for 20 years, said a good agent knows the ins and outs of Westchester municipalities.

“The schools are a huge driver and you do have to watch the listings and make sure it corresponds” to the right district, she said, adding that new buyers are often “looking to start out in Westchester and set up their lifestyle and raise their kids here.”

A quick Google search of the Greenhaven section of Rye led to the real estate listing site Trulia where someone questioned whether their property was in the Mamaroneck school district.

Several local real estate agents jumped into the forum, assuring the questioner that the Greenhaven neighborhood is in the Rye Neck school district, and one agent offered to send along SAT scores for the high school in that area.

Dogan recalled one instance when confusion over school boundaries landed in court.

“A lawsuit was filed when someone bought a house in what they thought was one district but when they really went to enroll it was another,” she said, which sounds bizarre until you think about the taxes people pay for the school district of their choice.

Trying to 'get it'

John Conrad lived in Mount Vernon from the age of 3, and never thought about any of this until he moved in with his wife.

“The thing about Mount Vernon is the city limits and the city borders were easily defined, you knew exactly what the limits were,” Conrad said. “I moved to Tarrytown with my wife, and we were living in the village of Tarrytown in the — gosh what is it?”

He wondered for a moment.

“In the town of Greenburgh?” he said. “Gee, no wonder our taxes are so high. You feel like you have these layers of government and services that have been entrenched for so many years.”

He and his wife later moved again and raised their daughters in the hamlet of Pocantico Hills, an area that was originally owned by the Rockefellers and has one school for 300 students in grades pre-K-8.

Gabel, the former Purchase College student, moved from his hometown in Rockland County and eventually settled into New Rochelle with his family. Now a recruiter, he felt his years in journalism gave him a handle on the weird Westchester boundaries.

Then, while real estate hunting, he heard people refer to an area on the north end as “Scarsdale-New Rochelle.”

“I don’t know if that makes me look silly or the whole concept of what this is,” he said. “It’s just crazy how you can work covering this for so many years and still be confused by it. I don’t think I ever fully understood it.”

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