August 7, 2025

Yonkers today is very different from the one of my grandparents time. Through redevelopment, the riverfront is transforming into a lifestyle community with high end restaurants, a sculpture garden, and public esplanades. Gone are the Con Edison Power plant, industrial warehouses, and post-industrial brownfields that peppered the shoreline. The Domino Sugar refinery is still in production, but slated to close by the end of the year. Since 2015, nearly 2000 apartments have been constructed, with 3000 more in the pipeline.
The manufacturing jobs that drew economic migrants a century ago are replaced by more 21st century employment. There is still manufacturing in the city, the Otis Elevator factory site houses a Kawawsaki rail car assembly plant, but much of its footprint is now a Lionsgate studio with 50,000 square feet of soundstages and city street backlots. Medical and social services are now major employers, and the Alexander Carpet Mill, once the largest employer in the region is now filled with artist studios and other small footprint creators.
With the lure of savings, riverfront views, and a slower pace, Yonkers is becoming a draw to the professional-class from the city. For some, Yonkers is a destination, for many it is a bedroom community. It’s less than an hour on Metro-North from Manhattan. As the mid-century saw a shift in demographics when European immigrants left to seek other prospects, gentrification and the trajectory of commerce has rearranged life and employment in the region.
I often wonder what would have happened had our family stayed. There’s a romance of identity that affects how I imagine a life more connected to heritage. The pressures toward assimilation that affected previous generations wained with their success. As a second generation American, I am afforded the privilege to desire a reconnected life. There is something centering in the return home and the collapse of time and space when I know I stand where my ancestors stood. 
Yonkers is changing, my hometown in Italy is changing; change is constant. The reconnection that often feels like history is really a move forward.