ON THE AVENUE Gramatan Avenue is part of a shopping enclave, along with Broad and Grand Streets, that has a grocery store along with a variety of shops, small businesses and restaurants.
IN many ways, the Fleetwood area of Mount Vernon, in southern Westchester County, is a home buyer’s dream, with its rich stock of Tudor, Mediterranean and colonial-style houses and Tudor and Art Deco apartment complexes.
Many of the streets in Fleetwood are lined with carefully tended lawns and lush gardens. And perhaps most appealing is the 30-minute rail commute on Metro-North from Fleetwood Station to Grand Central Terminal.
Shawn and Sharyn Kaufman bought a 1930s three-bedroom Arts-and-Crafts-style house in Fleetwood last year for $550,000, drawn by its proximity to the city. “We would have paid far more in Tuckahoe or Bronxville, even for just an ordinary 1960s ranch,” said Mr. Kaufman, a lighting designer. Mrs. Kaufman runs a children’s theater group and was attracted to the growing arts community in Fleetwood.
But living there entails more than just enjoying the shopping on bustling Gramatan Avenue.
Fleetwood is the northern part of Mount Vernon, a city of some 68,000 people that shoulders the burdens of a 14 percent poverty rate, according to the most recent census. The crime rate is high, with 2,446 serious crimes — murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft — committed in 2007. And the public school system is troubled. The proposed school budget was defeated twice this year, forcing administrators to adopt austerity measures.
Not only have the city’s problems caused many potential home buyers to look elsewhere, but they have also prompted some longtime residents to flee. “Once my children finished elementary school, we were out of here,” said John D. Royce, the plumbing superintendent for the Buildings Department, and a father of three, who has since moved to nearby Eastchester.
W. L. Sawyer, the school district superintendent who was hired last fall, said he had recently found outdated social studies books listing Jimmy Carter as president that were still being used by students in Grades 7 through 12 at Mount Vernon High School, which is in the northeast part of the city, and serves students from throughout the district.
“In many Westchester schools, they worry about new scoreboards for their football fields,” Dr. Sawyer said. “In our school district, we have to focus on more basic needs.”
After the second budget was defeated in the spring, the district cut its entire interscholastic sports program.
The city’s “image problem,” as Clinton I. Young Jr., the new mayor, describes it, is not confined to the schools. Mr. Young was elected last fall on promises to reduce crime, end patronage in city government and increase the tax base, in addition to working with the school board to improve the public education system.
“We have problems not unlike any other urban community in America,” the mayor said. “Poverty has weighed us down.”
WHAT YOU’LL FIND
Unlike some of the other areas in Mount Vernon, Fleetwood has retained a small-town feeling. Many of its vintage homes are large and luxurious, competing in style and class — but not price — with those in the far more upscale communities of Pelham and Bronxville, which border Mount Vernon. Others homes are more modest, built on lots tucked between the larger homes.
The area blossomed into a bedroom community in the 1920s, as New York City residents began streaming north. Over the years Fleetwood grew, eventually encompassing all of the 10552 ZIP code.
Woven through Fleetwood are smaller neighborhoods with names like Hunts Wood, Aubyn Manor and Pasadena Park “that have been unofficially rolled into the entity of Fleetwood over the years,” said Robert J. Granata, former president of the Fleetwood Neighborhood Association and a sales agent for Houlihan Lawrence in Mount Vernon.
The area is also home to several prewar apartment complexes that have been converted to co-ops.
The centerpiece of Fleetwood is the shopping enclave along Gramatan Avenue and Grand and Broad Streets, close to the Cross County Parkway. In addition to an A.&P. grocery store, there are a variety of smaller shops — dry cleaners, a bagel shop, florists, a couple of bakeries and several restaurants.
There has been an influx of Brazilians in Mount Vernon in recent years; the most recent census data tracks the population as 60 percent black, 24 percent white and 10 percent Hispanic.
WHAT YOU’LL PAY
Fleetwood — which has some of the most expensive real estate in the 4.4-square-mile city of Mount Vernon — offers an array of prices for home buyers, from low-priced co-ops for first-time homeowners to more expensive houses.
A two-bedroom co-op in a 1929 vintage three-story complex in Fleetwood has an asking price of $249,900. At the Park Lane, which was built in 1927, a co-op apartment on the top floor with three bedrooms and three baths, four exposures and 1,800 square feet of living space, is on the market for $475,000.
Typical of the 1920s architecture of Fleetwood, a three-story four-bedroom Tudor with stained-glass windows, gargoyles and copper roof finials is on the market for $549,900.
By contrast, a three-bedroom colonial in Fleetwood but with a Bronxville post office address and annual taxes of $26,848, is on the market for $1,385 million. Without the Bronxville address, the asking price on the house would be about $700,000, said Mr. Granata at Houlihan Lawrence. If it were in Bronxville, within that village’s school district, the asking price would be closer to $2.5 million, he said.
WHAT TO DO
Mount Vernon is so close to New York City that Samuel Spear Jr. and his wife, Kenya, both business consultants who live in the Park Lane Cooperative Apartments, sometimes drive south to the city for a night out on the town.
But many weekends Mr. and Mrs. Spear wife opt for more local spots, like the Bayou, a restaurant on Gramatan Avenue that features Louisiana crab cakes, crawfish pies and live music. For a movie, they often drive to Pelham, two miles away, to the Pelham Picture House, a 1920s theater.
For many Mount Vernon residents, the church is a major focus of social as well as religious life, said Mr. Spear, a deacon at Grace Baptist Church in the central part of Mount Vernon. The church was started by five black Baptist women in 1888 and runs many after-school programs for youth.
For youngsters during the summer months, Mount Vernon offers a variety of choices, including the 23-acre Wilson’s Woods in the southeastern section of the city. One of Westchester’s oldest county parks, it has an English Tudor-style bathhouse, a wave pool, water slides and a water playground.
THE SCHOOLS
The loss of the sports program has served as a call to action. “A battle is under way to reshape and reform the schools,” said Charles Stern, president of the school board.
Mr. Stern and his wife, Debra, who is president of the Mount Vernon Parent Teachers Association, live in Fleetwood and send their children to the public schools. They are among those spearheading an effort to ultimately raise $950,000 from private sources to reinstate sports.
The Mount Vernon City School District has 11 elementary schools, 2 middle schools and 3 high schools: Mount Vernon; the Nellie A. Thornton High School, which opened last year and is gradually adding grades; and an alternative high school, Nelson R. Mandela Community High School. Total enrollment in the school district is 10,046.
Dr. Sawyer attributed the defeat of the school budget to a number of factors, including “leftover feelings of mistrust” among the public about the inability of previous boards of education to address the needs of students.
But also, he said, because of the high rate of poverty in the city, many Mount Vernon residents — especially in the current economy — could not afford to shoulder a heavier tax burden. He also pointed to voters who send their children to private schools and, he said, are not vested in the public school system.
At Mount Vernon High School, of 424 students in last year’s senior class, 375 graduated. Of those, 45 percent went on to four-year colleges, 31 percent enrolled in two-year institutions, and the others chose either the military or employment, said Desiree Grand, a spokeswoman for the school district.
SAT scores for Mount Vernon seniors in 2007 were significantly below the averages for the state, according to the New York State Education Department. The Mount Vernon average test scores were 417 for critical reading, 410 for math and 415 for writing, compared with state averages of 491, 505 and 482 respectively, said Nellie Perez, a spokeswoman for the state.
THE COMMUTE
Metro-North’s Harlem Line stops at the Mount Vernon West and Fleetwood stations. The New Haven Line has a stop at Mount Vernon East. The 8:01 a.m. from Fleetwood arrives in Grand Central Terminal at 8:30 a.m. A round-trip ticket purchased at the station costs $15.50. A monthly ticket purchased on the Web costs $165.62.
