Port Chester: Saw Pit to Sound Shore

The village you are crossing through carries a name that is almost perfectly self-explanatory, but its earlier name tells a richer story. This place was known for most of its colonial life as Saw Pit, or Saw Pit Landing, because of the sawmills and boatyards that operated near the mouth of the Byram River from the early seventeen hundreds onward. The pit-sawing technique gave the name: two workers, one above a log and one below it in a shallow trench, drew a long saw back and forth to produce planks for shipbuilding. It was unglamorous, exhausting labor, and it built the ships that carried New York's trade along the Sound.

By the mid-nineteenth century the village had grown respectable enough to want a more dignified name, and Port Chester was incorporated in eighteen sixty-eight. The waterfront industries shifted from shipbuilding to manufacturing, and waves of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants arrived to work the factories. Then, after World War Two, Cuban refugees fleeing Fidel Castro began settling here, and through the nineteen sixties and seventies, workers from Mexico, Central America, and South America followed. Today about two thirds of Port Chester's residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, giving the village one of the most complete demographic transformations in Westchester County.

One institution that has outlasted every shift is the Capitol Theatre, designed by the prolific theater architect Thomas Lamb and opened in nineteen twenty-six, when its first night sold out all two thousand seats and turned hundreds away. It ran as a vaudeville house and then a movie palace until nineteen seventy. In the nineteen seventies it became a famous rock venue. After a long closure, it reopened in twenty twelve as a premier regional concert hall, and its ornate interior still fills on weekend nights.

Port Chester sits exactly on the New York-Connecticut state line. The Byram River, flowing just to its east, has marked the border since colonial times, which means this village has spent three and a half centuries as a threshold between two worlds.