Westchester Magazine is once again hosting its spectacular Food & Wine Festival. The event has expanded this year into a four-day extravaganza, the largest gathering of Westchester’s restaurants at one event in one place in Westchester County’s history.

Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino will be on hand for the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday May 17th. Joining Astorino will be Kevin Nunn, Director of the White Plains Business Improvement District, many other political and business dignitaries plus 23 local chefs including Peter Kelly, X20 Xaviars on the Hudson; Anthony Goncalves, 42 The Restaurant; Anthony Micari, BLT Steak; Eric Gabrynowicz, Restaurant North among others.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony will open the first event in four-day series, “Burgers, BBQ and Beer Bash,” featuring weekend filled with 200 world-class wines, 100 top restaurants and 18 special events. The proceeds from the event will benefit The Westchester Coalition for the Hungry and Homeless.

read more

(New Rochelle, NY) -- New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo held a press conference at The College of New Rochelle on May 10, 2012 to announce ground-breaking legislation to protect people with special needs and disabilities.

More than 200 representatives of local community organizations, members of the CNR Community, press from all the major news outlets, and government officials filled the College’s Maura Ballroom for the event.

CNR President Judith Huntington welcomed the Governor, praising him for the legislation, which she said sets a “new standard of care and protection for our most vulnerable populations. This important legislation resonates with the mission at The College of New Rochelle which for more than 100 years has been committed to service and ensuring social justice for underserved populations.”

read more

Dr. Yigal Joseph will retire this June after 12 years as Principal of New Rochelle's Columbus Elementary School. He will be missed. Dr. Joseph's strong leadership, marked by a boundless enthusiasm for improvement and genuine caring will be missed the most.

"He is, hands-down, the finest principal that I have ever had the privilege of working with," said one senior-level administrator who worked with Joseph for years.

"I am going to miss his inspiration" said Luz Maldonado, the outgoing PTA President at Columbus School. "I think he understands the spirit of Columbus in our lives."

"I will miss his compassion for the kids, his intelligence and all his good heartedness," said Sabrina Watkins, a third grade teacher at Columbus who has worked there for 11 of Joseph's 12 years at the school. She praised Joseph for being innovative, current and forward-thinking in his educational approach.

read more

The neighbors from hell are packing up and leaving town.

In November, Talk of the Sound reported that the house at 110 Stephenson Boulevard was on the market. A moving truck was spotted today in front of the house. John D sent along several photos.

Patrick Hickey, the primary owner of the house spent years orchestrating a campaign to drive his next door neighbor out of her house. Talk of the Sound's eight-part series Nightmare on Stephenson Boulevard exposed to readers Hickey's relentless harassment of Suzanne Ribando. It is with no small satisfaction that we report that it is Hickey who has been driven out of his house, and the City of New Rochelle. Goodbye and good riddance.

read more

The Woman’s Club of New Rochelle held a luncheon to celebrate its 100th anniversary and mark is passing as an active organization in New Rochelle.

The Journal News has a good article with an excellent photo slideshow.

read more

The New Rochelle Branch of the NAACP in conjunction with Xenia Lodge #50, F & A.M. (Prince Hall Masons) and Bethesda Baptist Church presented a forum Friday at Bethesda Baptist Church on "What to do When You Are Stopped By the Police". The evening, two years in the making, was billed as an opportunity to learn how to respond in a way to de-escalate the situation and preserve your rights and safety.

The panel included six active duty police officers, one retired police officer and a lawyer from the Westchester County DA's office. Jurisdictions represented on the panel included Pelham, Mount Vernon, New York City, the MTA and Westchester County.

Sergeant Timothy McKnight of the New Rochelle Police Department and Ronald H. Williams, President of the New Rochelle Branch of the NAACP served as moderators for the event.

read more

Dozens of students from Blessed Sacrament, Iona Prep, Salesian and Ursuline came spent their Saturday this weekend performing community service at different worksites in New Rochelle and Yonkers. Students did construction work at worksites selected by Habitat for Humanity and SAIL at Ferncliff Manor, worked at the food pantry at HOPE Community Services and cleared and prepared the New Rochelle Little League field in time for next week's Opening Day ceremonies.

Iona Preparatory School hosted the event with a prayer service and breakfast in the morning. Students from the schools were mixed into groups to work at each of the sites.

read more

Leo "Leibel" Zisman, an internationally renowned SHOAH speaker, a Holocaust survivor from Kovno, Lithuania, gave his testimony last night at Young Israel Scarsdale in New Rochelle as part of a program to mark Yom Hashoah v'Hagvurahmark. Yom Hashoah v'Hagvurah or Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day set aside by the Jewish people to commemorate and honor victims of the Holocaust.

Zisman, 82, was born 1931 to a prominent family. The Nazis invaded his country when he was just a young boy. He lost his parents and two of his siblings to the Nazis. He survived the atrocities of the concentration camps on his own.

Shortly after the war he had a dream where his parents told him his brother was looking for him. That day his older brother and only surviving sibling found him at a camp in Hungary. Zisman and his brother emigrated to the United States and started a successful business together which they ran for over 50 years. The two still talk every day.

read more

Just in time for Earth Day, Talk of the Sound has reviewed the Local Agenda 21 plan for New Rochelle, NY created under an ICLEI program first announced in 2009 and analyzed changes to the document made after the New Rochelle City Council voted to adopt the plan in 2011. Earth Day falls each year on April 22nd. It is the two-year anniversary of the release of the original GreeNR plan.

GreeNR Side by Side Analysis (39 MB PDF)

Talk of the Sound conducted a similar analysis when GreeNR was released in 2010 and many of the concerns we raised were raised at Council. In some cases, items we identified -- requiring homeowners to pay to upgrade the lateral lines from their house to the City sewer system when selling their home, displaying private information from Con Edison on electricity usage -- were removed from the revised GreeNR plan. Others however, such as the GreeNR Seal and the "Green Lien" programs, remain.

The linked document provides a side by side analysis of the document as presented to the City Council in April 2010 and the document created on March 17, 2012. The two documents contain insertions and deletions of images, section dividers and other cosmetic changes that make a side by side comparison difficult. Talk of the Sound inserted blank pages or removed cosmetic pages so that the content pages matched up and could be run through the software to identify changes. The mark up key uses yellow highlights, red rectangles and red ovals: sections, sentences or words "of interest" are highlighted in yellow; changes between the two documents are marked with a red rectangle; sections, sentences or words that suggest mandates are marked with a red oval.

Although certain sections have been updated to reflect data from 2010 to 2009 or 2011 to 2010, the title is not updated. The title is "New Rochelle Sustainability Plan 2010 - 2030" but the plan was not adopted until 2011. Title should read "New Rochelle Sustainability Plan 2011 - 2031". Which data was updated in the document is inconsistent and appears to be random.

During the Public Hearing on GreeNR in 2010, New Rochelle Sustainability Coordinator Deborah Newborn stated that GreeNR contained recommendations for mandates. When she was asked about mandates during City Council meetings she said there were no recommendations for mandates. In fact, there are recommendations for mandates and, in one case, according to the updated GreeNR document, Residential Recycling the City has already moved on from voluntarily recycling to mandatory recycling; the plan states that the City may now issue summonses. In another example, there is now a mandate on idling and summonses can be issued. There are other mandates regarding building codes. According to Newborn, the overall intent of GreeNR is to try the voluntary compliance route first and then move to mandatory mandatory if the voluntary route fails which is another way of saying the plan contains "mandates" even though she and the Mayor later claimed there were no mandates in the plan.

read more