Backlash Against Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez in Queens

And finally: Where it is never not Halloween

Molly Fitzpatrick writes:

In Sleepy Hollow, about an hour north of Times Square, the street signs and fire trucks are orange and black. The ambulances are emblazoned with full-panel murals of the Headless Horseman.

And the most famous pair of empty shoulders in American literature moonlights as Sleepy Hollow High School’s unsettling mascot (go Horsemen!).

For years, the village was known as North Tarrytown.

The rebranding of the area began in 1996. That year, the local General Motors plant — which had once employed 4,000 workers — closed, delivering a devastating blow to the village economy. The plan was to pivot toward tourism, focusing on the most famous work of the village’s most famous resident.

[The headless horseman industrial complex: a story about a place in Westchester.]

The village voted to rename itself Sleepy Hollow, in honor of the short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” written by Washington Irving. The then-mayor, Sean Treacy, celebrated the result of the vote against the backdrop of a Headless Horseman banner: “This is now the place,” he proclaimed, “where legends are made.”

For Henry Steiner, the village historian who supported the name change, the opportunity was more profound. “I wanted to see this community called North Tarrytown not labor under a lack of identity,” he said. “I wanted to seize this world-famous identity that had been buried.”

It worked. In October, about 100,000 tourists descend on the Westchester County village of 10,000.

And the long-vacant General Motors site is now under construction as Edge-on-Hudson, a $1 billion residential and commercial development.

“We don’t want people to think that Sleepy Hollow is, year-round, all about spooky stuff, because it’s not,” Ken Wray, the current mayor of Sleepy Hollow, said. “We don’t want to be the Santa’s Village of Halloween.”