commissioner of the idea of soccer

A lot of people are citing demographics, but that’s a type of circular logic which fails to explain how the demographics got distributed in the way they did. Long Island as we know it today is a postwar project initially designed around racial and economic segregation with a geography that lent itself to that separation. Westchester (connected to NYC on the US mainland by what became the Bronx) was already integrated with the city’s economy well before its postwar suburbanization, supplying NYC with agricultural goods, our water lines, a reliable labor force, and political heft (Thomas Paine and Nelson Rockefeller both had homes there). Yonkers almost became our 6th borough in 1898 but voted against it. It just has a longer history of integration with the city in ways that Long Island doesn’t.