One writer, one village, three books.
Hunk Alley began as a way to keep a place from slipping away. What follows is the story of the village behind the books, told with the true history that shaped it, and a note where the author will add the personal part.
Written by someone who grew up here.
About the author
I grew up on these streets, in the village the whole world thinks it already knows. I left the way most people leave a small town, sure the rest of the story was somewhere else, and spent years finding out how much of it was here all along. These three books are my walk back up the lane, past the river and the churchyard, the factory whistle and the long October light. They are about the ordinary miracles of a childhood spent somewhere a legend had already claimed. Thank you for reading them.
A little true history.
These are facts about the real place. The stories in the books grow from this ground.
A visitor and a legend
Washington Irving visited the area in the late 1790s and drew on it for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The story he set here would outlast almost everything else about the place.
The Old Dutch Church
The Old Dutch Church is the oldest church in New York State. It still stands at the edge of the burying ground, and it stands at the edge of these books too.
The plant on the waterfront
A General Motors plant stood on the waterfront from around 1900 and closed in 1996. For most of a century the town worked by the river, and then, in one year, it stopped.
The year the name changed
In 1996, the same year the plant closed, the village changed its name from North Tarrytown to Sleepy Hollow. The town finally took the name the world had used for it all along.
The Bridge at North Tarrytown
Book One · Hardback, paperback and ebook
The first book opens on a boyhood spent between the river and the churchyard, in a village that carried a famous story on its back. It is a warm account of small streets, big weather, and the sense that history was always just behind the next fence. The author gathers the people, the seasons, and the ordinary miracles of growing up somewhere the whole world thinks it already knows.
What is inside
- · The village before it was a postcard, street by street
- · The river, the church and the seasons of the Hudson Valley
- · A warm, true account of a small-town childhood
A quiet set of promises.
True to the place
Every street, church and season in the books is real. The history is checked. The memory is honest.
Warm, not spooky
This is a memoir, not a ghost story. The legend is the backdrop, the childhood is the book.
Made to be kept
Hardbacks built to last, signed when we can, printed with care in small runs.