Steve Dumas, 35, and his wife, Suzanne, 36, were renting an apartment in Tarrytown last year and looking for a house with “enough space so we didn’t have to move in a few years,” said Mr. Dumas, who is the senior director of strategy for a startup in Midtown Manhattan. They also had a bit of a deadline: Ms. Dumas, a social worker for Montefiore Medical Center, was pregnant with their first child.
A former colleague of Mr. Dumas’s lived in Ardsley, N.Y., and recommended the village to them. Mr. Dumas, who grew up in Rockland County, had also heard good things about the school system.
The couple closed last spring on a three-bedroom three-bath ranch near the elementary school, paying $650,000, and moved into it in June. It’s just a short walk to get coffee or get onto a hiking trail, they said, and they already have a future friend in mind for their son, Quinn, who was born in August — Mr. Dumas’s former colleague gave birth to a baby boy in May.
“We picked a good time to come,” Mr. Dumas said.
The village of one square mile, part of the town of Greenburgh, has managed to retain its small-town appeal over the years despite the slicing in half of its business district by the construction of the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway in the 1950s. It is a community where residents “care a lot for each other,” said Lauren Allan, the superintendent of the Ardsley school district, who moved to the village with her family when she was 12.
Although not on the Hudson River — and not to be confused with Ardsley-on-Hudson, which is a section of Irvington — the village, with hills, winding roads and green spaces, is grouped by real estate agents with the river towns, where houses have been selling briskly lately.
A house in Ardsley, if priced correctly, “goes in a 30-day period,” said Michael Criscuolo, an associate broker with Houlihan Lawrence in Ardsley.
Francie Malina, an agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Dobbs Ferry, said a majority of her clients are young families from Manhattan, Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens, looking for a “low-key lifestyle” who may not have the budget for Scarsdale or Bronxville. “You can get a lot of house for the price in Ardsley,” she said.
An easy commute to Midtown Manhattan is a big draw, agents and buyers say, but traffic can be a problem. To help with that, traffic lanes are being added and widened in the business district, and there are plans to replace the Ashford Avenue Bridge linking the village to Dobbs Ferry, said Meredith S. Robson, the Ardsley village manager.
article from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/realestate/ardsley-new-york-village.html?emc=eta1&_r=1
