I’m pretty sure I would have been a fan of Mad Men in any event, but the fact that Don and Betty Draper make their home in Ossining–one mere town over from Briarcliff Manor, where I have lived for twenty years–always made the show especially appealing to me. Last Sunday, however, when Betty and her Junior League pals began discussing the Ossining Reservoir on Pleasantville Road, and their opposition to building water tanks there, well, my heart went boom, boom, boom. Hey, that’s my Pleasantville Road, kids–the street where I live (about 2 miles away, I’d guess.) Later in the show, when Betty meets Henry, the handsome aide to Governor Rockefeller, he informs her that the water tank project was pretty much unstoppable. Well, no kidding. Above left, see the very tanks that Betty only dreamed of preventing in 1963, still in use this very afternoon. On the right, the reservoir, which, I gather from this blog written by my (unknown) neighbor J. Philip Faranda, used to be in pretty bad shape, but which has since been turned into a lovely park. Meanwhile, my buddy Ken Smith has sent me this interest feature from the Journal News, Westchester’s newspaper, discussing local landmarks that have appeared on Mad Men.
