David Chesler

On May 2, 1:34 am, Bolwerk <n...@way.org2> wrote:
> Phil Kane wrote:
> > On Thu, 1 May 2008 12:17:58 -0700 (PDT), hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
>
> >> This confusing to outsiders visiting L.I. or Westchester.  You see a
> >> sign "Town of ..." but you're nowhere near your utlimate destination,
> >> which is actually in the Village of ...".
>
> >> Of course, several other states have boroughs surrounded by townships
> >> with the same name but are different.  And there are post office names
> >> which do not coincide with commonly used names or muncipal boundaries.
>
> > This confuses me about New Jersey.  What is a "township" there?  We
> > have friends who have kept the same street address and zip code but
> > the name of the PO has changed several times.  One of them was a
> > "Township".
>
> New Jersey municipal law may be more convoluted than New York's.
>
> I think a township is just like a town in most states.  It has no
> subordinate municipal units within it, and exists in a county.  But
> there are specific, boring laws governing how it operates (mayor,
> council, what they do, etc.).  Same goes for other variations, like the
> town and borough - all basically just what people in most states would
> call "towns," but operate by different rules and maybe even different
> sizes.   There are also cities, whatever those are (chartered?).

I don't know if "township" and "boro[ugh]" have legal meanings in New
Jersey. (In Massachusetts, "town" versus "city" is an important
distinction, cities, like the City of Watertown [not to be confused
with the City of Townsville], have mayors, towns don't.)
Massachusetts, New Jersey, and maybe a few other small northeastern
states have the situation that there is no unincorporated land. In
Massachusetts it was not by design, the last unincorporated land
became part of a municipality in 1909. (On the other hand, the
counties have less and less responsibility, now limited primarily to
sheriffs, who run jails. I think a few of our counties dissolved all
together, becoming nothing more than regions. I think the UK has
undergone similar things.)
In New Jersey, in at least some places, there is a donut-and-hole
situation, where the old village or business district is named Foo
Borough while the surrounding until-more-recently-unincorporated area
is named Foo Township.

As others wrote, in New York, "town" refers to a sub-county.

As far as I know, every square foot of land that is within a US state
is also within some county (or in Louisiana, parish) whether or not it
is in an incorporated municipality, but in a few cases -- Phil
mentioned San Francisco -- the municipality and the county cover
exactly the same area. In at least five cases, the municipality
contains a county. (That was also not always the case: The City of
Greater New York came into existence before the County of the Bronx.
I'm pretty sure that between 1898 and 1912 [or whatever the exact
dates] the Borough [NYC subdivision] of the Bronx, being that part of
Westchester County, the towns of Eastchester and a few others, that
had become part of the City of Greater New York, was in the County of
New York, same as the Borough [and Island] of Manhattan. And I think
Marble Hill joined the mainland, the Borough of the Bronx, and the
County of the Bronx, at three different dates.)

ObNYCTransit: The Whtie Plains Road line ends in Wakefield. Why does
Wakefield bulge into Westchester distinctly from the straight line
that forms the Riverdale/Yonkers and Baychester/Pelham border?

--
- David Chesler <chesler@post.harvard.edu>
Free Cory Maye