A Place to Belong: Embodied Experiences of Economic Development from Industrial to Postindustrial Sleepy Hollow, New York

Abstract

For most of the 20th century, what is now Sleepy Hollow, New York was home to a General Motors (GM) automobile assembly plant. This plant, recognized by the village as the “backbone of the local economy” (Village of Sleepy Hollow 1997a, 9), paid half of the village’s property taxes and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the region at the peak of its operations (Hudson 1979, 299; McDade 1996, 87). Amidst widespread deindustrialization and factory closures across the country, GM closed the Sleepy Hollow plant in 1996, a devastating hit for the local economy. Unlike some other factory towns, though, Sleepy Hollow is now experiencing economic “revitalization.” This recovery is largely driven by tourism and real estate’s reinvigoration of the village’s tax base and economy. In my research, I focus on the redevelopment of the former GM plant site into Edge-on-Hudson, a 70-acre mixed-use, high-end, transit-oriented commercial and residential “community” as emblematic of the industrial to postindustrial transition in Sleepy Hollow (“Destination for the Next Generation” 2025). To illustrate the lived experiences and dynamics of economic development, I gathered data through a range of qualitative methods from May to October 2024. I conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with village residents, developers of Edge-on-Hudson, and local municipal officials, gathered 41 questionnaire responses from village residents, and curated an archive of over 8,000 pages of municipal documents and news articles. With these data, I argue that the everyday, embodied experiences of community members in Sleepy Hollow demonstrate the place-specific manifestations, material impacts, and costs of industrial and postindustrial economic development. I draw upon this range of data as well as analytical frameworks from geography and feminist political economy to approach the complex and embodied realities of economic activity in industrial and postindustrial Sleepy Hollow. By engaging with the experiences and perspectives of community members through a geographic lens, I attend to the consequences of economic decisions in the village. These findings demonstrate the urgency of challenging narratives of linear economic progress and seeking out alternatives to current modes of development that are more politically, economically, socially, and environmentally just – in Sleepy Hollow and beyond.