Mixed Success in Yonkers
By FERNANDA SANTOS

YONKERS — The matching town houses on Gaffney Place and Trenchard Street along this city's East Side — with their brick siding, peaked roofs and well-tended front yards — were once a prominent set of addresses in one of the country's more ambitious social experiments: the court-ordered effort to desegregate Yonkers, the fourth-largest city in New York.

After a bitter, drawn-out legal battle, black families from the city's housing projects began moving into the town houses and into the heart of one the city's white working-class neighborhoods.

For many, these town houses — known as the Andrew Smith Townhouses — were seen as the embodiment of an enemy invasion, a planted flag in the city's long and nasty war over race, jobs, schools and housing.

...According to the Municipal Housing Authority, 58 of the first 200 families to move into the town houses are still living there, 9 of those at Andrew Smith. Among those first 200 families, there were some problems: 40 have been evicted and 17 have returned to the projects. Yet city statistics indicate that a disaster did not occur. Crime rates in the still largely white neighborhood have not gone up. The prices of homes have not plunged, although they also have not risen as much as in the rest of Westchester County during the latest housing boom.

But seen most broadly, the experiment also did not lead to any remaking of the city's overall population or substantially alter the great, hard divides of where whites and blacks live. Census figures show the number of whites on the East Side decreased by about 12 percent in the 1990's, but whites remain 82 percent of the area's overall population. And in the southwest quadrant, where about 7,000 units of public housing are concentrated, most in high-rise and aged projects, the population remains 81 percent black and Hispanic.

...In interviews over several months, families in the Trenchard Street town houses and some of their neighbors spoke about the experience. Some told of living separate lives. In fact, some tenants spoke of feeling isolated, somewhat stranded and no more rooted in the community than before.

But they do feel safe.

"I remember the big rats in the projects, the dog fights on the basketball court," said Leda Corea, 25, who was 11 when she moved from the William A. Schlobohm Houses in southwestern Yonkers to a town house at Andrew Smith, across the street from Mary Paige. "I remember running to my apartment from the bus stop and making absolutely no eye contact with anyone until I got into my room. I was so afraid."

Ms. Corea continued: "Here, it's different. I never had to worry that I'd be hit by a stray bullet or chased on the street."

...The few researchers who have studied the Yonkers experiment — from Columbia and Johns Hopkins University — did not reach broad conclusions.

But they did say that the new housing helped residents cultivate positive attitudes toward school and work, and that the young people who had moved to the town houses were more likely than those who stayed in the projects to think that education was a route to good jobs.

However, the studies, as well as interviews conducted in recent weeks, also hint at the limited extent of the triumphs.

A fuller, deeper integration did not occur — in part, some residents and experts say, because of the simultaneous effort to desegregate the schools. The judge's order did away with neighborhood schools, so children were — and still are — bused to all parts of the city, making it hard for their parents to meet and make friends in the neighborhoods in which they live.

In the neighborhoods, residents still keep their distance. At the playground opposite the Andrew Smith Townhouses, black and white children play together almost as rarely as the adults socialize. Ms. Smith said that most of her neighbors in the private homes would greet her, but only if she greeted them first.

Outside the town houses, white residents were reluctant to talk about their experiences. When they did, they would give only their first names, or brush off the issue, saying any problems were a thing of the past.