February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But Tara leaders quickly countered, saying the group’s ownership of its home was permanent and immovable.
The non-profit Irish cultural and educational group secured full ownership of it headquarters only six months ago. The move into Alder Mansion in northwest Yonkers was the culmination of a decade-long battle to secure a premises in the New York metropolitan area for Tara.
The group had initially failed to get its hands on a former college in the Westchester County village of Briarcliff Manor, about 20 miles north of Yonkers.
The Journal News reported that a member of Yonkers city council had recently claimed that the city of Yonkers had sold the 43-room mansion to Tara without first securing the permission of a federal judge who blocked the unconditional sale of city property in a housing desegregation order. The order dates to 1987 but is still binding.
The Journal News, published in White Plains, reported that Yonkers, in contrast to the Tara deal, had recently asked the same judge for approval to sell another property close to Alder Mansion. According to the report, the 1987 court order by U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand stated that Yonkers could not “sell, transfer or otherwise encumber” any city-owned property without court permission.
The order was linked to an earlier 1980 ruling by Sand arising from a case brought jointly by the U.S. and the Yonkers chapter of the NAACP.
Judge Sand determined that Yonkers had engaged in a practice of deliberately segregating housing and schools.
The ruling means that Yonkers could theoretically be deemed in contempt of court for selling Alder Mansion to Tara.
Tara Circle paid $1.2 million for Alder Mansion, a dormitory building to its rear, and 5.8 surrounding acres in October 2004. The payment for the mansion — which dates to 1912 and sits on part of a larger property listed on the National Register of Historic Places — sealed a deal struck in 2000 when the Yonkers City Council voted unanimously to offer the mansion to Tara.
The mansion has been a popular shooting location for movie companies since it was taken over by Tara.
Liam McLaughlin, president of Tara Circle, was unimpressed by the suggestion that Tara’s halls might be vulnerable to the ’87 court ruling.
“I don’t think this has any merit,” McLaughlin said. “Alder Mansion is on the register of historic buildings and is not suitable for housing.”
McLaughlin is an attorney and Republican majority leader on the Yonkers City Council.
As it turns out, the matter of Alder Mansion and the court ruling was not raised by a rival Democratic member of the council, but a GOP colleague of McLaughlin’s.
McLaughlin said that Alder Mansion was located in an area designated as a college and university zone. It was not the kind of property the court order was intended to protect, he said.
McLaughlin has also taken the position that court permission was not necessary for Tara’s purchase of Alder Mansion because a court-appointed housing monitor was involved in the original 1995 purchase of the property by the city of Yonkers.
The monitor, he said, had known about plans by Yonkers to subdivide the property.
Jim Rice, chairman of the board of Tara Circle, conceded that there could be an issue between the federal court and Yonkers, but that Tara Circle and Alder Mansion would not be involved. He said that Yonkers might have to pay a fine but that Tara was protected from any action.
“Ours was a bona fide purchase for value. The property is Tara’s,” Rice said.
Tara Circle dates to 1992 when dozens of Irish-American groups in the New York area banded together in order to fund a cultural center.
Ironically, the securing of Alder Mansion was welcomed by the group in part because it saw Yonkers as being a much more culturally diverse place than Briarcliff Manor, a municipality that has been recorded as having the highest individual household income in the nation.
In a press release at the time of the 2002 deal, one Tara board member stated that the atmosphere in Yonkers was “encouraging and progressive” and that this was in stark contrast to the “vehement opposition” the group had encountered “in the less culturally diverse location originally proposed.”