We Used To Own The Bronx: Memoirs Of a Former Debutante

One of my family's traditions has its roots in both New and Old Worlds, and in the history of the English, Dutch, Huguenots and Native Americans in New York. Every year that we ask for it, the City of New Rochelle presents my family with a fat calf--or, in the spelling of the relevant document, a "fatte calf." This odd event embodies New Rochelle's compliance with a seventeenth-century real estate contract between a representative of a group of French refugees and an English colonial lord of the manor--my ancestor, John Pell.