In 1910, the New York State legislature made it possible to incorporate any neighborhood with at least 50 people into a village. (What is a village? We explain in Episode 1, but it's an unnecessarily cutesy synonym for "municipality." It's basically a very small city.) 

In Episode 1, we talk about how a wealthy landowner named Roswell Eldridge incorporated his personal estate into a legal village, just so he could dodge local taxes. In this episode, a group of millionaires try to do the same thing to their neighborhoods: tiny, wealthy districts called Motts Point, Barkers Point, and Sands Point. Here, lawyers and suffragists live in lavish homes nestled among the mansions of Goulds and Guggenheims. It was the inspiration for East Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. But although Sands Point is just minutes away from Roswell's Saddle Rock, the middle-class residents who lived just outside the village limits were horrified by the proposed incorporation. And they decided to fight back. 

Find notes and transcripts to this episode here: https://www.aneyesoreandaplague.com/sands-point