Pleasantville Rocks

Aimee Mann (photo credit: Rainer Merkel)

Now that it’s over – past history, at least for this year – let’s talk about the 15th annual Pleasantville Music Festival. What a great all-day event, featuring 18 bands such as Everclear, Soul Asylum and Aimee Mann. But, let’s not get too distracted by the music, or for that matter the food, which was a great mix of diverse culinary tastes.  Some 5,000 folks came out, many millennials, lots of Brooklynites.  Aren’t these the folks we want to lure back to WESTCHESTER? “Hell yes,” says Mayor Peter Scherer, chief cultural champion of this city. Truth be told, Pleasantville has its share of lively arts, with ARC Stages, Axial Theatre and more recently Gordon Parks Foundation. “But it’s thanks to the magnetic Jacob Burns Film Center that Pleasantville got branded as a cultural mecca,” says the Mayor, who defines his domain as “a village-scale urban center.”  It just happens to have some 100 new rental units in the pipeline, perhaps for empty-nesters, or those rock-and-rollers who may be in the market for some cool new digs.