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Southern Westchester, also called Lower Westchester, is a distinct area of Westchester County, New York, located in the suburbs of New York City, delineated from the more bucolic northern reaches of the county. Southern Westchester is usually defined as White Plains and south, or more precisely, everything from I-287 to the county's southern boundary with the New York City borough of the Bronx. At the Bronx-Westchester border, Lower Westchester County borders the Bronx neighborhoods of Riverdale, Woodlawn, Wakefield, and Eastchester (the Eastchester neighborhood was once part of the modern-day Town of Eastchester, in Westchester County), as well as both Van Cortlandt Park and Pelham Bay Park.
Though known for being affluent, particularly due to the (in)famy of towns like Scarsdale, this is hardly the case in cities like Yonkers and Mount Vernon, the largest and third-largest cities in the county, respectively. Yonkers remains distinctly working class; the crime-ridden, run-down, industrial South Side of Mount Vernon in nearly identical in appearance and character to the adjoining Wakefield section of the North Bronx. Both Mount Vernon and Wakefield have the largest black population in their respective counties, as well as some of the highest foreign-born populations.
Though Westchester County becomes more homogenous and affluent as one moves north, some places such as White Plains and the town of Greenburgh are surprisingly diverse for a suburb. North of White Plains, the landscape sharply segues into Northern Westchester, where it is not uncommon to find large pieces of open land as little as 30 or 40 miles north of midtown Manhattan. This pseudo-rural character has made Upper Westchester an attractive place for many celebrities to own country homes, including Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as the late Christopher Reeve.
The stark dichotomy between the two halves of the county naturally gives rise to a great deal of regionalism, with Southern Westchesterites belittling the northern reaches of their county as "the countryside".
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