Five-Year-Old James Wynn Was the One Who Decided That His Family Should Move to Garrison, N.Y
Five-year-old James Wynn was the one who decided that his family should move to Garrison, N.Y. After seven years in the two-bedroom duplex they owned in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, James’s parents, Julia and Paul Wynn, were ready to live in a house. “We wanted our own home with lots of space, in a small community, with great schools for our growing family,” Ms. Wynn, 40, said. Ms. Wynn is a stay-at-home mother; Mr. Wynn works for Boehringer Ingelheim, a pharmaceutical company in Ridgefield, Conn. While house hunting, they rejected New Jersey (commute too difficult), Westchester County (taxes too high) and Connecticut (“We really like New York,” Ms. Wynn said), before venturing up to Putnam County, where they fell in love with Garrison and neighboring Cold Spring. “We didn’t think we’d go that far north,” Ms. Wynn said. “But we did, and it was awesome.” But Garrison or Cold Spring? Enamored of Cold Spring’s quaint downtown, but drawn to Garrison’s more bucolic flavor, the Wynns were torn. So they asked James, who was about to enter kindergarten, and brought him to see the schools in both places. “He felt comfortable at Garrison from the get-go,” Ms. Wynn said. “And that is what he chose.” In 2014, after renting in the hamlet for two years, the Wynns bought a four-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath farmhouse, built in 1945 on three acres. Ms. Wynn called it a “major fixer-upper.” They paid $610,000. “We originally rented, in case this wasn’t the community for us,” Ms.
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