The method
We start from the paperwork, not the photographs. Before we describe a room we read what governs it — the state's rate tables, its labor regulations on banquet charges, its caterer bulletins, the county's own planning documents. Those documents decide what your invoice says. The photographs decide nothing.
We read the effective date on everything. The county's general sales tax rate changed on 1 August 2019, and one municipality inside the county has never matched the rest of it (NYS Tax bulletin). A pricing post written in 2017, or written by somebody who checked one town and generalized, is wrong in two directions at once. Every rate we publish carries the date of the table it came from. Current figures are on the cost page.
We lead with the median. Where a market has a long right tail — and this one does — the average describes the tail rather than the market. Quoting a mean at a couple planning against the middle of a distribution is a sales technique with a citation attached. Our cost pages carry medians first, averages second, and both divided by guest count, because that is the only form in which two proposals can be honestly compared.
Every number carries its source, in the sentence or in the link. If we cannot source it, it does not appear, including when it would make a better page. We wanted an authoritative figure for miles of Hudson River shoreline inside Westchester and could not find one at county, state or federal level, so this site does not have one. Other sites publish a number. They made it up.
We label access, we do not assume it. Several of the best rooms in this county are private member clubs with sponsorship requirements, board approval, and calendars that serve members first. Some rent off-season. Some never have. Almost none publish the policy. A listing stays marked members only or unverified until we can cite a source and a date, because nobody's Saturday should rest on a directory's optimism.
We have verdicts. A listing without an opinion is furniture. If a terrace is worth the upcharge and the indoor alternate is not, that gets written down. Venues will not enjoy all of it.
Where the authority comes from, and where it does not
Not from biography. The operator of this site is a Long Island native. Nobody here grew up in Bronxville, nobody's grandparents had their reception in Rye, and you will never read an invented childhood on this website to make a listing sound warmer.
What we have instead is the reading. Publication 718's rate table. The Health Department's Publication 4210. Tax bulletins TB-ST-110 and TB-ST-320. Sections 146-2.18 and 146-2.19 of Title 12 of the state code, which is where the administrative fee on your banquet contract is actually governed. County planning documents and the parks department's own materials.
What we do not have yet is a body of signed Westchester banquet contracts large enough to publish fee percentages from. Couples repeat a 20 to 25 percent band to each other online. We are not going to print that band as a fact until we have read it off paper, and the cost page says so in the same words. When we have the contracts, we will publish the percentages and name the venues.
Where a local would say "everyone knows," we link instead. North Tarrytown did not drift into becoming Sleepy Hollow — the village voted for the name on 10 December 1996, 1,304 to 710, explicitly to build an identity after the General Motors plant closed (UPI archive). Dates, margins, a link. That is the register.
We are not from here. We know the paperwork here.
Corrections policy
- Anyone can file a correction. Venue staff, couples, planners, competitors. You do not need to represent the business.
- We want the receipt. A dated page on the venue's own site, a signed contract, a proposal PDF, an email with a date on it, or a government record. A phone call with a salesperson is a lead, not a source.
- Prices and fees get pulled first and verified second. Tell us a published price is wrong and we remove the number the same working day, then republish only once we can cite it. An unsourced number does not sit here while we investigate.
- Corrections are logged on the listing. Every listing carries a last-verified date and a change log you can read.
- Verdicts are not corrections. If we say a room's sightlines are poor and you disagree, send the floor plan. We will look again and say so publicly if we were wrong. No venue edits an opinion, and nobody buys one.
- Access status jumps the queue. A private club labeled wrongly in either direction gets fixed ahead of everything else, because that error is the one that costs somebody a date.
Use the correction form on any listing page. Venue managers who want a listing created or claimed should start at list your venue.