New Rochelle

New Rochelle is a city in Westchester County, New York, on the shore of Long Island Sound about 17 miles from Midtown Manhattan, and a suburb of New York City. Its name recalls La Rochelle in France: in 1688 some 33 families, many of them Huguenot artisans and craftsmen, founded the community of La Nouvelle-Rochelle on land bought from the Siwanoy by the English settler Thomas Pell, and for generations French remained spoken there. The thinker Thomas Paine was given a farm in the town in 1784 for his service to the independence cause. The city formed its first professional police department in 1885 and incorporated in 1899. Its 2020 census population was 79,726, which made it the seventh largest city in the state of New York. It is roughly triangular, about 10 miles from north to south and 1.5 miles across at its widest point, with a total area of 13.2 square miles.