Yonkers is a city in Westchester County, New York, located directly to the north of The Bronx, New York City; it is considered to be an inner suburb of New York. Yonkers was founded in 1646 as a village, and it was named for the lawyer Adriaen van der Donck, who was given the honorific title of Jonkheer ("young gentleman"). Yonkers was a small farming town for its first two hundred years, but it became a city in 1872 as the result of industrialization and immigration. In 1874, the southern part of Yonkers was annexed by New York City as "The Bronx", but a merger vote in Yonkers failed; Yonkers is sometimes considered to be the "sixth borough" of New York City. In 1888, the first golf course in the USA was established in Yonkers. During the early 1900s, plastic and automobile factories opened in the city, and it became home to the nation's largest hat manufacturer. From the 1930s to 1980s, many African-Americans migrated from the American South to Yonkers during the Great Migration, and the once-prominent Jewish community in the city dwindled. Yonkers would also develop large Italian, Irish, Portuguese, Polish, Ukrainian, Czechoslovakian, Russian, Croatian, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Lebanese communities. During the 1980s, the decline of the manufacturing industry led to Yonkers becoming a residential city, and racial tensions grew during the 1980s and 1990s. Yonkers and the rest of Westchester County would become a Democratic Party stronghold, but the City Council and mayorship was mostly controlled by the Republican Party during the early 21st century. In 2016, Yonkers had a population of 200,807.
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