Snug Harbor Randall Memorial Church

   Many readers of this site (or group) know that Snug Harbor used to have a beautiful church standing next to the theater: the Randall Memorial Church. As the number of sailors resident declined the church fell into disuse. Unused, it also fell into disrepair. According to Wikipedia, after a plan to turn it into a community center fell through, in 1952, the building was torn down. Today, it's the crappy parking lot next to the theater.

interior images showing the apse and altar

the church was located in the bottom left of the lower picture, around where the cars are parked.

One of the things I only really thought about a few years ago was that I never really understood what Snug Harbor is supposed to look like. The location of the trees were deliberately planned and not just scattered around randomly. All the forested section along Henderson Avenue?  All just new growth following the end of farming at the Harbor.  

The Grounds of Snug Harbor

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This is just to give you a sense of where the various lost buildings were once located. It's also interesting to note from the maps that the Snug Harbor property once ran all the way up to Forest Avenue.

One More Neighborhood Church

Next to my neighborhood (Cottage Hill, once Hamilton Park) are Livingston and Snug Harbor. Livingston is home to an old and storied Unitarian Church. The present building is the third home of Staten Island's Unitarians, following the original building on Cebra Avenue(which was sold to the German Lutherans to become the original Trinity German Evangelical Lutheran Church who moved the whole thing over the hill to St. Paul's Avenue and Beach Street),





then the "St. Roofus" building in the same location as the present building's.







Finally, in 1895, years after the Great Blizzard of 1888 brought down the roof of "St. Roofus", the present building was erected. It's a tidy little building with a pleasant look to it. You can see the small trees in the older photo now grown old and larger surrounding it in the contemporary picture.


Unitarianism has been described somewhere as a soft pillow on the descent to atheism. Perhaps that's a bit extreme , but it is a bit nebulous and feelgoody. Nonetheless, the track record of the Unitarians on abolition and civil rights is laudable and the building does fit nicely into the neighborhood.