Kite Hill and Ward Hill

this is a repost from the site's facebook group, North Shore Staten Island History.



   I don't know where it originated, but the name the kids I grew up with on Cebra and Ward Avenues called the outcrop of rock that rises up above Homer Street and looking out over St. Paul's Avenue is Kite Hill. It was one of those things you did on a summer day, you'd hike up to Nixon Avenue, cut through the empty lot and climb down into the hillside, work your way thru the brambles (which were filled with pheasants), and then climb up Kite Hill. After hanging out for a little while and looking out at the SIRT, the harbor, and Stapleton, you'd go home. A couple of months later you'd do it all over again. 

   Today, just tooling about the net, looking for Statpleton stuff, I found this painting. It wasn't done from Kite Hill, but it's definitely from somewhere on Pavilion Hill (Tompkins Circle). 

   It's described as being painted from Brighton Heights, but I'd stake my Stapleton credibility on that mansion on the left being the Caleb Ward House. 

Hermann Fuechsel (http://hrs-art.com/hudson-river-school-ar…/hermann-fuechsel/) was a German-American painter and part of the Hudson River School.

Horror on Ward Hill

The other day I spent a couple of hours trying to track down any pictures of the hilltop mansions from Staten Island's past. I didn't have much luck. The microfilm spool for Jones Woods was overexposed and the poorly labeled. There was no shot of Chester Clark's Hill Top on the hill bounded by Cebra and Ward (and the one I really wanted because I grew up on Cebra and wandered around the old driveway and bits of its foundation).

But I did find a lousy picture of a second house that stood on the same hill as Clark's house. Its address was 192 Ward Avenue and it was owned by Berthold Ludwig.

I don't know when either of the buildings were destroyed. The story I heard as a kid was that there had been a fire, but we also only heard about one house up on the hill, not two. If you know anything, please, let me know. Some day the Advance will digitize its collection and make itself useful to amateur sleuths like me, but till the day I must rely on the memories of strangers.

192 Ward Avenue - home of Berthold A. Ludwig

1917 map showing location of house in lower right corner

Article from The Day, a New London, Conn. newspaper. For some reasoned it carried this story of the terrible events of that day 102 years ago. Now, that spot, once the home of a wealth chemist is covered over by ugly townhouses. Nothing, save a map and bad photo are readily available. Perhaps ghosts of memories of those events linger on in the families effected by this outburst of rage. Berthold Ludwig had three sons. Who knows how many servants lived in the house. And maybe no one remembers this at all. Even if they were teenagers, the people burned are probably long, long gone.

It's no great insight, but things like this happen all the time, all around us. They seem so big, so important at the time. And then, twenty, fifty, a hundred years later, they are little more than a clipping from an old newspaper.

OLGC

When I was a kid growing up on Cebra most of the kids around me who were Catholic went to Our Lady of Good Counsel for school and church. It also had a lenient policy about letting neighborhood kids use their schoolyard (really just a blacktop parking lot) for playing softball and just hanging around in so I spent a lot of time there.
There womens' guild or whatever they call it used to hold book fairs every year. My dad and I would walk up to Austin Place and buy tons of paperbacks for something like a quarter a piece. Good times.


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Look to the Hills

Perhaps you've noticed that the North Shore of my beloved Staten Island is littered with hills? Well it is.

Once they were all refuges for wealthier seeking insulation from the rest of us. Elevation lifted them away and above us. In that time great mansions covered many of those hills (see the Ben Braw pictures). Later, meaner times lead to the demolition of those manorial estates and the subdivision of their property as is seen in the differences between the map of the C. A. Low Estate and the photo of the same place twenty-five years later.

Pavillion Hill - 1933 - Taken from a vantage near the public restroom at Tompkinsville Square (where all the junkies hung about when I was younger).




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Map of Pavillion Hill - 1917 - Note the ownership by the Pavillion Hill Corp. and the subdivision of the property into the lots that exist to this day.




Ben Braw - 1935 - This magnificent house is one of the few remaining great estates from Staten Island's Gilded Age homes (I think I've ranted about this once or twice before). Today the view of it from Murray Hulbert Street is obscured by the elevated SI Rapid Transit tracks, buildings and three quarters of a century of plant growth.








Fort Hill Circle - 1933 - From York Avenue - The large brick building with the gables in the picture's center is on the corner of Crescent and Westervelt. The white apartments at the top left is the Ambassador and the first home of the luminous Mrs. V.



Map - Low Estate - 1917