Beautiful Mansion Reigning on Jewett Avenue

    These splendid Victorian era mansions remain towering over the west side Jewett Avenue between Maine Avenue and the Boulevard.
   The latter has always struck me as the entrance to Westerleigh, the old National Prohibition Campground Association development.  It's hard to imagine a group of Americans actually dedicating themselves to any sort of restraint these days.

   The older pictures were taken in 1905.  The Beers' Map from 1874 only shows empty lots owned by a Smith family.  The temperance group didn't start buying property until around 1877 so this makes sense.  They do appear on the 1917 map but there're no owner names listed.

   Though they still stand, much of their period detail, like on so many of the houses I post about, has been stripped away.  The little architectural fripperies that enhanced the already considerably character of these houses has been worn away by time and, I imagine, expense.

   Still, while occasional tear downs still happen in Westerleigh, the neighborhood still preserves much of its 19th century feel and is more than well worth several drives through.

The Church Project Lite

So I'm too lazy/too overwhelmed/too tired, or just too something indefinable to carry out the Church Project the way I originally intended to. So...
So, what I'll do is just get googlemap shots and the occasional old timey picture of the North Shore churches and some information about them.
I'll do it by denomination, starting with my home court, the Lutheran churches.

DAY ONE

Trinity Evangelical Lutheran - 309 Saint Pauls Ave - Stapleton


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My old church and elementary school. Founded by Germans back in the nineteenth century, Trinity really took off in the early twentieth century under the stewardship of Pastor Fredrick Sutter. In the google picture you can see the damage to the steeple caused by the tornado that ravaged the North Shore 2 years ago.


Zion Lutheran - 505 Watchogue Road, Westerleigh


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The group that founded Zion Lutheran started as an adult Norwegian Sunday school class in a no longer standing building in Port Richmond. At some point they collected enough money and built a beautiful neo-Gothic church on Bennett Street alongside Port Richmond Park. In the sixties they relocated to Westerleigh and built the kind of ugly modern church they still occupy on Watchogue and Willowbrook Roads.










I started with Trinity and Zion because they represent the two most active and vibrant Lutheran congregations remaining on Staten Island. They also still have a strong sense of their initial ethnic origins. Trinity was still holding German services in the early eighties.

They also represent two distinct wings of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Trinity came from money (particularly the Stapleton beer barons of the nineteenth century) and Zion from working class poverty. Today Trinity maintains a much more ritual filled worship service and Zion's is more stripped down.

The great wave of Lutheranism that once represented Germans, Norwegians and Swedes in numerous churches has receded with the demographic changes across the Island as well as the general collapse of the mainline denominations.

The Secret Churches

In my research I've discovered the existence of several defunct churches now in service as something else. Sometimes it's fairly obvious the structure used to be a church but sometimes it just looks like a house.


Norwegian Lutheran Free Church - Wardwell Avenue in Westerleigh


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I never even realized this places existence until my friend, Steve MacD. told me about an aunt who'd attended an evangelical Norwegian church in Westerleigh. Later I correlated this memory when going through the Davis and Leng Staten Island books at the CSI Staten Island Archives. Funnily enough, despite it's obvious previous history as a church, it never occurred to me all the times I drove past the building.



Kingsley Methodist Church - Cebra Avenue in Stapleton


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All I know is that was one of the great Methodist Calamity casualties in the late sixties. When I was a lad I was told it was owned by two "gentlemen artists", later the Mormons owned it. It was the center of the Mormoning activities which consisted primarily of sending out two tow-headed young men in white shirts and black ties to knock on doors. Later a Pentecostal congregation set up residence there and I don't know what the present owner plans to do with it. From the below old postcard you can see it once had the common four sided steeple I'm finding on many of the Island's old wooden Methodist churches. I've only recently realized how big the building actually is (50' by 85') and I imagine there are extensions in the back for offices and the like.