The Stapleton Projects Project - Part Eight

Moving west along Tompkins Street, we reach between Patten and Clarke Streets. The southside was actually featured in the very first Stapleton Projects Project last year. A mix of commercial and residential buildings, it's typical of the backstreets I've looked at so far.

The northside is mostly residential, but there is the cool looking luncheonette with the Pepsi Cola sign on it. Also, lurking overhead to the right is Horrmann Castle high atop Grymes Hill. 

Today I took my first trip to the new Staten Island Museum at Snug Harbor today and learned a terrible bit of backstreets history. Apparently, during the New York City Draft Riots in 1863, white Islanders attacked black residents of McKeon Street. McKeon Street was the original name for Tompkins Street. Nice to know Staten Island got to play its part in one of the city's most ignominious events.

Southside of Tompkins Street between Patten and Clarke Streets, pts. 1, 2, and 3

Northside of Tompkins Street between Patten and Clarke, 

pts. 1 and 2

1917 map showing locations of buildings

Let It Begin! - Stapleton Projects Project Part One - Lost Stapleton

I mentioned on Facebook in the group North Shore Staten Island Stuff about my hope of recreating the neighborhoods lost to the construction of the various NYCHA housing projects across the North Shore in the early sixties. Because it's my home, because I'm getting reinvolved in community affairs, I'm starting with Stapleton.

The backstreets of Stapleton, over ten blocks of detached homes, small apartments, and a few commercial operations were demolished in order to build the Stapleton Houses. They were completed in 1962 and are the largest public housing complex on Staten Island with over 2,000 tenants.

While the area had some buildings in poor condition, there is no way it could really be thought of as blighted. But the city is its infinite wisdom decreed it so and up went the terraced towers that still loom over Broad Street today.

As I learn more I'll speak more about the nature of what was there in the region bounded by Broad, Tompkins, Hill, and Warren. For now, I'm just going to start putting up pictures.
Caveat - These pictures are from the WPA property photos and were taken between 1939 and 1941. Things may have drastically changed over the ensuing twenty years before the projects were built.

Tompkins Street btw Patten (Custer) and Clarker

(make sure you click on the pictures to enlarge them)

1917 map

1917 map smaller scale

So there's the first round of lost homes and businesses. I'm not sure I can ever quite forgive the mid-century urban planners who thought they could "fix" cities by destroying existing neighborhoods and packing people into high rises.

I Was Born There

   Well, not actually.  I was born in the newer section but you know what I mean.  Sadly, after three decades of neglect and misplaced trust that "somebody" would do "something" to save it, the Smith Infirmary was demolished by the City earlier today.  The SILIVE has pictures and video.

   I'm a little disappointed with myself for never going back and getting some better, closeup pictures of the building but it sure ain't happening now.  So it goes.  I wonder how many poorly built townhouses they're going to fit on the property.
 

This is the end.... The Smith Infirmary's Days Are Numbered

As promised, here's some fresh off the digital camera shots of the gradually collapsing Smith Infirmary of the original Staten Island Hospital.

   Taken from Cebra and Rosewood

   This is the perspective I saw the Smith Infirmary from at least once a day for over thirty years of my life.  Closed for over thirty years, I can still picture it as an operating facility with doctors, nurses, aides and all sorts of maintenance workers.   The shops at the intersection of Victory and Cebra flourished because of the hospital.  There were Kohlmann's Florist, Matty's Barbershop, Precious Treasures Gifts, a jeweler's, a liquor store and several bars.  

   Over time those places went away and were replaced by decreasingly good delis, junk stores and Albanian pizzerias.  At least these days there's Dosa Garden (which I'm not sure I could actually recommend enough).

The Hole  - below, unseen, a great pile of 

fallen bricks cover the ground

  Brooding over it all is the crumbling hulk of the old hospital.  For years there were plans to renovate it and turn it into some sort of condo complex.  When I, in an early incarnation, worked for the city, I tried to uncover the insane web of ownership of the place for a potential investor.  

   In the end, after looking at deeds, plans, transaction records and talking to the Commissioner for Finance it all came to nothing.  One man claimed to own it but, even in order to save himself millions of dollars in delinquent taxes, couldn't.  

   Ultimately the investor decided it was not worth dipping into the deep pool of garbage that was the old Staten Island Hospital site.  I guessed the place would just deteriorate until it got so bad that the city's office of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) would simply take possession of the complex and bulldoze it.

   The was thirteen years ago and the place was still salvageable but nothing happened.  Since then, even when the city had money, no North Shore or borough politician stepped forward to invest money to at least stabilize the place.  Then the roofs of the back buildings (where I worked on my dentistry merit badge) collapsed and HPD had to demolish them.

   And it got worse and worse.  There was fake landlord who rented out units in the converted new building.  Then there were squatters.  Eventually HPD did a better job of sealing the newer buildings up for good but the infirmary and other remaining old building (I think a nursing school) just crumbled.

  And now I'm proven correct.  HPD owns it and according to the Advance, they're going to raze it.

   For many of the past thirty-two years this (the hospital's new building that was converted to housing, though it was allegedly a real estate scam) has looked pretty much like this.  Through five City Council Members (the only one I consider blameless is Debi Rose because by the time she got elected the damage was done), three Borough Presidents, four mayors, three State Assembly members, two Staten Senators, and six members of the House of Representatives.  Many of them were North Shore born and raised.  

It's a little late.

Oh My

Tooling about the interweb this morning I discovered ANOTHER amazing NYC provided resource. It's the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives and has photos of what existed on the land prior to the construction of housing projects. It's also got mayoral archives for the LaGuardia, Wagner, Beame,and Koch administrations (where's Impelliteri?) but I'm more interested in the housing stuff at the moment.

Go to the NYC Housing Authority tab on the left and click it. Then put in the neighborhood you wish to look at and away you go. There's not a whole lot for Staten Island but what's there is worthwhile. It's also depressing to read that the neighborhood at the foot of Jersey Street filling the present footprint of the Richmond Terrace Houses was "a neighborhood considered for demolition long before the housing project was built"


Cleveland Street, New Broghton - part of the aforementioned places eyed for destruction. And it was.



Public housing is one of the greatest failures of the 20th century liberal statist dream for the future. The laudable goal of alleviating the horrendous conditions in many urban slums was murdered by construction monstrous human hives. Working, existing neighborhoods were eliminated and replaced with oversized unnatural constructions. That many are being torn down only attests to their failure a mere two or three generations after their completion.