Lost Apartments of the North Shore: the Baltimore Flats

 

17-23 Victory Blvd, ca. 1940

When my parents got married, they lived at 115 Stuyvesant Place. It's where I lived my first three years. They bought a house on Cebra Avenue when their rent went up to $137 and exceeded a mortgage. As a baby, my mom and I went to all sorts of stores in St. George and Tompkinsville. I had memories of eating in a luncheonette at the corner of Victory and  Bay, but I couldn't remember anything specific about it except that my mom was friends with a waitress. It was only doing some research a few years ago that I discovered pictures of it.

The luncheonette was called DeFranco's and it was in the corner of a string of apartments called the Baltimore Flats. They're a beautiful example of late 19th-century buildings, designed by Edward A. Sargent. Unfortunately, after part of them caught fire in 1980, it wasn't long before the entire block of flats was demolished.

DeFranco's Luncheonette, 1969 - My mom and I could be inside 

Baltimore Flats on fire - 1980

the Baltimore Flats, 1980 - awaiting their fate

1989 - rubble

2021

P.S. 17 Hamilton Park - Burned and Gone

PS 17, a fairly standard looking school once stood on the heights overlooking York and Jersey Streets. The bit of woods visible in the right of the picture, behind the school, represent the edge of The Cedars, businessman Shipley Jones' estate.

The school burned down in 1977 and Parks began the process of acquiring the land from the Board of Education in order to build what's now called Skyline Park. It's a great place and every time our nephews visit we try to get there at least once.

1874 Map - a school existed on the site but it's footprint differs from the photo/post card, implying it was a different, older facility.

1917 Map - That's the building in the pictures. The entrance faced Fairview Avenue (now Harvard). I wish there was a photo from a further away location so there'd be a sense of how the school sat on the land.

The streets today - Here's a shot up the little piece of Arnold off York. The school was on the rise to the right.

Staten Island Ferry

The Staten Island Ferry has its roots in private sailing vessels used to connect the island to the rest of the region going back to colonial days. In the early 19th century, Daniel Tompkins established the Richmond Turnpike Company in a effort to develop the town of Tompkinsville on the North Shore of Staten Island. He started a commercial service that later introduced the first motorized steam ship in 1817. This line was later bought by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Eventually he sold his ferry service to his brother and finally it ended up in the hands of the B & O Railroad. Following a major disaster when the ferry Westfield exploded in 1871 (killing nearly 100) and the Northfield being sunk in 1901 (with 5 dead) the city seized control of the Staten Island Ferry system.

Since the city took over it's been nothing but unicorns and butterflies. Well, not really. There have been collisions, seawall rammings, and, most notably, the 2003 dock collision that left eleven dead, and crippling several. Miraculously, though the pilot went to jail but the captain, though responsible, escaped jail time, essentially because the Dept. of Transportation had never enforced its own guidelines about how a ferry should be crewed during docking. As usual with the Bloomberg administration, no real high ranking employees of the department responsible for the ferry's mismanagement were even disciplined (see FDNY and the Deutsche Bank fire).

As a Staten Islander the ferry has been a major part of my life since I was very small. Only in the past seven years have I stopped riding it with any sort of regularity. Before that, like tens of thousands of other Islanders, I rode it ten to twelve times a week. It formed a crucial part of my memories of childhood trips to museums, plays and shopping trips. As I grew up it became part of my daily school and work trips.

The new terminal, stark and silvery stands in tremendous contrast to the ugly functional industrial style terminal I grew up with and in even greater contrast to the beautiful and ornate one built by Carrere and Hastings. That one burned down in 1946.



From the pictures I've been able to obtain it was clearly beautiful. I sort of wish my memories were of that lost edifice instead of the ugly, bolt covered thing that too often reeked of urine and pigeon droppings.