The Forgotten Borough

I added a new link on the "Historical Stuff" section called "The Forgotten Borough". I'd come across the site in it's earlier "Prodigal Borough" version and was happy to find the new version. It's a beautiful site with all sorts of very valuable links to sites about the arts, parks, and real estate (and plenty of other stuff too). Primarily it provides a great perspective about the North Shore by an immigrant from Manhattan (and parts beyond originally). She loves the communities, the look, and the buildings.
I love the North Shore for many reasons, but mostly, I suspect, because it's where I grew up and it forms the background for most of my memories and experiences. I was born in the ruined hospital looming at the head of Cebra Avenue and I almost burned down the woods behind my between Cebra and Creston Place. We shopped in Stapleton every week and I ate fish filet sandwiches at the Woolworth's counter. I practically lived in the Stapleton Library from age 5 to age 18. I went to school at PS 16, Trinity Lutheran (and was baptized and confirmed there) and Curtis High School (the same place my mom and her three sisters graduated from).
As I get older and most of my childhood friends (most of the people I'm friends with now have lived here their whole lives but few of them were part of my life before the age of fifteen) have left the Island and my parents have died I guess I'm trying to reinforce the images of my past by constantly examining and studying the place where I've lived most of my 43 years. It's like I'll lose parts of my memories if I don't reinforce them by studying them to death.
I appreciate everyone who sticks around for the ride and I hope to actually get off my backside and get some better things up here this year (and I hope the preceding paragraphs don't sound too maudlin). I need to get my scanner fixed, I need to get back to the St. George Library for more WPA photos, and I need to maybe get a better camera to get better pictures of my own (I mean how much can I steal from NYPL's collection?) and I need to do this more regularly.

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.