Cool SIRT (Staten Island Rapid Transit) links

When I was a kid, my mom would take me and my sister to New Dorp to go shopping or in the summer see a Disney matinee at the Lane Movie Theater. Since we didn't drive we'd catch the old 103 bus in front of Trinity Lutheran Church at the foot of Cebra Avenue or we'd walk down and catch the train in Stapleton. Mostly she opted for the convenience of the bus but I remember plenty of rides on the old trains with wicker seats and conductors collecting fares.

When I was older my friends and I took to long, exploratory hikes around the North Shore. One of the coolest ones took us along the abandoned overpasses of the South Beach rail line. Now they've been pulled down and the old right-of-ways have been filled with houses.

So here are some pictures from several different sites. All are worth spending some time with and any native Islander should have some memories tugged by some of them.



Third Rail's SIRT issue

Forgotten New York - SIRT photos

Joe's SIRT photos

Someone else's cool SIRT photos

New Link

There's a new link on the page. It's for the NYPL's "Staten Island on the Web" section. I forgot to put it up last time so here it is. There's lots of fun stuff to be found. I was particularly looking for photos of the Bethlehem Ship Yards in Mariner's Harbor building destroyers during WW II but they're gone. Someday, maybe, I'll find them again and put them up.

Postcards by Grimshaw

So I found out about the postcards. All I had to do was type "W.J. Grimshaw" and postcards into google and it took me to the Grimshaw family page. I always feel extra stupid when it takes me a week to actually do the five seconds of work needed to solve a problem or answer a question.

William Grimshaw was born on October 14, 1830 in Accrington, Lancashire and emigrated to the U.S. in about 1847. After living for a brief time in Pennsylvania, he moved to Bordentown, New Jersey where he apparently married Emily Brown in 1853. After living there for more than 20 years, the family relocated to Staten Island in 1873, where William was engaged as a carpenter for the remainder of his life. William and Emily had at least four children -- William J., Frank P., Lamar C., and Margaret Grimshaw. William died in 1905 and Emily passed away in 1908. William's oldest son, William J., operated a stationery and confectionery business that became later focused on selling ice cream when it was first introduced.

Now Mr. Grimshaw and his son's postcards are collected for our pleasure on the NYPL's Digital Collection pages. I've said it before, check them out.

Richmond Terrace Apartments - the present

So here's the other building shown in the postcards posting. If the Prospect Gables have seen better days, then this place REALLY has seen better days.

It sits at the foot of York Avenue and Richmond Terrace. I'd wager that the postcard was created back when the Jersey Street area was still a thriving working class commercial strip for the surrounding homes on Westervelt and York. There was at least one synagogue, a Polish Catholic church and all manner of shops. There was a public school, PS 17, and supermarkets.

When I was a boy the area was already on the way down. The A&P closed and many of the old tenements were abandoned and sank into ruin. In the later 70's the school burned down (though there was already another school nearby). The Richmond Terrace Public Houses had gone from being a diverse working class bastion to a place where the hardworking tenants were force to live cheek by jowl with individuals of the least reputable sort.

Now the area has achieved a stasis. In the early 80's I watched several blocks of old building be torn down and replaced with little attached homes. The commercial strip of Jersey Street between Pauw Street and Castleton Avenue struggles on. Working class families have reclaimed many of the older homes on the streets branching off Jersey and there's been a stabilizing effect on the whole neighborhood. Despite all that, the Jersey Street environs are still a marginal place with more crime than much of the rest fo the Island and general shabbiness that never seems to go away.

Later criminals began preying on the neighborhood and

Prospect Gables Redux

Located only a few houses and across the street from the albatross that is the home I purchased two years ago and still can't live in, the Prospect Gables have clearly fallen down on their uppers. I feel like I remember seeing the Gables with their fanciful roof top adornments still intact but I could have taken crazy pills. You can clearly see the once painted patterns used to create the fake Tudor effect in the postcard picture. The old concrete stanchions are still visible at the bottom left of the picture. The lower story windows are bricked up today, probably a reminder of the neighborhood's less criminally averese days.

I still am puzzled by the postcard's existence but I'm thankful for it. These postcards (and the NYPL's easily accessible collection) will give me things to write about whenever I run out of my own trite ideas.

Postcard from New Brighton

These were real postcards printed at some distant time in Staten Island's past. Both building still exist (with modern pictures forthoming) and have suffered considerable aesthetic deterioration and their blocks have tumbled down the economic ladder a few rungs. There also continues to be no reason for the postcards to exist. Perhaps I can do little research on the history of postcards of such everyday domiciles. I mean it's cool to be able to send a painted picture of your house to friends and family but it just doesn' make any sense.

New Links

I added a bunch of new links today. The first two are the most valuable but all have good things contained within.


Forgotten New York is one of the coolest sites for pictures of the five boroughs bar none. It's creator, Kevin Walsh, has been doing hist site for ten years and recently he wrote a book called "Forgotten New York". Go to the "Street Scenes" section and check out the Staten Island articles. The man's collected some amazing things and gathered good information.

The New York Public Library Digital Collections is a great picture resource. Just enter what you'd like to see in the search and go for it. Unfortunately there's not a lot of good information attached to the pictures. Sometimes there's a note scribble onto the image or there's a caption indicating date or location but more often than not it's all a little vague.

The last two sites are similar to my own. They're personal sites with things of special interest to their creators. Nonetheless, for the interested Staten Islander they do provide a wealth of interesting pictures from across the decades. They also have their own sets of links to other Staten Island biased sites. Check them out and if you find fun sites on your own, let me know and I'll put up a link.

Old Church Building

It's still a beautiful neo-Gothic structure. There's some minor changes (the old steeple spires are missing (which is not visible in my mediocre picture) and there are windows over the bell openings), but it's still the same building from the postcard. Reading about Zion's history from there website, I discovered the building was opened in 1921. The congregation had started as a simple Norwegian Sunday school meeting in a building on Avenue B (which was just torn down) and had finally reached the point they could afford to erect a real church. Then a mere forty-three years later they moved on to the lifeless structure on Watchogue Road.

Zion Lutheran Church

I guess that Zion Lutheran moved to its present location in Westerleigh from Port Richmond in the mid sixties because they wanted a larger building and many of its parishoners had moved to that neighborhood. Whatever the reasons, who'd want to trade this beautiful gothic building for this lifeless example of modern architecture?

The old Scandinavian Lutheran Church is now St. Philip's Baptist Church and appears to be maintained in good condition. It is one of several churches in the area and one of the two directly along the park that once formed the heart of one of Port Richmond's nicer residential sections. I forgot to get a picture of the building's present condition (because I'm a dope) but I'll put that up next.

Same House - Different Picture

So here's what the house looks like today. It's a pretty little house that's been kept up rather well. You can see that the clapboard sheathing has been replaced with wider boards and the decorative trim at the top of the left hand chimney is gone but it's still a splendid reminded or Staten Island's long ago Dutch settlement.

Van Santvoord House

This cool little brick and wood house sits at the bend in Richmond Terrace at the foot of Pelton Avenue. I'll post a picture of the house at it looks today. It's still beautiful. Now, unfortunately, it's been chopped up into multi-family. What are you gonna do. At least it's still there.

Staten Island

I love Staten Island. If you know me that probably doesn't come as any sort of a surprise, but I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else bored enough to be reading this. I can't think of leaving Staten Island. I know, I know. Staten Island's a provincial, conservative town with stupid, classless people.

First, with almost half a million people it's only as provincial as you want it to be. Whatever cultural attractions we lack are simply in another borough, that is, in a different part of the city Staten Island belongs to.

Secondly, it is conservative. People who own homes, worry about earning enough money and sending the kids to school usally don't have the luxury or time to not be fairly conservative. Suits me fine.

Finally, they're really no less classy than any bohemian wannabe in Manahattan or Brooklyn. Look, we live in a pretty tacky society in general these days. For every NASCAR or wrestling fan there's some hipster going to a pompous show at PS 1. We live in a day of cheap spectacle and crazy social antipathies. If you like junk I don't it must be tasteless.

Coming on to Staten Island from any of the bridges or the ferry can still take my breath away. Masonry towers and old wooden houses brek through a seemingly endless green cover of sycamores, oaks and maples. The same vantage point shows the Island as a black space floating in front of me bound together by the yellow-orange street lights and rushing bands of car lights. I'm still moved when I look out over the borough from the crest of one of our bridges and I get just a bit excited when I can pick out a house I know between the leaves and branches that seem to be ready to smother it.

I like its houses and I like its people, even the ones I can't stand on a day to day basis. That's probably because I know I'm a bit of a jerk and I only feel superior because they don't like what I like or act just like me. I mean there's just no rational foundation for me feeling I'm any better than anybody I meet on the street and when I stop looking down my nose long enough I remember that and I can tell myself to shut the heck up.

I'm not foolish enough to think I'm anything but a product of this borough and I know I'm not "better" than the vast majority of them. Just because I think I'm smarter than so many of my fellow Staten Islanders doesn't make it even occasionally true. Everyone likes to think they're smarter or cooler than everyone around them (and everyone knows how cool I am).

These are the people I've known all my life and will probably know till the day I die. They have the same concerns for how the Island evolves and grows in the future that I do. If we don't agree on precisely how things turn out we at least all know what's important to think about.

If I was to go anywhere else I'd feel unmoored and set loose in a very discomfomrting way. It happened during my years in Albany (admittedly a small, anti-cosmopolitan outpost in New York's northlands) and I suspect it would happen wherever I moved to.

I love the tree covered hills and the evolving prairies growing on the remnants of the Fresh Kills Landfill. I love our French Provincial Borough Hall and the abandoned derelict Seaview TB hospital. I love the handful of ancient colonial homes scattered around the North Shore and old Victorian homes vainly struggling against development in Tottenville.

I'm going to start posting pictures from the Island throughout time. Some I'll snag from books and websites while the others I take with my handy little digital camera. If you have any ideas or comments please feel free to leave them and I'll see what I can do.

What I've Read

Mignola/Arcudi - BPRD: The Universal Machine
De Hartog, Jan - The Peacable Kingdom
Marshall, William L. - Yellowthread Street
Cotterill, Colin - The Coroner's Lunch
Kirk, Russell - Watcher at the Strait Gate
Rowling, J.K. - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
McWhorter, John - Authentically Black
Wangerin, Walter - The Book of the Dun Cow
McCarthy, Cormac - No Country for Old Men
Marshall, Michael - The Intruders
Bellavia, David - House to House
Pratchett, Terry - Making Money
Cook, Glen - The Fire in His Hands
Cook, Glen - With Mercy Toward None
Lindsay, Jeff - Darkly Devoted Dexter
Lindsay, Jeff - Dexter in the Dark
Cook, Glen - A Shadow of All Night Falling
Shlaes, Amity - The Forgotten Man
Erikson, Steven - Gardens of the Moon
King, Stephen - On Writing
Erikson, Steven - Deadhouse Gates
Dalrymple, Theodore - Our Culture, or What's Left of It
Long, Jeff - Deeper
Barlough, Jeffrey - Bertram of Butter Cross
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Coady, Roxanne, ed. - The Book That Changed My Life
Lermontov, Mikhail - A Hero for Our Times
Dostoevsky, Feodor - Crime and Punishment
Reeve, Philip - Larklight

A little bit of everything; non-fiction, scifi, fantasy, crime, etc. Some were very good (House to House) and some were very (very, very) bad (The Intruders and Harry Potter).

Catching Up

So I haven't written anything on this useless blog in several months. for what it's worth, since July, I've read 28 books and gotten a job. The latter had a lot to do with making the former possible.
My job is a beautiful post at the College of Staten Island. I'm employed as a college assistant and I spend my days hooking up A-V equipment for professors and getting movies off the racks for students to watch. Much of my day is spent sitting at the front desk answering phones or just waiting for my next scheduled delivery. This gives me some time to read. Enough time that I've been able to get myself back on track to the sort of scale of reading I used to do.
The job is actually very cool. My bosses are decent and, unlike some I've had in the past, look out for the staff. My coworkers are a great assortment of students and retirees. Both are taking advantage of the job's great benefits package and comfortable working conditions.
If I'm not sounding to emotional one way or the other it's because it's just a nice job that I don't dislike going to and it gives me money, healthcare and pay. At this point I don't really want to ask for more out of a job.

"Freedomland" - Richard Price

While not a sequel to "Clockers", "Freedomland", from 1998, is set in Richard Price's fictional New Jersey cities of Dempsy and Gannon. Respectively they're stand-ins for Jersey City and Bayonne with fictional room to spare.

There's still crime and drugs on the streets around the Armstrong Projects in Dempsy and their mostly black tenants but it's not like the crack era depicted in the "Clockers". In fact it's barely alluded to in "Freedomland". In the first book, black-white interaction seemed to be limited to white cops and junkies and teenage black crack dealers. flying squads of narcotics cops are constanly storming the parks and playgrounds in "Clockers" rounding up everyone they feel like. By the era of "Freedomland" that doesn't seem to be the norm anymore. The cops, instead, now exist to establish a cordon sanitaire around the projects and keep blacks out of Gannon.

"Freedomland" opens with a wounded white woman, Brenda Martin, wondering through the Armstrong Houses and into the local emergency room where she says she's just been carjacked by a black man. Eventually she also lets the interviewing detective know her four year old son, Cody, was in the back seat of her stolen car. From the moment that information is relayed to police headquarters the two cities, white Gannon and heavily black and brown Dempsy, begin moving towards an explosion in slow motion.

The inevitable disaster, and Price makes it clear from the beginning that it is inevitable, is seen through the eyes of Det. Lorenzo Council and Jesse Haus, a reporter for the Dempsy evening paper. Council is older and black and lives for the job. His range is the Armstrong Houses and he will do whatever he needs to keep things calm, help those in need and ensure that deceny is given a chance and the tenants are treated with respect. Haus is young and white, the child of communist party parents who still live in projects because moving out when they turned black would have been a racist act in their eyes. Both are drawn to Brenda by their job and become entangled in her story.

While both Council and Haus suspect that Brenda isn't telling the whole story they and the rest of the city's law enforcement apparatus and regional media have to proceed on the information at hand. Soon there is a blockade around the Armstrong Houses, long outstanding minor warrants being enforced and violent roustings being conducted. There are no surprises in the book and I think that's one of Price's goals.

We all know that there's crime in the projects, that there are struggling working people there and that most of us (by which I mean middle class educated white folks) couldn't care less.

When a cute little white kid goes missing it's bound to be the lead news story. When a cute little black kid goes missing it's going to be on a middle page of the paper. There's just too much history to point to dismiss that. It's not the cops' fault, but it is the law enforcement hierarchy and media's fault.

We live in a country where we willingly tolerate cities becoming hollowed out shells and abandoned many of the people left there when our parents and grandparents moved to the suburbs. As long as the police kept the criminals in those cities and away from our nice streets we didn't care. When moments arises like the book's plot we want an immediate military style crackdown. At some point there are bound to be explosions.

As the truth is teased out by Council, Haus and group of semi-professional missing child finders Dempsy and Gannon's clash slowly builds from a series of skirmishes to full dress battle. Over a few days and nights years of black-white tension come to what Price portrays as foregone conclusion.

While "Clockers" raced to its end, "Freedomland" moves with at a funereal pace. The book is packed (and padded) with incident and incidental characters. There's just too much. Price's prose is soul wrenching at times but it's not enough to overcome the book's ridiculous length. When the story's come to its end there's still one hundred more pages to go. Since there's no mystery he needs to give his readers more than endless repetitions of the same points and that's what the book does.

Not since "Bleak House" have I taken this long to read a book. It's not a bad book and Price's book is about things we don't talk and scream about till something's done about them. It's about the rage and devastation that lives on the periphery of our own comfortable lives and it's a story told with appropriate rage. It just doesn't have to be so long.

"Clockers" - Robert Price

One of the authors praised by Stanley Crouch in "the Artificial White Man" for examing America and race in depth, is Richard Price. Actually, he writes about Tom Wolfe, whom he praises, giving a speech in which he extolls Price for moving into Jersey City for over a year and striving to understand the place down to its sinews and guts and then producing the novel "Clockers".

Published in 1992, "Clockers" is about race, murder and drugs in Jersey City (called Dempsy in the book) in the early nineties. We see the violence and devastation through the eyes of 19-year old, ulcer ridden dealer Strike and just shy of retirement homicide detective Rocco Klein. Both are men at their limits of mental endurance and achingly striving to understand how they managed to lose control of their lives and how can they climb out of the pits they dug themselves.

Strike and Rocco have grown up, like all of us, with strongly held notions of how the world works. For years nothing they've encountered has discouraged their prejudices. When a fast food manager is murdered and it's discovered he's dealing from the restaurant things begin spinning out of control for Strike and Rocco become obsessed to the point of possibly screwing up his looming retirement.

Strike's brother, a church-going, hard working man who always does the right thing confesses to the murder. Strike can't believe his brother did it and neither can Rocco. Strike tries to find out what happened in hopes of saving his brother. Rocco too disbelieves the confession, instead believing in Strike's guilt. As the two fight their way through the streets and bureaucracy of Dempsy to discover some sort of truth we're given a deep tour of economic despair, drug abuse, racial hatred and simple police callousness.

Price writes gorgeous prose (at time a little too so) that sounds believable even when coming from dangerous thugs. Strike's boss, the mid level dealer, Rodney Little, with dreams of legitimacy while Faginishly building new teams of juvenile dealers to move his product, is one of the most disturbing villains encountered in recent realistic fiction. Rodney's manipulation of Strike is Mephistophelean.

"Clockers" exposes the war on drugs as a failure and the urban decay that robs too many American's of any sort of hope and ultimately the rest of the country of the contributions of too many of its citizens trapped in the rotten hulks of long lost cities.

"The Thanatos Syndrome" - Walker Percy

I was looking up some background on the late historian Shelby Foote and found a lote of references to his friendship with another Southern writer, Walker Percy. From there I decided to check out Walker Percy. I found a few articles and interviews with Percy that made me want to give his books a whirl. The theme he explored until his death was the creep of relativism and how it natuarally undermines a larger, societal morality.


"The Thanatos Syndrome" takes that theme to its darkest conclusion and tries to pull it apart and expose the snake coiled around its heart. At what point does abortion lead to proactive euthanasia of the disabled and elderly? When does the belief that mankind is perfectible lead to re-education camps and ultimately the ovens?

Percy's hero Dr. Tom More, a psychiatrist recently released from prison and returned to his old home in Louisiana. Beset by family problems, diminished faith and a general seething rage at the world around him he quickly finds out things seem to be getting horribly strange in his town. People are emotionally flat but sexually aggressive. Some of the same people are suddenly possessed of great calculating ability and utter geographical recall. There are also signs of child molestation at his children's private school.

Soon More realizes that his town is the center of some sort of experiment being conducted to improve mankind. If it all recalls some seventies medical thriller (like Coma, just not as boring) that was exactly Percy's goal. He hoped he could bring the issues that moved him most by deliberately creating a blockbuster style thriller. He almost succeeded.

Parts of the book are too dry and pendantic which is a shame. Percy's ideas are important and worth examinating but a times the book just slips into a little too slow a gear. Is mankind perfectible? As a Christian I of course don't think so and that's the basis of Percy's argument. He makes a strong case for what are seemingly logical outcomes from the dismissal of any sort of greater morality from human interaction. What happens when man takes it on himself to try to reform man? What doors are opened and how dark a place do they lead to?

Maybe a non-fiction work would have been bettered suited to Percy's examination of the questions he wanted raised. Unfortunately he tried to write a thriller and his skill just didn't meet the task he set himself. The action sequences are sloppy and confusing. The dialogue is too long and drawn out to be part of a potboiler and is overwritten for where it's placed.

I haven't read anything else by Percy yet but I suspect that the thriller just wasn't something he'd schooled himself in well enough to actually write a really good one. I've got some of his other books and "The Moviegoer" is always showing up on lists as one of the most important American books of the last century so I sort of feel obligated to give it a try someday.

"The Artificial White Man" - Stanley Crouch

"The Artificial White Man" is Stanley Crouch's most recent collection of essays on all things American, artistic and political. Crouch is a curmudgeonly New York writer that I first encountered twenty years ago in his arts writing for the Village Voice. I'd never read anyone who combined indignation, rage and what seemed like a heavy dose of common sense before. My own views were only starting to coalesce into traditional conservatism I tend to favor these days and finding a liberal who wasn't simply vomiting up the standard liberal lines on the arts and culture was enlightening.

I admit I also loved his thick style awash in seemingly endless trains of adjectives. Again, I'd never read a style like Crouch's up till then. I even got a subscription to the New Republic because he was listed as an associate editor at the time. Unfortunately he never wrote a piece for it during the years I got it.

Over the years as my reading scope widened I saw the verbal bloat that Crouch suffers from. I also realized that too often his essays are limited by his pugnacity and strong prejudices. I still enojyed his newspaper columns but I didn't buy his novel when it came out.

So why did I buy "The Artificial White Man"? I've come to the conclusion that I love essays. I like their succinctness and tight focus. Too much non-fiction I encounter is crushed down with minutiae that I don't care about and I can barely imagine the authors even have regards for.

I started reading the Atlantic Monthly because it features some of the best non-fiction writing I'm aware of. People like Christopher Hitchens and Sandra Tsing Loh are regular contributors. Robert Kaplan, Mark Bowden and all sorts of amazing authors regularly write great dispatches on the wars.

That's a long way of saying I'll always grab a book of essays that looks interesting when I'm in need of something new to read. Crouch's book seemed to fit the bill.

The book is a mishmash of determinedly provacative essays on white justifications and fetishizations of black social patholgies, the unwillingness of American writers to confront race (as well as anything outside of their immediate social zone) and paeans to some artists who happen to do all the things Crouch wants them to.

Can you tell I thought the book was a little too much? I mean it only cost me about $13 (thank you little beige Barnes&Noble member card - absolutely worth the $25 per annum if you buy more than three of four books a year) and he does have an interesting take on things. Race is still the monster underpinning and undermining so much of what goes on in this country these days and we don't really discuss it.

"Hostage" - Robert Crais

I'm a pretty solid Bruce Willis fan and will check out most movies with him (okay, I will not see "Perfect Stranger") and one night I stayed up and watched "Hostage". There's not all that much to it but it's an entertaining enough hour and a half.

Sometime later Otto Penzler strongly recommended the original book and wrote pretty emphatically that its author, Robert Crais, is one of the best hard boiled writers around. So, ever the ready fool, I took Penzler's advice and rushed out and found a copy in the increasingly disorganized stacks of books at the Barrett Book Trader.

Yeah, well, I know Penzler's one of the most knowledgable fellows around when it comes to the history of crime and mystery writing. I love his weekly column in the New York City Sun and would actually pay to own them in a bound collection someday. I don't, however, think I'll fork over money for another book he pushes quite so quickly anymore.

"Hostage" is pretty much, well, it is entirely nothing special. Grizzled hostage negotiator burns out and moves out of LA and becomes the chief of a small town police force. A group of young punks invade a house and unintentionally take a mob accountant and his kids hostage (work that title). When the mob gets wind they force our hero to devise a way to get their records out of the house without any one finding out.

The book reads like a slick Hollywood treatment from the start and reeks of high concept and no originality. There isn't a character or a situation that doesn't feel old and tired. The villains might as well be twirling long mustaches. Crais needed to find a way to hide the neon "I'M THE VILLAIN" signs hanging about their necks.

No, this is not a good book for even whiling away mass transit time or laundry time or any sort of time you have to waste on potboilers. There's plenty of good crappy thrillers out there (can you say Preston and Child?) to spend money on instead of "Hostage"

"The Grave Tattoo" - Val McDermid

Val McDermid's the author of the "Wire in the Blood" series of serial killer books that I haven't read but I have watched a lot of the BBC movies based on them. They were sort of okay. Pretty much run of the mill in these days of CSI and its tiresome ilk.

"The Grave Tattoo" chronicles the adventures of a low level Wordsworth academic searching for the connection between a two century old tattooed corpse in an English bog, Fletcher Christian of HMS Bounty fame, and William Wordsworth, long winded, now deceased, poet laureate of England.

The reviews made the book sound pretty cool, I swear it. But it wasn't. McDermid threw in so much ancilliary crap (such as a clever mixed race tough girl with a penchant for poetry, conniving gay male friends, untrustworthy ex-boyfriends and jealous brothers) that none of it really helped move the story along and kept it from ever really achieving any sort of depth. In the end it felt like a sort of politically correct Agatha Christie singleton with none of the true cleverness the old dame brought to a mystery.