The Beautiful Houses of Harrison Street

Between Water Street and Vanderbilt Avenue (think between Tappen Park and Bayley Seton Hospital) and between Bay Street and Tompkins Avenue, is a beautiful pocket of houses. Some are old and tumbling down while others are downright magnificent and stunningly maintained. The are was anchored once by the previously shown First Presbyterian Church (now owned by Mt. Sinai Baptist Church).



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This grand brick building is on the corner of Harrison and Quinn.



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Harrison between Quinn and Brownell, west side


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Harrison between Quinn and Brownell - east side


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Harrison and corner of Brownell, northeast side

Arlington

Facing east on Richmond Terrace about 400 feet from Holland Ave - 9/25/31


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Today

The houses are described as being next to the property of the Downey Shipbuilding Firm. They'd started in 1903 on Shooters Island and moved to Howland Hook in 1910. Most famously they built a yacht for the Kaiser and the three masted schooner Atlantic

A Series of Very Old Houses

Finding that little house on Port Richmond Avenue the other day was great. It reminded me that I've noticed several similar houses around the North Shore over the life of this site. So here are some of them. I can't tell you anything about them in most cases. There aren't CofO's online for most of them and the tax information on really old homes just says they were built in 1899, not the actual year of construction.



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Jackson Street, Stapleton


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Targee Street, Stapleton





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Tompkins Street, Stapleton

William Street

63 William Street - 1932 - The NYPL description states this home was owned by G.W. Rathburn in 1874.


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Today - In deepest Stapleton there remain beautiful 19th century homes maintained with loving care by their owners. I'd give my eyeteeth to be able to live in a house like this.

Port Richmond Avenue and Orange Avenue

620 Port Richmond Avenue - seems to have been built in 1899 (though I suspect before then)


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Today

Mariners Harbor Day

Mariner's Harbor (I haven't linked to wikipedia here because the entry seems racist and I suspect contains and urban legend) presents the best neighborhood to look around at for cool old pictures and surviving old buildings. It's been a heavy industrial area, was and remains a working class neighborhood with an always diverse populations, and at one time was the heart of the Island's wealthy oystering community.

Because of various economic and demographic prejudices the Harbor stayed fairly intact (in regards to its older housing stock) till fairly recently. The beautiful big Victorian houses on along the north end of South Avenue were only demolished in the last decade or so (and even now one or two survive, crowded all around by the townhouses wedged onto the lots of their now lost compatriots). Even a few of the old captains' mansions along Richmond Terrace have stumbled along into the 21st Century.

Whenever I'm stuck for something to put up on the site I've been able to just troll through the Mariner's Harbor pictures on the NYPL site and just post away. I hope you enjoy the pictures.

St. Clement's Church

St. Clement's Church - 1932


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Today - The original wooden church has been covered with stucco and it's Catholic congregation has been merged with that of St. Michael's over on Harbor Road. I'm not sure what's in the building at present.

47 Union Avenue

47 Union Avenue - 1932 - The NYPL information says a plaque over the door read "Horse Shoer and Blacksmith"


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Today

St. Michael's Church - Harbor Road and Brabant Street

Looking at St. Michael's Church at Harbor and Brabant from the west along Lockman Avenue - In the distance you can see PS 44.



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Today - Now called St. Clement's and St. Michael's. It's a poor quality googlemaps pictures but it's what I've got to work with at work.

The Post House

The Post House - 1900 - located on the south side of Richmond Terrace several hundred yards west of Holland Avenue. According to the NYPL it was built in 1691.


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Fernic Aircraft Corporation

3493 Richmond Terrace (northside) - 1931



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The Fernic Aircraft Corporation was founded by Romanian aviator George Fenric in 1929. He died in 1930 when he crashed at an air show on Curtiss Reynolds airfield in Chicago, Illinois, on October 22, 1930.

Mariner's Harbor - remants of a oysteriffic past

2846 Richmond Terrace - from 1924 - the homes of George and John Thompson, both in the oyster business


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18 South Avenue - at these times it belonged to M.A. Sinn. Prior to that it belonged to G. Hart

1924


1932


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c. 2007

C'mon. This is creepy

Be sure to go to the publisher's home page and check out some of their other books. I know there's got to be a Republican version of this sort of stuff and I'd find it just as creepy and wrongheaded.

Sad Ferries

As a native Staten Islander I grew up riding the ferry into Manhattan on a regular basis. Whenever relatives descended on us from New England we'd take them to the museums and shopping and all sorts of touristy jazz. I rode them with my father to see the three real Star Wars movies at the Loew's Astor. Later I took them to college and to work.

The names of those boats still echo in my head: the American Legion, the Gov. Lehman, and the Cornelius Kolf and the Pvt. Merrell. These last two were decommissioned in 1986 and converted into prison barges. Finally they were simply sold for scrap and ripped apart.

USS Mahan

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Built in 1936 in Mariner's Harbor, Staten Island. The USS Mahan, (DD-364) was the first of the seventy-five destroyers built at the Bethlehem Steel Works. She had a life of only eight years and seems to have served the Navy and the country well. There was even a model made of her.

Bethlehem Steel in Mariner's Harbor

There was a period when Staten Island was an industrial town. In Mariner's Harbor, Bethlehem Steel built destroyers during WW II. They closed up shop in the late fifties but several of the buildings still remain, converted to other uses or simply left to rot.


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The size of this shipyard was huge.


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Buildings on Davidson Street - rotted, rusting remnants


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Buildings at Andros and Richmond Terrace - the building on the extreme right's been converted into a mosque.

Cool Page - Staten Island Air Field

Just tooling around I found this cool looking site dedicated to lost or forgotten air fields and there's a page about State Island. Nifty.

Dom Deluise, RIP

Forever a sideman to Burt Reynolds and a minor player in things like "Sherlock Holmes Younger Brother", Dom Deluise was one funny, funny man. RIP

Here's the funniest clip from a not really good movie (but I did pay to see it at the old Hylan Movie Theater, I think) with him and Gilda Radner.

Lost Richmond Terrace

Last year in posting a picture of Richmond Terrace I realized that I was seeing a lost series of tenements and shops along it where it meets Jersey Street and the Richmond Terrace Projects are now located. There were also buildings along the water side of the Terrace now occupied by tall grass and bits of rubble.

Some later time I was asking my aunt about going to movie theaters when she was a kid and she remembered going to one down by Jersey Street with my grandmother in order to get something at some giveaway or another. Eventually taking her information and the various bits and pieces I'd come across this past year I determined that my aunt's theater was located on Richmond Terrace at the foot of Jersey Street.

A quick trip to the St. George Library and the WPA photo archive turned up the following pictures. From top to bottom there's the Star Theater and the shops to its left (west) along the Terrace circa 1939.

Here's what's there today -

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I'm sure there's a good reason for the loss of these buildings and the replacement of shops and homes with ant hive-like projects but all these years later I imagine the builders might have second thoughts.

A Belated Return - Missing Churches of Port Richmond

So last November and December I did several postings on the churches of Port Richmond. I chose the neighborhood because it's got the largest single collection of churches in any neighborhood on Staten Island that I'm aware of. The churches are also an interesting bunch of old, new and inbetween. Several have changed denomination and most have seen some sort of demographic shift as the borough and Port Richmond in particular have changed over the past forty years.

Unfortunately, I left a some out. One was recently shown as a "lost church" and the other I just forgot about at the time. Unfortunately, I also never posted a picture of the original building used by the Norwegian Lutherans (later Zion Lutheran) for their Sunday school before forming a full congregation and church and now I've discovered it's been torn down. Oh, well.


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Mt. Calvary Holy Church - Dubois Avenue (behind the Castleton Depot)
This was the original location of the El Bethel Assembly of God (that means Pentecostal) now located on Jewett by Victory Blvd.



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Our Lady of Mt. Carmel
Last month I put up a picture of this, the present church, and the pretty little Mediterranean one long gone a replace with the parish school's parking lot.