Richmond Terrace as Classical Playground

Once upon a time, when Staten Island was a playground for the more than moderately wealthy, stately homes and near palaces graced the county. One notable location was Richmond Terrace, particularly between the ferry terminal and Westervelt Avenue. The only remaining evidence of this grand period is the weed shrouded Pavillion catering hall on the corner of Westervelt and the Terrace.
Once several ornate, classically columned and decorated homes graced Richmond Terrace looking northward across the bay towards New Jersey and Manhattan. Staten Island actually had a elegance that seems utterly alien to its car jammed streets and too-small townhouses.
By the early decades of the last century these homes, like the great mansions of the Hendersons, Vanderbilts and Lows were being demolished and their land subdivided. I'm not sure when these building met their ultimate fates but by 1928 the property of 386 and 396 Richmond Terrace is clearly overgrown, the first is for sale and both are in disrepair. I don't know where these wealthy families went or what became of them (whence the Pendletons, Barretts, Hendersons and Jewetts?) but at some point these homes and similarly scaled ones across the North Shore seem to have become burdensome or out of date and they left them to decay and the wrecker's ball.



Democratic Party Clubhouse - Now the site of St. Peter's Girls' School


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386 and 396 Richmond Terrace - between St. Peter's Place and Westervelt Avenue - 5/2/1928 - The former is listed on 1917 maps as the "West Day and Evening School" and prior to 1907 belonged to the Pendleton family. The latter belonged to the Wilkinson family. It's hard to tell without zooming in on the original digital photo but the school building has a sign indicating it's for sale.




396 Richmond Terrace - 5/2/1928 -


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404 Richmond Terrace - southeast corner of Westervelt - 5/2/1928 - In 1907 it belonged to one George J. Greenfield, and between 1874 and 1898 the Wilkinson's owned it. Much later it became the Pavillion, a catering hall where my aunt and uncle had their 25th anniversary party.



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Coolest New Toy

I never see my the comments people make when they make them only noticing them weeks after the fact. Well, a Dave left me information about a NYC website called City Map. Using the clever sliding bar you can see aerials maps of the city from 1924, 1996, 2006 and 2008. You can slide back and forth switching the pictures. It's awesome.
All the big houses I've written about (Ward Mansion, etc.) are present in gloriously blurry black and white. It's the coolest thing I've been shown in ages. Have fun!

Lost West New Brighton

Sorry my only posts lately haven't been particularly Staten Islandy, but, hey, what can I tell you?
I've written about, and posted about, the lost West New Brighton neighborhood now squatted on by the West Brighton Houses. It was several blocks of homes, a church (the original St. Benedicta), and was served by theaters and stores along Broadway and Castleton Avenue. Nearby where the factories and dockyards where the people made their livings. It must have been something until the City decided packing thousands of people in like ants was a better alternative than small tenements and a vibrant neighborhood.




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Shiloh AME Zion Church, Henderson Avenue between Broadway and Richmond Street (no longer exists) June 29, 1931 - This pretty little wooden church has been long replaced with a larger brick one.




St.Benedicata, northwest corner of Staten and Market Streets, August 7, 1930. The intersection no longer exists.


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St. Benedicata stood on the ground behind the seniors apartments on Broadway.



PS 18, northeast corner of Market Street - March 24, 1930


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This beautiful, ornate structure was torn down and replaced with a fairly generic box of brick and cement a block to the north. The cigar store in the pictures left was where the Broadway senior houses shown above are now located.





North side of Richmond Terrace west of Alaska Street, November 4, 1931


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These two buildings (found at the left of the 1931 picture)are the sole survivors from the five originally shown. I'm sure a featureless brick box (the one on the right) is a much better neighbor that stores with apartments overhead.

D & D - an old school fan's dream come true

I was introduced to the original pamphlet-style D & D rules by Densel E. in the Boy Scouts back in 1977 or so. He had Blackmoor, Greyhawk, Chainmail, the whole bunch. I was hooked. Later me and the Neighborhood started playing D & D (which a bunch of us got for Christmas) and eventually moved on to Advanced D & D. I remember walking to and from Smilin' Sunny's on Forest Avenue to buy my copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Within a few years we had stopped playing D & D and moved on to other RPGs. We didn't like the class or combat systems in D & D. In DragonQuest and later in the Fantasy Hero we found better systems (if more complicated). Still, D & D was the first and definitely the one where the experiences, the fun and inventiveness were the best.


I recently was directed to a very cool fantast RPG site called Grognardia. Apparently, over the past few years a movement of "old school RPG" players has grown up. These people long for the simpler days when the first started playing and everything was fresh and very (very) uncommercial.

They remember and long for the days when the art was done by friends of the creators and the text type in rulebooks an modules was out of place. They remember umber hulks and displacer beasts fondly. The campaign worlds were the ones made up at night on pages of graph paper and with colored pencils. Dungeons ofter existed for no reason (except to garner treasure and magic items) in ridiculous locations. There were no endless reams of derivative and poorly written novels or an unending supply of modules set in somebody else's universe. Halcyon days.

As nostalgia overcame me I decided to see if I could download any of the old module covers just to see what I remembered. What I found was pure gold as they say (no, I don't really know where). Somebody posted EVERY old school TSR product. Every terrible Erol Otus picture, every superhero influence Jeff Dee picture. Every beautiful multicolored cover with sword wielding paladins, orcs and axe swinging dwarfs.





For about fifteen or sixteen years I played games on many weekends and countless days in the summer. Those were great times I can never go back to but I would never want to give up.

Anger is an energy (one of those occassional political posts)

Gutfeld makes me laugh and he's right on target. I feel like I've taken crazy pills when Paul Krugman gets worked up over anti-Pelosi literature but earlier wrote that folks should hang Sen. Lieberman in effigy. I worked for NYC City Hall in the last years of Giuliani and constantly saw posters of him as Hitler (which was later done to Bush Jr.).

I'm not against all that sort of juvenile hyperbolic placard waving stuff. If you want to parade around with pictures of your enemy in Nazi garb and expose your dumbocity to the world, go for it. Just don't get your panties all in a twist when the other side does equivalent stuff.

And, NO, I'm not down with rock throwing, fires or going to some dimwitted politician's private home where his family's at. Though, again, seems I recall that was done to McCain, Rove and Wall Street people.

The Lost Iron Tower of Howard Avenue

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Like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard, this tall cylinder can been seen peeking out from behind the trees on Howard Avenue next to St. John's. Of course when I was younger my friends and I decided we had to make an effort to penetrate the dense woods and find out what it was.
Well, as you can sort of see, security's pretty lax and the woods aren't really that thick. We simply slipped through a gap in the fence and walked up to the metal column. I guess it's about eight or ninety feet high. There's not really much going on with it. There was an oval hole in the side that we were able to look into and see the great nothing inside and the sky through the open top above. And that was it. We went home and never bothered going back.





Apparently it's just a DEP Water Department water tower. The old photo's from 1937.

Vale Snowden

I wish I had a picture of Elizabeth Snowden Nichols' home. Named Vale Snowden, it stood on the lower southern slope of Grymes Hill.

I found this excerpt about it from "The History and legend of Howard Avenue and the Serpentine Road, Grymes Hill, Staten Island" by C.G. Hine on the Internet Archive:


"Vale Snowden", which corners on the
Clove road, is the home of Mrs. William
Snowden Nichols. The house was erected
by Satterthwaite about 1852-1854 and was
purchased by Mr. Nichols in 1864. The
architect was James Renwick, mentioned in
connection with the Davis place, and the
grounds were laid out by Frederick Law
Olmstead.

Mrs. Nichols tells me that General Green,
one time minister to Russia, and who was
associated with Mr. Olmstead in the laying
out of Central Park, once said that Mr. Olm-
stead and Mr. Satterthwaite were friends and
that the former gained a large part of his
practical knowledge as a landscape architect
in the laying out of this place. Originally it
was a most unpromising spot, a mass of
soapstone (serpentine), and it required the
work of eight yoke of oxen almost a year to
haul sufficient earth from the top of the hill
to make a foundation for the garden.

A well which is situated almost in front
of the house and very near the road was, ac-
cording to local tradition, a regular stopping
place for the Philadelphia stages. Mrs.
Nichols does not know anything more than
that this statement came from Mr. Satter-
thwait. It is possible that there may have
been an inn on the Little Clove road here,
but if so there does not appear to be any
record concerning it.

^ Mrs. Nichols recalls that the Richmond
County Country Club grew out of an in-
formal riding and driving club which used
this place as a rendezvous, as the younger
members of her family took a lively interest
in its formation and development.


Today the house, and even memories of it, are lost in to the past. Now Wagner College's baseball field stands in its place.


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Why I Dislike Politicians

Rep. Alcee Hastings, (D) 23rd Florida
This is a man who was impeached and removed from the federal bench by fellow Democrats back in 1988 for taking a $150,000 bribe. He only escaped jail because his co-conspirator refused to testify against him (that man went to jail and later got a pardon from Bill Clinton).

Theater Fix

The Lyric Theater - in Rosebank at the on Tompkins near Clifton


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Apparently you can buy this bit of Staten Island theatrical history.

Fox Hills Golf Club (and some cows)

Once upon a time Staten Island was a home and playground for the rich. Names like Vanderbilt, Barrett and Tompkins still mark our neighborhoods and street signs. Larger signs, like their homes and playgrounds, as I've often tried to illustrate, are long gone with overcrowded streets and shoddy housing taking much of their place.

Fox Hills, now mostly covered with Trump produced apartment buildings and bad reputation, the neighborhood once was the grounds of the Fox Hills Golf Club. There were also several large homes but the gold club seems to have been the primary point of interest.





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The best newspaper reference I found was about someone's cows grazing themselves on the golf club's greens.


NY Times Sept. 13, 1902

OLGC

When I was a kid growing up on Cebra most of the kids around me who were Catholic went to Our Lady of Good Counsel for school and church. It also had a lenient policy about letting neighborhood kids use their schoolyard (really just a blacktop parking lot) for playing softball and just hanging around in so I spent a lot of time there.
There womens' guild or whatever they call it used to hold book fairs every year. My dad and I would walk up to Austin Place and buy tons of paperbacks for something like a quarter a piece. Good times.


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St. Simon's Chapel - Episcopal

St. Simon's Chapel - demolished and rebuilt on Richmond Road



When I came across the Bethlehem Orphan and Half Orphan Asylum I discovered something new to dig into. When the Verrazano Bridge and the Staten Island Expressway were built they obliterated substantial parts of several neighborhoods. I don't know how much I can uncover from just tooling about the NYPL site but it's better than nothing.



Construction on the highway started in 1959 and was opened over the course of 1964. The bridge opened in 1964. Obviously Staten Island's never been the same.






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Before demolition and after - St. Simon's is the yellow building to the left of the pink car barn set where Clove and Richmond Roads meet.

Bethlehem Orphan and Half Orphan Asylum

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In perusing the maps of Rosebank and Fort Wadsworth I wander a little south of my usual hunting grounds and discovered something new: the Bethlehem Orphan and Half Orphan Asylum. A little quick digging revealed it was a Lutheran (yay) undertaking.
A little more research told me that the orphanage had been founded in 1886 by eleven churches in response to large number of children orphaned during a severe cholera outbreak in NYC. In 1915 they were able to buy about 20 acres of land on Staten Island from the Barrett family.

postcard showing the entrance to the orphanage



The establishment operated until it burned down in 1972. As the social services were turning away from orphanages towards foster care the Lutheran Social Services of New York declined to rebuild it and sold off the property. Today it's a huge tract of typically unattractive townhouses.



New York Times article from 1915

Fingerboard Road

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Nice little postcard of the intersection of Fingerboard and Tompkins looking south towards Fox Hill Villa (by then already a part of the Jesuit's Mount Manresa retreat). That towered building was taken down in 1963.
Based on some of the other postcards in the NYPL collection I'd guess it's from between the end of the 19th and the earliest part of the 20th centuries.
That bridge in the foreground is over the old South Beach Railroad. When I was a kid the old trestles of the line still existed along the overgrown right-of-way. In the mid nineties all that was lost when endless lines of far too small townhouses were built on top of the right-of-way. Progress.


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Beautiful Hues

Came across this beautiful bright blue New York harbor view. You can see the old Cromwell piers in Tompkinsville, the rail yards at the SI Ferry Terminal and the apartments around Curtis High School. And the V-Z Bridge. Great find. Thank you, NYPL.

First Home

MacGregror Arms Apartments - 1925
In 1965 the late Richard and Jane Vredenburgh moved into this fine building following their marriage. A year later when I came along I guess you could say I moved in too.
We lived there until 1969 when the rent was raised (I think to $137) above what my parents could get a mortgage for. So they moved to Cebra Avenue and spent the rest of their lives there.
I have clear memories from living in the building and numerous stories told me by my folks over the years. I loved to greet my dad coming home walking up the stairs next to Borough Hall from the ferry. The ceilings were nine feet high and our apartment, not subdivided like some, was huge. There was a dentist in the ground floor (later home to Montezuma's, the Side Street and now a tapas place). There were tons of places for my mom to shop along the foot of Victory Blvd. and we were always going to the library.


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But then we moved to then quiet, paving stoned, tree-lined Cebra Avenue. In the summer horses from Clove Lakes Stables would come over Cebra steadily clip clopping along. The woods were filled with possums and pheasants. Strange abandoned treehouses made of doors high up in the trees on the hill rising above Cebra Avenue became visible when the leaves fell in the fall. Moving to Cebra in the summer of 1969 still calls me a back with a magical pull that I hope never fades completely away.


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ERRORERRORERROR

Our computer died last night. Got a new Tb hard drive in the mail for tomorrow and after an XP install hope to salvage data from the old drive. I don't expect good luck with this.

The Fletch Movies (are unwatchable)

So killing time and trying to watch the Fletch movies on netflix. Uff da! I can't believe how unwatchable they proved to be. I remember vaguely liking them back when. Not now. Shudder.

Detroit in the News

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Michigan Central Station - built 1913, closed 1988

Mayor Dave Bing, elected last year in the wake of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's contretemps last year, has proposed a novel way of trying to stave off the death of Detroit. Like a surgeon removing gangrenous flesh, Bing plans to encourage people still living in desolate neighborhoods to relocate to ones that stand a chance of survival.

Immediately I'm saddened by the plan but I'm also realistic enough to recognize its logic and potential. According to the city's survey of itself 1 out of 3 lots is abandoned or empty. The population's fallen from a 1950 high of 1.8 million to just over 900 thousand today. At the same time the total Detroit metro region has risen from 3.7 million to 5.4 million.

The disaster that is Detroit rests at many peoples' feet; the white people who fled, the auto industry that failed to make cars that could compete with Japan's, the unions that bled the auto companies, and the people left behind who elected incompetents and crooks in desperate hope of staving off their city's destruction. I'd add the federal government but what was it supposed to do - force people to remain in a burning and collapsing city or just pour billions down a municipal rathole?

So sadly, I commend Mayor Bing for coming up with a novel way to try and save his home city. Cities across the country have been losing people for years to the suburbs and beyond. There's nothing that could have prevented the reduction of Detroit in the face of that and the changing global economy. But still, Detroit's slow death hasn't been a natural one but an abetted one.

Saddest Music in the World

So I've been listening to a bunch of seventies music lately and in telling the luminous Mrs. V. about it I mentioned I thought "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" was one of the saddest albums I know. This precipitated a short discussion of other sad albums. She felt "The Wall" belonged on the list. I came back with "Setting Sons" by the Jam (though perhaps it loses major points for ending with a take on "Heatwave" that's so uplifting that it almost cuts through all the preceding tracks' misery). I also remembered that the ole' Lawgiver said to me once, in the dim and distant past, that "All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes". Perhaps.
But what do you think (and that's the plural you, I'm not talking to you as a special individual)? Make some suggestions. Don't be limited by the pop music genre.