Preservation League of Staten Island and NY City Map

Added a new link on the right for the PRESERVATION LEAGUE OF STATEN ISLAND. I may not agree with all of their goals but I appreciate and support their stand on preserving various individual historic/culturally important buildings.

I'm also belatedly adding the very cool NY City Map page.

Enjoy!

Vanderbilts No More

Over 18 months ago I posted a piece about the defunct Swedish Nursing Home in Sunnyside and the Island's one remaining Vanderbilt family home that was part of that small establishment. Well it's no more. More precisely it's been no more for six months or so. I just missed it. (I apologize for my tardiness but I have no army of county wide informants sending me reports from the front).

I was driving through the back streets of Sunnyside two weeks ago and realized something was significantly different. It took a minute or two to understand the enormity of the change and lost relic.

Last night I tooled around the SI Advance's site and learned about what brought about the mansion's demise. It's not an untypical tale and I understand the neighborhood peoples' decision to not fight the mansions demolition. The Preservation League put up a good fight and lost. It's all understandable and regrettable.

I AM disappointed at the inaction of the Landmarks Commission. They preserve all sorts of rubbish, take whole neighborhoods out from under their owners for the desires of a few fools and yet they express no interest in the last remaining vestige of the Vanderbilts' home on Staten Island. It's so typical of the disdain I always feel coming out of City Hall and its organs towards Staten Island.

The Grounds of Snug Harbor

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This is just to give you a sense of where the various lost buildings were once located. It's also interesting to note from the maps that the Snug Harbor property once ran all the way up to Forest Avenue.

Finally, Snug Harbor (my longest post ever)

I've been thinking about Snug Harbor a bunch lately and a recent SI Advance article about artifacts coming home to Staten Island only stoked my brain-fires a little more. I've long had a love-hate relationship with the Harbor but it's really the juggernaut of Island cultural institutions and architectural wonders and at some point I guess I have to write something about the place. Even though the church and hospital are long gone Snug Harbor stands as one of the greatest collections of Greek Revival buildings in the country. There is clearly nothing else like it on Staten Island and I'd doubt anything else in the city really compares.


Randall Memorial Church: Built as a reduced scale replica of St. Paul's Cathedral, disrepair and no money led to its demolition in 1952


While much work still needs to be done to fully restore Snug Harbor's buildings to their original beauty, under the eyes of the most recent director (she was also the director of the SI Botanical Garden located on the Harbor's grounds for almost 2 decades), Fran X.P.Huber, much has been done. Despite the inappropriateness of Huber's Chinese and Tuscan gardens (yes, they are beautiful, no, they are not germane to the history of Snug Harbor or Staten Island. If you haven't realized that by now, that's the sort of thing that fires the engines of my blathering), she has been a generally decent steward of the Robert Randall's bequest in most other regards.



Hospital: The main building was erected in 1850 to cope with a population that was there because of disability. The wings were added in 1879 and 1898. In the "downsizing" of 1950 that saw the destruction of almost a third of the buildings it came down.



When I was little my mother told me stories about the Harbor and the Snuggies. She grew up and lived only two blocks away from the Harbor and spent a fair amount of time running around its grounds as a kid. It was clear that when the remaining residents were bundled off to North Carolina she was saddened. She, like I suspect many others, felt it was simply a ploy by the trustees to get their hands on the Harbor's 83 acres.

Snug Harbor was created out of a desire to provide for the men who'd served the merchant fleet of this nation when they'd fallen on hardtimes. From its beginnings there were issues with the trustees, money and the way the residents were treated. In the last several decades of its operation as a residential facility things got bad with the trustees looking to charge rent and develop off acres of property with stores and high rise apartments. There were court cases and all sorts of charges made.

The buildings had been designated landmarks but the trustees were still able to offer up 65 acres for development. Only aggressive community action was able to stop the construction of 2,800 apartment units and get a cash poor NYC to purchase the rest of the property. Even then, in the darkest days of the City's last great fiscal crisis, it was a not clear Snug Harbor would survive unscathed.

Over the years I watched the Snug Harbor Cultural Center misuse and make all sorts of mistakes with its patrimony. I don't think I stepped onto the grounds of Snug Harbor until I worked there in the mid-nineties. There was just nothing there that was compelling to me.




Well, there actually was, but my friends and I never acted on it. Somebody, somewhere, at sometime, told me and my friends that there tunnels under the grounds of Snug Harbor. They didn't know how to access them but they assured us it was supposed to be easy. You just had to find the right manhole cover and you'd be in. You could traverse the whole grounds of the Harbor never coming above the surface.

We actually planned out what we'd have to take in order to ensure light and not getting lost. Alas, it never went beyond the most basic of prep sessions. To this day I don't know if there actually are or aren't tunnels under the earth of Snug Harbor.

I suspect the board of directors dreamed of being a national arts destination and as such its own gallery shows focused on everything but local artists. The late Art Network came about in direct opposition to the Harbor's almost mandatory cosmopolitanism. Local organizations deemed not cultural enough (ex. the Bridge Club) were forced out even though their rent for fifteen years had helped pay the bills. The idea of Snug Harbor simply being a many faceted cultural draw for Staten Islanders seemed to be too small for the various directors.

Dreams of fixing the theater in the future displaced the need to fix the cottages so they rotted for twenty years. When they were finally fixed it was for much more than it'd have cost in the first place AND the theater remained unusable for several more years.

For most of my life there have been no reasons to go to Snug Harbor. The gallery shows have tended towards unappealing art and you can only go to the John Noble Gallery so many times. The grounds consisted of old roads, overgrown meadows and woods.


Governor's Residence: long gone it stood along Richmond Terrace to at the western corner of the property near the West Gate. Termite damage was enough of an excuse for the trustees to demolish it around 1950.


The West Gate: the governor's mansion is off to the left


In recent years this has changed. The primary draw for me are the grounds and I lay that directly at the feet of Huber. Without her I suspect the gardens and and lawns would not be where they are today which is beautiful. She restored the ponds and added various small gardens throughout the grounds. She has cared for and preserved the stands of trees lining Henderson and Kissel Avenues. I know there are those out there who don't like her, and I don't want to give undue credit to her, but, until she achieved critical mass at the Botanical Garden in the mid-nineties Snug Harbor was mostly know for the Staten Island Children's Museum and lousy catering in the great hall. Now it's actually much more. So, go, check out Snug Harbor. There are various events held on the grounds by outside groups (most recently Trinity Lutheran's first German Maifest), plays in the theaters, art shows (several years ago there was a very cool Arthur Rackham show), and above all, 83 acres of (mostly) beautiful lawns, gardens and building to wander through.

When I was little my dad and I would walk from our house on Cebra Avenue to my grandparent's on Henderson Avenue. We'd walk along Castleton Avenue, down Conyingham and Brentwood and then along Henderson alongside Snug Harbor's fenced in south side. At one point you can look down from streetlevel to a stream that runs from under the road, north towards the Kill Van Kull. There was something mysterious and wild about that running water, coming into the sun from some unknown subterranean place and hemmed in by bending trees as it flowed to the sea. I half expected to see deer drinking along its edges.

My dad and I always stopped for a moment or two, no longer, to look at the stream. Today it's got a seedy look to it. Many of the trees are gone and I know that the tunnel is just a channel for a stream the city built a road over. Still, if I look at it right and let my eyes not see the Harbor's building through the thinned out trees a little hint of the mystery comes back.

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NOTE: I found a chapter from something called "Archaeology and Preservation of Gendered Landscapes" that has great information about Snug Harbor's history and social structures. It also calls out the "director of the Botanical Garden" for seeking to "incorporate more outdoor space into new attractive gardens that
have no connection to the historic landscape". Good food for thought.

Beach Hotels

The pictures I've posted earlier show huge crowds. Obviously, they had to stay somewhere. There were bungalows and campgrounds, but by far, it seems the primary places to stay were hotels. There were lots of them, from a little away from the water in Arrochar all the way south along the beach to New Dorp.









Hotel Lincoln - Midland Beach

I think there are a few of the original buildings remaining in South Beach that have now been converted into apartments. Specifically there is one remaining hotel building today standing alone at the foot of Midland Avenue near the corner of Fr. Capaodano Blvd. It still functions as a hotel but not, I think, as one you might take your family to for a summer excursion to the beach.



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Summertime And The Beaches Are Open

With the dread of summer upon me (I dislike the heat, the sun, the humididdity and the extra long days) I've decided to venture south of the Staten Island Expressway for a rare excursion. Apparently, there are some people crazy enough to enjoy going to crowded, hot, amusement strewn beaches and boardwalks in the summertime. Well, ....


...once upon a time, long ago in the dim and distant past, South Beach and Midland Beach were glorious havens of escape and adventure.



Gaudily illuminated and painted tents, rides and buildings ran alongside the boardwalk that lined the north eastern shore of Staten Island. From the late nineteenth century through the late nineteen twenties the twin beaches had hotels, summer cottages, campgrounds and theaters and rides. In 1906 Happy Land Amusement Park opened in South Beach.




Midland Beach had its own collection of resorts and like its northern neighbor its own train station.





The Great Depression (no link, you really should know that one) killed the resorts. By the time the tourists dried up in 1939 the abandoned halls, rides and hotels were ready for demolition. The feds bought the property, knocked everything down and eventually building what is now known as the FDR Boardwalk.



Considering the emptiness of the beaches today (one restaurant/catering hall, public toilets and a fishing pier are about it) and the reputation of South Beach and Midland Beach as two run down neighborhoods the above pictures might come as a surprise. To think that Staten Island was ever anyone's idea of a destination is staggering. As much as I love this stupid place it's mostly for nutty, personal reasons. Otherwise this island is simply a place where people live and work.
I know that's absurdly reductionist but I still have a hard time picturing imaging hordes of people coming from anywhere else to spend weeks on Staten Island's shore. The closest comparison is Ocean City, NJ (though clearly people dressed MUCH better back then). Nearness to the rest of the city and the ease of getting here compared to New Jersey makes sense. Still.....

Back to Detroit - Wayne Kramer

Wayne Kramer, one of the MC5's guitarists, after a life of missteps, drugs and jail, righted himself. Since then he's released some heavy hitting albums. They're mixes of protopunk guitar rock, beat poetry over tape loops and pretty instrumentals. I recommend them heartily.

For our purposes I'm posting his video for "Back to Detroit". It's his town and the song is about the lost place that city's become. The video's a little too dark at times but the bleak, hopelessness of the place is conveyed. Enjoy!



/

Is Bloomberg (and the rest of the politicians) insane?

When I read that Mayor Bloomberg suggested the Times Square bomber might have been a lone crazy or "somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something" I was floored. Aside from, at best unintentionally, linking it to the Tea Party crowd, it seemed, well, sort of dumb. Now I don't know that it wasn't a "lone wolf" but I sure as anything don't assume from the start that someone who's put a bomb in TIMES SQUARE near the VIACOM building(hello, South Park) is upset about the health care bill. Not as one of my first choices. Probably not as my eleventh or eighty seventh choice. When someone tries to set a bomb off in a very public place in NYC I think Islamic terrorists. I base on on a vast preponderance of past experience. I may be wrong but my point is that if I were to start looking for suspects I don't think I'd start with the anti-health reform bill crowd.
Now that a naturalized US citizen from Pakistan was caught on a plane ready to lift off to Dubai I'm wondering if the mayor will retract his statement. I hope it does prove to be a lone wolf (though, of course, the possibility of dozens of other similar men acting in a similar fashion in the future scares the bejabbers out of me), but I'm sort of doubtful that he has anything important to offer in the way of a health care bill critique.
Was the mayor trying to allay New Yorkers' fears by making the bombing attempt look like just some run of the mill Patriot movement militia member? Is he worried that if he says it might have been, shall we say, at least related to the larger Islamic terrorist offensive against the West someone will look at him askance? I, surely, cannot see into the little heart of Mayor Bloomberg and discern his motives. I will say, though, that I wish he'd simply said 'no comment', or 'the investigation's proceeding'. Then we wouldn't have the experience of his dismissive little gust of nonsense being revealed as wrong and I wouldn't be worried that he was simply lying or, worse yet, wrong, revealing a lack of understanding of the dangerous situation this city was in on Saturday night. Please, tell us the truth about what you actually know or keep your mouths shut. Don't try to calm us with misdirecting nonsense or scare us by revealing your blinding ignorance.

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.