American Dock Terminal

Hanging out with Alex R. and his wife, Angie, the other day, he reminded me of one of the several places we explored when we were kids and Staten Island was a wilder and woolier place. He thought the coolest place we'd sneaked into and wandered around in were the great big warehouses that were converted into the Bay Landings condos starting around 1981.

We were able to easily enter them by walking through the porous fencing near the supposedly, incredibly creepy (creepier than the average) strip club (now a yoga joint) at the bottom of Victory Boulevard and then through the unblocked doorways of the buildings.



From our initial vantage point the warehouses were hemmed in on the left by the SIRT tracks and the great retaining wall that rises up to Bay Street. To their right were the greasy waters of the harbor and the collapsed piers the warehouses once served. The buildings themselves were huge, primordial constructions dominating the neighborhood. They were like some Lovecraftian towers that had survived the arrival and retraction of the glaciers mostly unscathed.

The blank buildings were seven floors of plain brick and concrete inhabited by flocks of pigeons and often little evidence of ever having been used. We never encountered anyone else in all the times we investigated the various buildings. There was never even the stray fisherman or rats, something we'd routinely see when going into (and under) the abandoned piers in Stapleton.

From photos the buildings were once white but by our time they were dirty and
stained unpainted cement covering brick. Whole floors were simply empty and windowless and exposed to the elements but then smooth cement is pretty hardy so the wear seemed negligible.

From the exposed stairwells you could see out across the rooftops of Tompkinsville and St. George. From the top of the building we looked out to Manhattan and Brooklyn. For a bunch of twelve year olds it was exhilarating (do 12 year olds even explore abandoned buildings anymore?).

In some places the things of man were very evident and the appearance was of sudden abandonment. On a few floors huge quantities of loose coffee beans simply spilled out of rotted sacks. Ground floor offices were littered with old telephone books, blank company forms and all sorts of soil and mineral samples in jars. We never understood the last bit but with a little research today I discovered some of the docks' and warehouses' history.



I found an account of the Port of Staten Island, its docks and development on Google Books in something called "Shipping - The Magazine of Marine Transportation, Construction and Supplies" from 1922. Its chock full of illustrations, detailed descriptions of the businesses concerned with the port operations and names of individuals involved and addresses where the businesses were located.

The buildings we were in were those of the American Dock Terminal. The president of the firm was A.B. Pouch who was related to William H. Pouch of Clifton's Pouch Terminal. Eventually the two complexes were practically combined. From the "Shipping" article it appears the oldest building was from about 1900 and the newest from 1922. By 1978 when we first explored them they were totally abandoned.

Mayor John. Hylan and Docks Commissioner Murray Hulbert had visions of Staten Island's North Shore becoming a major cargo port. Numerous thousand foot long covered piers were built increasing the existing facilities several fold. There were several large cargo complexes built or expanded to service the piers (American Dock Terminal, Union Transport Company and Pouch Terminal). It was an ambitious future.

Several great warehouses, of which only three survive, were built by the American Dock Terminal to house primarily grain and coffee (hence the beans on the floor decades later). There were small trains to service the complex and connected to the main shore track running between all the piers.

Today nothing of that plan remains as envisioned. At some point the Pouch family, which owned the ADT sold it off and it entered a long period of speculation and failed development attempts. The surviving buildings have been converted to co-ops. The piers are now mostly gone. Pier No.5 had housed a bar and restaurant through the early nineties until it collapsed. Recently, Pier No.6, long the NYC Parks Department's Cromwell Center, began collapsing into the bay. Something about shoddy workmanship during its numerous refurbishments I think I heard.


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Bay Landing from Bay Street - The remnants of the American Dock Terminal - American industry converted to over priced urban housing.

I don't know how the American Dock Terminal came to its seemingly rushed end but I suspect it had to do with Staten Island's opposition to giant apartment construction.

In 1961 the developer William Zeckendorf bought the American Dock Terminal site from its owner, Gulf States Land and Industries, Inc., for $3 million (which means the newest buildings were in use for less than forty years). He planned to raze much of the site and build four or five 35 story buildings. The goal was 4,000 units geared toward the wealthy and for a rental price of $60 per room.

They would have clearly dominated the Island's skyline and opened the door for similar constructions across the borough. All he need was to get the property rezoned for residential use.

That didn't happened and in 1965 he went bankrupt. He and his son held onto the property, though, and waited for future developments. In 1975 a similar project was put forward to be financed by Westinghouse with the Zeckendorfs taking the actual lead on the project. A NY Times article from that year claims the politicians, community board and unions all supported the development. I strongly suspect the residents did not. This dream too faded away.

At some point the ownership of the property passed to a metals firm from Michigan (reading about the convoluted way they came to own the American Dock Terminal is mind boggling). The new owners developed a much more realistic and less ambitious residential development program and stuck with it. The original plan never came to pass but in 1981 the first of the Bay Landing buildings were converted.

I helped my grandfather, a floor scraper and carpenter, work in one of the earliest apartments in the Bay Landing building at the foot of Victory Boulevard opposite Lyon's Pool. It was a blank, white painted cement and plaster space to which my grandfather was adding hardwood floors and slightly raised section under the windows. Even to my fifteen year old eyes the conversion of the building from decaying industrial site to modern dwelling seemed cheap, poorly done. The plaster was already chipped and the cement exposed and cold. I haven't been in any of the buildings since.

This is a lot more content and history than I usually post but it's one of the first times I was able to pull up so much specific information online. I still don't know about the closure of though I suspect it had to do with a declining financial outlook. It's interesting to study about the rise, fall, and resurrection of a location and how plans changed so radically over two decades.

Oh My

Tooling about the interweb this morning I discovered ANOTHER amazing NYC provided resource. It's the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives and has photos of what existed on the land prior to the construction of housing projects. It's also got mayoral archives for the LaGuardia, Wagner, Beame,and Koch administrations (where's Impelliteri?) but I'm more interested in the housing stuff at the moment.

Go to the NYC Housing Authority tab on the left and click it. Then put in the neighborhood you wish to look at and away you go. There's not a whole lot for Staten Island but what's there is worthwhile. It's also depressing to read that the neighborhood at the foot of Jersey Street filling the present footprint of the Richmond Terrace Houses was "a neighborhood considered for demolition long before the housing project was built"


Cleveland Street, New Broghton - part of the aforementioned places eyed for destruction. And it was.



Public housing is one of the greatest failures of the 20th century liberal statist dream for the future. The laudable goal of alleviating the horrendous conditions in many urban slums was murdered by construction monstrous human hives. Working, existing neighborhoods were eliminated and replaced with oversized unnatural constructions. That many are being torn down only attests to their failure a mere two or three generations after their completion.

S.S. White

The only memory I have personally of the S.S. White Factory out on Seguine Avenue is of watching it burn while I was at a Boy Scout Olympics nearby. From our vantage point across Princes Bay we watched the brilliant red and orange column of fire rise up against the night sky. Thirty years after the event the beauty of that destructive night remains vivid.

S.S. White was a dental products company started by Dr. Samuel Stockton White of Philadelphia in the 19th century. He opened distribution sites along the East Coast and finally a large factory complex at the foot of Seguine Avenue in Princes Bay.

In 1968 the firm was bought by the Pennwalt Corporation. In 1972 they closed the factory, split its dental and industrial operations and moved them both to New Jersey.

The closed factory operated later as the Princes Bay Trade Mart. The conversion to giant flea market came about when the factory's purchaser was told he couldn't build 10 30-story apartment buildings. I know there was a performance venue on the site at some point.

Then in the late seventies it burned. Several times I think. Finally it was demolished and to this day the land remains empty despite attempts to build a huge and undesired condo complex in the late nineties.

I never would written about this if not for yesterday. The luminous Mrs. V, her mother, and I, were driving about New Jersey when suddenly we saw the S.S. White Technologies Inc. building along Rte 151. I remembered reading at some point that the firm had been moved into New Jersey and here I was faced with the actual new plant.


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It was odd to come across this lost bit of Staten Island's legacy 16 miles away from where it started.

Woo Hoo!!!!!!!!!

I just noticed NYCityMap added a new aerial view of the city from 1951. Thank you, DOITT!!!!

Port Richmond Avenue

Port Richmond Avenue looking north toward the Bergen Ferry


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Same view today - The buildings are ramshackle, some abandoned or used for homeless housing.


I've put up pictures of this intersection before but the new one I just came across above drew me right back in. The photo displays a vibrant Port Richmond intersection with restaurants, a theater in the background (the old Farrell Lumber building, which used to be Leo's Empire), an SRO, numerous cars and a bank. There's some sort of "academy" advertised in a window at the pictures' left. It's streets that are alive and thriving.

I didn't recognize the Murad brand of cigarettes advertised on the building in the left foreground (apparently it was the world's best brand) so I googled it and found scads of beautiful advertising.



Today it's all gone. Some of the buildings remain by the life has drained out.
Instead of trolleys and shops the streets are near empty and the shops gone and the bank closed up. There's not even a Coca Cola ad in the present view.



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I know Main Streets suffered with the advent of shopping plazas and malls and I don't think there's any way their deaths could have been prevented. However, Port Richmond seems to have been more than just a shopping district. There's a real town with houses, apartments, schools and churches all around the storefronts. That it's only staggered on as the place where we allow our day laborers to live (and then don't bother to maintain it) makes me feel a little ashamed.




View looking north on (Port) Richmond Avenue. You can see the still standing Port Richmond Reformed Church in the distance on the left side of the avenue.

Missing Tombstone Brought Home

Great article in today's NY Times about the discovery of an old tombstone and its journey to the United Hebrew section of the Ocean View Cemetery out on Amboy Road.

You can still see the remains of the great Jewish tide that swept over the Lower East Side of Manhattan a century ago. Today those immigrants have moved on only to be replaced by other immigrants (or hipsters), but, if you look up at many of the little Spanish language churches in the area you can still see Hebrew and torahs carved into the tops of them.

Definitely a mitzvah by Mr. Lankenau.

Clove Lake Boat House and Restaurant

So the dog days are definitely upon us. When I walk outside I feel like I've been hammered with a sack of swamp water. It's the time of the year I find most unpleasant. So, I've tracked down a pleasant pair of pictures to ease my discomfort.
I don't know the history of the building but the Parks Department's page about Clove Lakes implies its comes from the thirties. The black and white picture would seem to come from at least the thirties. The color one is obviously later and probably from the fifties or early sixties (at least to my untutored eye that's what the vivid color makes me think as well as the clothing).









I spent much of this past Memorial Day at Clove Lakes Park. I went there with my family to watch a demonstration by the USMC in helicopter assault tactics. It was pretty impressive, particularly when the downdraft from the Osprey took out much of several trees endangering the onlookers.

What impressed me more, though, that day, was the wildlife I encountered when we walked around the main lake. I only got a few, lousy, pictures, but here they are:

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.