Jersey Street Projects Project: Part Six - east side of Henry Street

Recently, I've become interested in the infamous tenement collapse on New Street in the summer of 1937. This New Street wasn't the one in Port Richmond, instead it was a little dead end street off of Jersey Street roughly where the entrance to 81 Jersey Street is today. It was a horrible disaster, killing 19 people, and I'll write more about it in the future.

Right now, I'm putting together pictures of the buildings that were down in the valley between Jersey Street and Westervelt Avenue. New Street, Henry Street, and James Street, all no longer in existence, were situated below the level of Jersey Street. That was part of the reason the tenement collapsed, their basements having filled up with over ten feet of water during a torrential downpour.

Henry Street ran north from Cleveland Street to James Street, behind 131 and 151 Jersey Street. Between the maps and the photos are 23 years. In that time, several of these buildings were constructed and several more vanished - whether from demolition or fire, I have no way of telling. There's a little more of a ramshackle quality to a few of these buildings than the vanished streets of Stapleton and West New Brighton. As I've written before, I think it's due to the greater age of the neighborhood, but I'm only guessing.

this building is actually 51-61

Jersey Street Projects Project: Part Five - north side of Richmond Terrace btw York Avenue and Jersey Street

The destruction carried out in the name of urban renewal in order to build the Richmond Terrace housing projects was significant. As you saw last time, not only was a long stretch of Jersey Street and some of the streets between Jersey and Westervelt cleared, but a two blocks of Richmond Terrace's north side were demolished as well.

The Star Theater was a place my grandmother would go regularly in order to get  a free piece of dishware. It was a thing theaters did back then to draw customers in.

If you can't make out the word on the marquee, have no fear, I was able to figure out what movies were playing. The top billed is The Light That Failed, an adaptation of a Kipling novel and starring Ronald Colman. Below it is Kid Nightingale, a musical boxing movie starring John Payne and Jane Wyman. The last picture listed is The Man Who Wouldn't Talk, a mystery starring Lloyd Nolan. The first two were released in late 1939 and the last in January, 1940.

I found an article from the July 30, 1926 Ocean Grove Times listing Mr. and Mrs. J.E. Semons of West New Brighton arriving in Ocean Grove.

In case you can't make it out, the building house a United Cigar store. Apparently, at one time, it was the largest cigar store chain in the country, with 3,000 stores before the Depression.

"Eat Home Cooking" proclaims the lunch room's sign. I'm going to make a guess that the owner's name was Antone Pappas.

The Liberty Grill, a name that came up in the comments on the Facebook posting of one of the Jersey Street Projects Project articles. They had wines, liquor, and beer.

A shack, probably part of the Gypsum Plant.

I was pointed to some interesting reading from the Staten Island Advance from 1959. Borough President Maniscalco discusses the demolition of the above buildings for the extension of the Richmond Terrace Promenade and its widening. It was supposed to have been the same length as the portion east of Westervelt and have a "central mall separating the traffic lanes." Whelp, like with so many projects on Staten Island it never really worked out the way its proponents claimed. That stretch of the Terrace in front of the Jersey Street Projects remains a bottle-neck almost 60 years later.

 Sixty years later and this is what Staten Island has to show for urban renewal.

Jersey Street Projects Project: Part Four - north side of Richmond Terrace btw Westervelt and Jersey Street

   I don't do a lot of these post. I should - I've got loads of pictures copied and saved - but I don't. The primary reason is laziness. There, I've admitted it. It's true, I'm a lazy, lazy man. In my defense, however, putting these posts together is time consuming and tedious. The 18 old pictures below are composed of 69 separate images that I had to put together like puzzles. I love getting these posts together and I love the feedback they get and conversations they start, but man, it's annoying. That said, here you go, one of the most interesting streetside recreations to date: the waterside of Richmond Terrace opposite the Jersey Street Projects, between Westervelt and Jersey. Enjoy!

These particular buildings appear to have come down in 1959 or thereabouts, specifically to help widen the Terrace and extend the Promenade down to the foot of Westervelt. Considering it's an overgrown mess today, was an overgrown mess when I was a kid forty-five years ago, and was probably an overgrown mess within months of demolition, I think it's clear the City did its usual bang-up job of urban renewal.

I look at these buildings and I imagine the people who owned the businesses - Chen Hing's Hand Laundry, Burns Coal, the Pan-American Bar & Grill - raised families, sent their kids to school, buried their parents, and now all the memories that remain are these old photos and family memories. I know it's not really important, but for some reason, I feel like it is. I know, it's weird, but I can't help it. I feel driven to recreate these lost street vistas of places that were demolished half a decade or more before I was born.

NOTE: I think it's safe to assume Chen Hing was Chinese. From things I've red and seen, I know there were more Chinese laundries along Jersey Street. Does anyone know anything about the history of Chinese living on Staten Island before the sixties?

Jersey Street Projects Project: Part Three - east side, running north from the corner of Cleveland Street

Sorry I've taken so long to get another post up. So here's a quick glimpse of the east side of Jersey Street starting at the corner of Cleveland Street and running north.

 The corner of Cleveland and Jersey Streets. With a name like White Eagle, I'd guess it was a Polish bar. To the left is a building I don't have a better picture of. It reappears in the next shot, but on the right.

   

   The same corner today.

 A house. One of the interesting things about Jersey Street is the large number of individual houses right in the middle of largely commercial blocks. That's not the case in Stapleton and West New Brighton.