Printer Friendly VersionWhenever I hear a politician being referred to as “mad,” crazy,” “iconoclastic,” or “out of touch,” I inevitably conclude that he or she might have something interesting to say, so, using the same logic, I decided that perhaps Staten Island had something interesting to see. I would go and see it.
And living in the Greenwood Cemetery side of Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, I also have no excuses not to travel there. Why does it feel that Staten Island is so much harder to reach than Manhattan? It is not. By car, it is a simple matter of getting to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and paying the high (it’s been recently raised to $10 for cars) toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; by public transport, it is just as easy: Take the R train to its 86th St. stop in Bay Ridge and then catch a S53 or S79 bus.
Armed with a map of Staten Island, I disembarked on a corner of Hylan Blvd., a road that stretches across the whole of the island, for some 13 miles from New York Harbor to the town of Tottenville. (The Ward Point section of Tottenville is the southernmost point of New York State, which is of itself a valid reason for coming here.) The corner I got off at was the wonderfully named West Fingerboard Rd., and the first thing I saw was a Chinese-Hawaiian restaurant called Fortune Hawaii.
Walking across Route 278, I entered the neighborhood of Rosebank. The standout discovery here for me was the Bay Street Luncheonette & Soda Fountain (1189 Bay St.; 718/720-0922) restaurant, which was founded in 1930. It is refreshingly unpretentious. Locals stroll in for a coffee and a chat, and advertisements on the wall tell of the delights of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7-Up and Sealtest Ice-Cream. Something called a Lime Ricky is served, a drink I had never heard of before but which comprises lime and carbonated water (licensed bars might add vodka or gin).
Hylan Blvd. ends (or starts) at the Alice Austen House, Museum & Garden (2 Hylan Blvd.; 718/816-4506; www.aliceausten.org), which overlooks the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and Manhattan. It is a photography museum, primarily concentrating on the work of Alice Austen, who lived in this large Victorian building at the end of the 19th century. She was a pioneer in photography and chronicled a world long gone, of a Staten Island of empty farmland; warm, lazy summer afternoons; suited, mustachioed men and hatted woman in long white dresses; and tea parties on green lawns. The house has been left as it was in 1890, and while I was there, there was an interesting, temporary exhibit by Tim Hetherington on the often-troubled West African country of Liberia between the years of 2003 and 2007. Austen’s life also saw its share of calamities. Brought up in relative luxury, she lost all her savings in the stock-market crash of 1929. Struggling, she opened a restaurant, but that was not a success, and she ended up in the poor house. Her talent was rediscovered just before her death in 1952. The museum opens between Thurs. and Sun., noon to 5 p.m.
Just up the road is lonely Edgewater St., on which is light industry. The rusting, almost illegible sign of the Polish Terminal grabbed my attention. I had visions of Poles in an alien country, their English faltering, when it was spoken at all, lifting and moving crates and boxes from ships newly harbored. Everything there now was boarded up. A few doors up is the Nautical Chart Supply Co. (718/876-8200; www.nauticalchartsupply.com). Owner Sal DeGennaro moved his business to 94 Edgewater Rd. seven years ago, and while I was there, he was finishing a print run of maps of New York Harbor for the Staten Island Ferry Co. For reasons I did not understand, the store also sold binoculars.
It is only a short walk from here to Staten Island’s subway-style overground train system, which has 22 stations and goes all the way from the Staten Island Ferry terminal at St. George to Tottenville. I took it for 18 stops down to Nassau, where another bus took me up the west of the island to the village of Charleston, but not before being stopped by a plain-clothes detective asking me for some identification, as I was taking photos. My subjects were innocent, but the detective said they had to keep a close eye on the goings-on near New York Harbor.
Charleston was founded in 1760 and formerly has been called both Androvetteville and Kreischerville. Its graveyard is old, its tombstones darkening with age and leaning over in a variety of different angles.
The main reason to come here is the wonderful Killmeyer’s Old Bavaria Inn (4254 Arthur Kill Rd.; 718/984-1202; www.killmeyers.com). The bricks of the path leading up to the inn’s front door have the word Kreischer stamped on them, yet another reference to the village’s early German roots, for it was named after Balthasar Kreischer, a Bavarian immigrant who opened a brick factory here in 1854. The bar in the inn dates to 1890, and the beer list is impressive. Staring at one of the far reaches of the Meadowlands Marshes, this place feels like the end of the world, like Tasmania at the bottom of Australia or Fort Yukon in Alaska. I had a pint of dark Kastritzer Schwarzbier beer and a plate of weinerschnitzel with spätzle. Farther along Arthur Kill Rd., on the way to Richmond Historic Town, I saw the Holtermann’s Bakery, one more sign of Old Germany.
The word “kill” is everywhere in Staten Island. It derives from the Dutch word kille, which means a “water channel” or a “riverbed” and can be seen in such local names as Kill Van Kull; Killmeyer’s Old Bavarian Inn; Great Kill Park; Arthur Kill Rd.; Little Fresh Kill; Great Fresh Kill; Arthur Kill; Great Kills; Great Kills Harbor; all mystical names to someone who has lived so close to Staten Island for so long but never felt the urge to go there. Some of what once was the Arthur Kill’s Landfill—no longer used for that purpose but once famous for being the largest trash dump on the planet—now is the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge and New Springville Park.
My last stop made sense in the long loop I had made from when I first entered the borough over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge: Richmond Historic Town (Staten Island is not a county, just a borough. The county is known as Richmond, as Brooklyn is known as Kings, for example). This (441 Clarke Ave.; 718/351-1611; www.historicrichmondtown.org) is Staten Island as it must have looked at around the time of the Revolutionary War. Approximately 25 old houses and buildings cover 25 acres and lie to both sides of a busy road, my favorite being the Christopher House, which was built in 1720 and was home to Joseph Christopher, who headed the Staten Island Safety Committee until the British forces ousted these American patriots from the manor lands of Governor Thomas Dongan. A small river winds through the area.
That was all I had time to do on my first day there, but I have been back since to walk around Willowbrook Park, which is guarded by a huge chimney stack bearing the initials CSI, which stands for “College of Staten Island,” a branch of the City University of New York, and not for “Crime Scene Investigation,” as some TV fans would have you believe. This particular spot of Staten Island is kept beating by the energy of approximately 12,000 students on a 204-acre campus (2800 Victory Blvd.; 718/982-2000; www.csi.cuny.edu), which is the largest in New York City.
And there is more to do here. I will be back again to visit such cultural jewels as the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, the Staten Island Botanical Garden and the Garibaldi-Meucci House, where Giuseppe Garibaldi, the unifier of modern Italy, lived in the 1850s (supposedly, fellow Italian Antonio Meucci invented the telephone, a claim that probably will not go down to well in neighboring New Jersey, where Thomas Edison, who is attributed with inventing it, lived and worked).
