It's summer, the venerable black locust next door is thick with hanging seed-pods, and the restoration work at 42 Westervelt Avenue proceeds.
At first, following a disastrous fire, with severe consequences for the owners of the house next door, we were glad simply to be rid of the crack house that had always been an eyesore until it became a nuisance and then a menace --- and a presence that defined the block.
Now, as the restoration becomes more and more visible on the exterior, we allow ourselves grander thoughts ––– of clean sidewalks, quiet tenants, routine maintenance performed, not deferred. An attractive streetscape on the opposite side of the street.
Carpenter whimsy observed walking sort of west on St. Marks Place near Nicholas Street, St. George.
San Franciscans probably know more about North Brooklyn than Staten Islanders know about their own home borough. At least one of the reasons may be a relative lack of popular or scholarly writing on the subject compared to what's available on the other boroughs.
The books devoted to this borough that I've seen most often in Staten Island home libraries are the two-volume Leng and Davis history of 1930, a professional but dated effort; and two volumes by amateur historian Dorothy Valentine Smith, both of 1968. By now, these titles are more parts of history themselves than guides to it, at least where more recent history is concerned.
That's not a situation unique to Staten Island. Many communities have a detached, curiosity-cabinet view of their own histories; or an even drier statistical one. Or else they've ignored their histories outright. Mostly the failure has been to make history relevant by connecting the lives of those who walked these streets, lived in these houses and rode these trains, trolleys and buses with our own lives, here, today.
David Goldfarb and Jim Ferreri's new pictorial history, ST. GEORGE--one of eight titles on Staten Island history produced by Arcadia Publishing in its handsomely designed Images of America series––is a worthy attempt to fill in some of the blanks in our knowledge and awareness. It uses historic photographs to make our neighborhood's history more accessible to a wide audience.
Some of the text has the ring of oft-told legend more than history--such as the (possibly tall) tale of how St. George got its name (see page 36). But there are many surprises as well, such as a sign-of-changing-times photo (see page 109) of a railroad engine sitting on tracks no one expected would be laid directly below the Richmond Terrace mansion that overlooks them.
I didn't know how much I didn't know.
In their approach to ST. GEORGE, Ferreri, an interior designer who is president of the Preservation League of Staten Island; and David Goldfarb, attorney, community activist and passionate preservationist, have let the pictures tell the story. Following a brief introduction, the authors have included a total of seven sections, each devoted to a particular aspect of the community's history and development, including Early Settlement, Houses of Worship, Resort Development, Planned Suburban Community, Civic Center, Staten Island Ferry and Transportation Hub, and Modern St. George.
While the bulk of the text is contained in photo captions, those captions are often quite meaty and informative. Historical background and archival images were provided by the Staten Island Historical Society and the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, with additional images from the Staten Island Advance. A number of the images were contributed by the authors themselves.
Several particularly revealing photos show us how Stuyvesant Place was transformed, perhaps inevitably, given its strategically important location near the ferry, from a rather elegant 19th century suburban residential street to a livelier but less interesting amalgam of shops and large residential and commercial structures. Seeing what we have lost underscores the precarious position of what remains.
A COMPLAINT . . .
One of the things that jumped out at me right away in Goldfarb and Ferreri's terrific new book was their use of the term 'town' to refer to what most people on Staten Island would refer to as a neighborhood or community or section, maybe.
Sure, when I arrived by ferry on these shores in 1977, there were people--usually older natives––who would use the term 'town,' a holdover from the days when Richmond County was a collection of town centers with scant residential development surrounding. That was still somewhat the case as late as 1950.
The handwritten caption of this undated, unpostmarked card reads, New York Public Library, St. George, Staten Island.
But these days, one hears West Brighton or Oakwood or Willowbrook referred to much less often as towns and much more often as neighborhoods.
The real dividing lines are not rigid 'town' boundaries, anyway--such as those arbitrarily established by the Advance. It's the words people use to refer to the places they live--not the preferences of newspaper editors and real estate developers--that determine those places' names.
I was heartened to see the authors engage the question of who decides what history is and whether that history is frozen or subject to review. That may not be Goldfarb and Ferreri's intent in referring to New Brighton as 'the town that would become St. George.' But that is the effect of those words.
St. George, Staten Island, N.Y.
As they imply, place-names are not divinely set in stone; they are human creations, subject to human revision. By acknowledging that process of change, the authors of ST. GEORGE have set forth a view of history as something dynamic and evolutionary that is periodically reconsidered or revised. Just like our understanding of it.
But the question of what neighborhood we live in has been settled for quite some time. In a sense, the publication of David Goldfarb and Jim Ferreri's ST. GEORGE proves it.
My March 24 photo essay on Queen Anne towers, turrets and finials ("When Queen Anne Was King") included pictures of buildings in a small stretch of Westervelt Avenue between St. Marks Place and its merge into Hamilton Avenue in St. George.
The rooflines pictured in that essay were knockoffs of earlier, larger and more elegant buildings elsewhere in the neighborhood. The partial roofline shown left is taken from one of these. It represents the sort of model journeyman builders were inspired by and whose massing and detailing they copied, albeit in considerably scaled down form, for more modest buildings.
The extraordinary finial-capped inverted cone (is it a dunce's cap? a witch's hat?) on this St. George house is probably the most striking example of Queen Anne eccentricity in the neighborhood. The near circle of tower room windows is partly covered by the overhang in almost a protective gesture--a detail I've seen nowhere else in the neighborhood.
Look at the care lavished upon the finial--the dentilated decoration near the finial base, echoing the much larger circular rim of the tower roof itself. A person could pass it on the street, year after year and never look up and never notice it, but to its designer it was a crowning detail; it had to be done right.
And look again: the use of dentils is repeated in the terra cotta chimney just behind. Possibly nothing more than a felicitous accident, but no less beautiful for that.
The building is situated across Central Avenue from the site of the new Richmond County Courthouse--a guaranteed revenue generator for any retail or restaurant business that had the vision and the dollars required to locate here. A smart user would capitalize on the building's eccentricity, providing relief from the typical civic center-type structure now about to rise across the street.
Offices would be a predictable and shortsighted use of such a dynamic space; so would restricting it to uses catering mostly or exclusively to lawyers and business types. That sort of strictly-suits concept would have limited appeal to the young, hip community developing nearby. The ideal would be to generate as broad an appeal as possible.
Like so much commercial real estate in St. George, this remarkable but severely deteriorated structure is for sale or lease, as it has been for years, with a parking lot adjacent.