Staten Island
Based on Wikipedia: Staten Island
New Yorkers have a name for Staten Island: "the forgotten borough." It's a label that sticks because it captures something true about the place—a piece of New York City that doesn't quite feel like New York City, separated from the rest of the metropolis not just by water but by temperament, politics, and the peculiar isolation that comes from being the only borough you can't reach by subway.
To understand Staten Island, you have to understand what it is not. It is not Manhattan's vertical ambition or Brooklyn's brownstone density. It is not the Bronx's urban grit or Queens' immigrant tapestry. With half a million residents spread across nearly sixty square miles, Staten Island is the least populated of New York's five boroughs, the least densely built, and the most suburban. Drive through its southern reaches and you'll find strip malls, single-family homes with driveways, and a landscape that could pass for New Jersey—which, geographically speaking, it nearly is.
The Geography of Separation
Look at a map. Staten Island sits at the southernmost tip of New York State, closer to New Jersey than to any other part of New York City. The Arthur Kill and Kill Van Kull—those Dutch-named waterways whose word "kill" simply means creek or channel—separate it from the Garden State. New York Bay separates it from Manhattan and Brooklyn.
That separation has defined everything about the island's character.
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, completed in 1964, finally connected Staten Island to Brooklyn by road. Before that, if you didn't have a boat, you weren't getting there from the rest of New York City. Today you can also reach New Jersey via three bridges: the Outerbridge Crossing, the Goethals Bridge, and the Bayonne Bridge. But there's still no subway. The Staten Island Railway runs a single line from the ferry terminal at St. George down to Tottenville at the island's southern tip, but it connects to nothing else in the transit system.
And then there's the ferry.
The Staten Island Ferry is free. It runs around the clock, every day of the year, carrying commuters and tourists across New York Harbor with views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Lower Manhattan skyline. For many visitors, riding the ferry is the closest they'll ever get to Staten Island—a twenty-five-minute journey across the water before turning around and heading back to Manhattan. The island itself remains terra incognita.
Before the Europeans
Fourteen thousand years ago, the Wisconsin glaciation was ending. The massive ice sheets that had covered much of North America were retreating, and humans followed the thaw. Archaeologists have found Clovis culture artifacts on Staten Island—distinctive stone tools that mark some of the earliest human presence in the Americas. The discovery came in 1917, in the Charleston section of the island, on land that would later belong to Mobil Oil.
The island was likely abandoned for a time after that. The megafauna—the mastodons and giant sloths that Clovis hunters pursued—went extinct, and without big game, there was less reason to stay. Evidence of permanent settlement and agriculture appears around five thousand years ago.
When Europeans arrived, they found the Raritan band of the Lenape people living on the island. The Lenape called it Aquehonga Manacknong, which translates roughly to "as far as the place of the bad woods," or sometimes Eghquhous—simply "the bad woods." Whether this referred to difficult terrain, spiritual significance, or something else entirely, the meaning is now lost.
The Lenape didn't build permanent villages. They moved seasonally, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture and following the rhythms of the land. Shellfish formed a staple of their diet—the waters around New York were once extraordinarily rich in Eastern oysters, and the Lenape harvested them in enormous quantities. You can still find evidence of this at shell middens along the shore in Tottenville, where oyster shells larger than twelve inches across sometimes turn up. Modern oysters rarely grow so large; those giants speak to an abundance we have since depleted.
Burial Ridge, overlooking Raritan Bay in Tottenville, is the largest pre-European burial ground in New York City. Bodies were first reported unearthed there in 1858, and in 1895, the American Museum of Natural History contracted an archaeologist named George H. Pepper to conduct formal research at the site. Today, the burial ground is unmarked, lying within Conference House Park—a place we'll return to, because something important happened there in 1776.
The Dutch Struggle
Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian explorer sailing for France, made first recorded European contact in 1524. He anchored for one night and moved on. The Dutch, who would eventually claim the area as part of New Netherland, took their time establishing anything permanent on what they called Staaten Eylandt—named for the Staten-Generaal, the parliament of the Dutch Republic.
Their early attempts failed spectacularly.
Between 1639 and 1655, Dutch colonists tried three separate times to establish settlements on the island. Each time, conflicts with the Lenape destroyed what they built. The violence was part of a broader catastrophe known as Kieft's War, named for Willem Kieft, the director of New Netherland whose aggressive and brutal policies toward Native Americans sparked years of bloodshed. In the summer of 1641 and again in 1642, Native American tribes destroyed the settlement at Old Town.
It wasn't until 1661 that a permanent settlement finally took hold at Oude Dorp—Dutch for "Old Village"—just south of the Narrows near what is now South Beach. The settlers were a mixed group: Dutch, Walloons, and French Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France. At one point, nearly a third of the island's residents spoke French. The Huguenots had first escaped to the Netherlands as refugees, and some then joined the emigration to the New World, seeking both religious freedom and economic opportunity.
The only trace of Oude Dorp today is the name of a neighborhood: Old Town, adjacent to Old Town Road.
The English Take Over
In 1667, the Treaty of Breda ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and the Dutch ceded New Netherland to England. Staaten Eylandt became Staten Island. Three years later, the Lenape formally ceded all claims to the island to English Governor Francis Lovelace.
The English moved to expand settlement. They resurveyed Oude Dorp—now called Old Town—and extended the lots southward along the shore. Dutch families settled these new parcels, and the area became known as Nieuwe Dorp, meaning "New Village," which the English eventually anglicized to New Dorp.
In 1683, the colony of New York was divided into ten counties. Staten Island and several neighboring minor islands became Richmond County—a name it still holds as New York City's least-known borough designation. The name honored Charles Lennox, the First Duke of Richmond, who happened to be an illegitimate son of King Charles II. By 1687, the English had divided the island into four administrative divisions based on natural features: Castleton, Northfield, Southfield, and Westfield. These would persist as the island's basic geographic framework for centuries.
The government parceled out land in rectangular eighty-acre blocks, with the most desirable plots along the coastline and waterways. By 1708, the entire island had been divided into 166 small farms and two large manorial estates. The population in 1698 was just 727 people.
A Myth About a Race
There's a famous story about how Staten Island came to be part of New York rather than New Jersey. According to the tale, Captain Christopher Billopp won the island for New York through seamanship: he was challenged to circumnavigate Staten Island in a single day, and if he succeeded, the island would belong to New York. He did, and so it does.
It's a wonderful story. It's also almost certainly false.
Captain Billopp was a real person who settled on Staten Island in 1675 after years of service in the Royal Navy, receiving a patent for 932 acres on the island's southwestern tip. But the story of the race has never been reliably documented. Historians have traced its likely origin to Gabriel Disosway, a local chronicler in the mid-1800s who seems to have either invented or heavily embellished a bit of local folklore. The conflicting details in various tellings—how long the race took, whether Billopp received a prize, what exactly was at stake—suggest the story grew in the retelling.
Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg perpetuated the myth at a news conference in 2007, prompting The New York Times to investigate and conclude that the event was almost entirely fictional. A YouTuber named CGP Grey addressed the discrepancies in a 2019 video, further cementing the scholarly consensus: it's a good yarn, but don't believe it.
The Loyalist Island
By 1771, Staten Island's population had grown to 2,847. Most of them wanted nothing to do with the American Revolution.
General George Washington once called Staten Islanders "our most inveterate enemies," and he wasn't exaggerating. When representatives gathered for the First Continental Congress, Staten Island was the only county in New York that failed to send anyone. The islanders simply weren't interested in independence. This had consequences: towns in New Jersey like Elizabethport, Woodbridge, and Dover instituted boycotts against doing business with Staten Islanders in the months leading up to 1776.
The island's strategic position made it irresistible to the British. When Sir William Howe evacuated Boston in March 1776 and prepared to attack New York City, he chose Staten Island as his staging ground. Over the summer of 1776, more than 140 British ships anchored off the island's shores, carrying approximately 30,000 British and Hessian troops. Howe established his headquarters in New Dorp at the Rose and Crown Tavern. There, according to tradition, British officials first learned of the Declaration of Independence.
In August 1776, British forces crossed the Narrows to Brooklyn and outflanked Washington's Continental Army at the Battle of Long Island. New York City fell shortly afterward.
The Conference That Failed
Three weeks after the Battle of Long Island, on September 11, 1776, something remarkable happened at the old Billopp estate on Staten Island's southwestern tip.
Lord Howe—Admiral Richard Howe, brother of General William Howe—received a delegation of Americans at what is now called the Conference House. The American representatives were Benjamin Franklin, Edward Rutledge, and John Adams. They had come to discuss peace.
Howe offered terms: if the Americans would withdraw the Declaration of Independence, negotiations could proceed. Franklin, Adams, and Rutledge refused. The conference ended without agreement, and the war continued for seven more years.
That building still stands. Conference House Park preserves both the structure and Burial Ridge, the Lenape burial ground, creating a layered site where you can contemplate thirteen thousand years of human presence on this island that nobody quite knows what to do with.
The War's Long Shadow
British forces remained on Staten Island for the duration of the Revolutionary War. The few Patriots who had lived there fled after the Battle of Long Island, and those who stayed were predominantly Loyalist. But even loyal subjects found the occupation burdensome. The troops needed resources—firewood, food, supplies—and they took what they needed. Churches were dismantled for lumber. The island was extensively deforested by war's end.
On December 5, 1783, Staten Island served as the staging ground for the final British evacuation of New York City. After the departure, many Loyalist landowners fled to Canada—including Christopher Billop (the captain's descendant), the family of Canadian historian Peter Fisher, John Dunn (who would found St. Andrews, New Brunswick), and Abraham Jones. Their estates were subdivided and sold to new owners.
The Island Today
Staten Island's geography still shapes its character. The North Shore—St. George, Tompkinsville, Clifton, Stapleton—is the island's most urban area, home to historic Victorian houses and the St. George Historic District. The East Shore features the FDR Boardwalk, stretching two and a half miles along the waterfront—the fourth-longest boardwalk in the world.
The South Shore, where the Dutch and Huguenots first settled, developed rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s after the Verrazzano Bridge made automobile commuting practical. Today it's thoroughly suburban. The West Shore, along the industrial waterways of the kills, has the fewest residents but the most factories and warehouses.
Staten Islanders call their home "the borough of parks," and the numbers back them up: 12,300 acres of protected parkland, over 170 parks. It's a greener, quieter piece of New York City, accessible yet apart.
But that apartness carries a cost. Without a subway connection, without the foot traffic and mixed-use density that define urban New York, Staten Island exists in a kind of limbo. It belongs to the city legally and administratively, but not quite culturally. Its residents vote differently than the rest of New York, live differently, and often feel that the city government and media treat them as an afterthought.
The forgotten borough. The name persists because it still fits.
Perhaps that's the thread running through Staten Island's entire history: a place defined by what separates it from everywhere else. The bad woods. The waterways that isolated the Lenape. The harbor that kept the Dutch out for decades. The missing subway line that keeps Manhattan at arm's length today. Staten Island has always been slightly elsewhere, slightly other—close enough to see, too far to easily reach, and just independent enough to resent being overlooked.