Arrochar, the first part of Staten Island that the S-53 bus visits when it comes off the Verrazano Bridge from Brooklyn, is often the starting point for my Staten Island peregrinations. It encompasses Fort Wadsworth, now a Gateway Recreation Area, as well as the northern section of South Beach and its lengthy boardwalk. The area was settled by Scottish immigrant W. W. MacFarland in the 1840s; he named his estate Arrochar, after the small village NW of Glasgow he hailed from. MacFarland’s home still stands on the St. Joseph Hill Academy campus. You can’t walk in Arrochar and neighboring South Beach and Midland Beach without sensing the ghost of Sandy, the “megastorm” that toyed with the Northeast, especially New Jersey and Staten Island, in late-October 2012.
I got off the bus at McClean Ave. and Railroad Ave. and walked. Railroad Ave. fascinates me because there’s no railroad of any kind there, but it used to border an open cut used by the Staten Island Rapid Transit South Beach branch. Consult Forgotten New York’s Arrochar to South Beach link for photos of the branch, which closed in 1953, as well as Steve Owen’s page for a comprehensive review of the SIRT South Beach branch. In many cases the infrastructure is still there if NYC ever wants to revive the line, but housing has replaced the open cut here.
One of the few reminders that there was a Staten Island Rapid Transit South Beach Branch still spans Robin Rd. between Austin and Doty Aves. And, while that line ran at grade from the late-1890s until 1936, much of the line was placed in an open cut or iron trestles that year to get rid of grade crossings as urbanization filtered into eastern Staten Island. Just 17 years later this part of the line went out of business.
Chinar Restaurant on Sand La. sits in the road’s former amusement area, known as Happyland, which opened in 1906. According to the NYC Parks department, “Happyland’s amusements, stage productions, and vaudeville shows attracted 30,000 visitors on opening day. The amusement park continued to draw summer crowds for many years with attractions like the Japanese Tea Gardens, the Carnival of Venice, and the shooting gallery. Though the boardwalk resort thrived throughout the 1910s and 20s, fires, water pollution, and The Great Depression (1929-1939) took their toll on the beachfront resort area.” There were still some amusements along Sand Lane when I first traveled to Staten Island on the bus from Bay Ridge in the 1960s.
The Chinar’s unusual in that it’s located in a former church, St. Cuthbert’s Chapel, built entirely of rough stone collected on the Island and driftwood collected on the beach beginning in 1901. The chapel was never completed and was incorporated into today’s restaurant, complete with a bell tower that never tolled.
Olympia Boulevard, a two-lane road, angles southwest toward what was once the State of NY Department of Mental Hygiene, a large tract now about evenly divided between protected wetlands and Staten Island University Hospital. In the years between those two designations, some maps in the 1970s show an immense blank white space there. Ocean Breeze Park, a largely undeveloped tract of protected wetlands, with hiking trails, was initiated by NYC Parks after the property was ceded by the NYS Department of Mental Hygiene. Though nothing exists there now but weeds and trees, NYC Parks has plans for it and is constructing a therapeutic horse riding arena in Ocean Breeze Park that’ll provide year-round support for physical and occupational therapy programs and include a nearly 5800-square-foot riding arena, stables, areas for feeding and grooming horses, and an observation room for visitors.
On Hurlbert St. and Evergreen and Laconia Aves. I encountered groups of wild turkeys, who scurried away when approached by a human, but also savvy enough to know which local homeowner was ready with bird seed. The story goes that there was a gentleman who had five or 10 of these turkeys in his backyard and didn’t want to keep them anymore, so he let them go. For over two decades these turkeys lived on the south shore, on the beach, reproducing.
Also on Evergreen near Laconia, I found a light-blue 1959 Edsel Ranger. The 1957-1960 Edsels, named for Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford, were considered one of Ford’s biggest flops, despite a heavily-promoted rollout. Around this time they were selling for between $2500 and $3000. Edsels were sold in four different stylings, the Rangers, Pacers, and the higher-priced Citations and Corsairs.
On the southern edge of the old NYS Department of Mental Hygiene tract, Staten Island University Hospital, founded in 1861 and moved in 1890 to the now-demolished Samuel R. Smith Infirmary in New Brighton, SIUH’s most recent relocation was here on Seaview and Mason Aves. Much of this space is also taken up by the South Beach Psychiatric Center, which succeeded the Department of Mental Hygiene.
Because there are few through streets around here, south of the hospital, you turn right onto Olympia Blvd. again, right on Buel, and then left on Slater Blvd., one of the few streets that traverses the New Creek Bluebelt. All pretense to urbanity falls away, and unless you’re in a car, it’s just you, the creek, the phragmites and the ducks.
According to the U.S. Army, “The Staten Island Bluebelt Program is preserving and restoring streams, ponds and other wetland areas—called Bluebelts—in 16 of the island’s natural watershed systems. These watershed systems used to collect storm water runoff during rainstorms, hold it, filter it and gradually release it into the Raritan Bay and Arthur Kill. During a rainstorm, water on the streets needs to to drain off into a storm sewer system so that roads, homes and businesses don’t flood. In many parts of Staten Island, there’s no such system and the rainwater has no place to go. In the areas served by a Bluebelt Program, conventional storm sewers are built in the beds of city streets, but instead of draining into a large trunk storm sewer, the water’s channeled into the Bluebelt wetland systems.”
As Slater Blvd. runs further east, signs of civilization reappear, and tributaries of New Creek are crossed and recrossed. The creek runs from Last Chance Park in Dongan Hills east to Lower Bay separating Staten Island from Brooklyn. I felt content, stalking around the back roads of Staten Island like this. I hadn’t been in this part of town since February 2000. Some of the roads on the page have changed since then, but Midland Beach hasn’t—vast swaths of it are just too swampy to build on.
Slater Blvd. ends in a small cluster of streets along Quincy, all named for Indian tribes. Quincy Ave. trails off into the phragmites past Sioux St., which is lined with tiny frame houses and bungalows, some still lived in, others in need of repair.
Sioux St. ends at Father Capodanno Blvd., the main dragstrip of the South Beach area. It runs along the shoreline, paralleled by the FDR Boardwalk, from Lilypond Ave. to a dead-end past Greeley Ave. at Miller Field.
It was originally part of a Robert Moses plan to build an expressway along Staten Island’s southern shore. The road was called Seaside Blvd., but in 1975, it was renamed for Father Vincent R. Capodanno, a Navy chaplain who died in action, bringing Sacraments to wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War’s Operation Swift in the Que Son Valley in 1967.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)