There’s no sidewalk on the north side of Arthur Kill Rd. at the Rossville Burying Ground aka Blazing Star Burying Ground in southwest Staten Island, so the only passersby on the graveyard site here are motorists, most of whom speed by so quickly they miss the cemetery, here for at least 260 years. Hiteita Simonson’s (1722-1789) marker has been by the side of the road here since the year of George Washington’s inauguration. It’s fascinating that such an ancient relic is within plain sight of the car wash, gym and succession of eateries along the south side of the road.
I’ve been to Rossville many times. Under its placid suburban veneer, there’s over 300 years of history. The British arrived around 1684 and in the early days the area was called Smoking Point and later, Blazing Star, for a long-lost tavern (a separate Staten Island locale was called Bull’s Head, after another such tavern).
By the 1830s the southwest Staten Island area was named for a local wealthy landowner, William Ross (who built a replica of Windsor Castle near the Blazing Star tavern), while the small town was known before the Revolution by the picturesque name Blazing Star. Ferries, and later steamships whose wrecks are still sinking in the Arthur Kill, connected it with New Jersey. After the West Shore Expressway was built in the 1970s, it spurred development south of the highway, with streets filled with what songwriter Malvina Reynolds called “little boxes.” North of the expressway are shipwrecks, auto repair shops, abandoned cemeteries, and assorted detritus. Today Rossville is fairly compact and can be defined by the Arthur Kill waterway, the West Shore Expressway, the South Shore Golf Course and Woodrow Rd.
A couple of things happened by the mid-1970s that pulled Rossville Ave. from near-rurality: a devastating 1973 brush fire burned down many local residences, and the 1976 opening of the West Shore Expressway prompted local farmers to sell suddenly profitable land to local developers, who built the tract houses that gave Rossville the look it has today.
Behind the trees in the cemetery, Arthur Kill Rd. makes one of its closest approaches to its titular body of water. The Blazing Star Ferry ran from here to Woodbridge, New Jersey and steamboats still docked here in the 1800s. I’ve come here since the late-1990s to gaze at the collection of rotting, corroding wrecks found in the shipyard here at Arthur Kill Rd. and Rossville Ave.
Founded in the 1950s by Arthur Witte Jr., the shipyard, once described by The New York Times as an “accidental marine museum,” the Witte Marine Scrap Yard accumulated far more vessels than it could dismember, and the boats quickly piled up. Arthur Witte intentionally stored the vast collection of ships for parts, but the wrecks became a habitat to teeming colonies of underwater fauna. A change in environmental law mandated that these eco-systems be untouched and the hulks endured. Over 400 ships inhabit the yard, now known as the Don John Iron and Metal Scrap Processing Facility. The junkyard is home to one of the largest collections of historic boats in the United States and has attracted a deluge of maritime historians from across the country. Some of these craft have tales as gripping as the metropolis of Manhattan itself.
Vessels from all decades of the 20th century lie in a state of decomposition and rust at this scrapyard at Arthur Kill Rd. and Rossville Ave. Most are tugs or cargo ships. The former piers are for the most part unpassable; these wrecks are officially located in the Witte Scrapyard and are off limits to the public, which hasn’t stopped dozens if not hundreds of urban explorers and gawkers from wandering out to these hulks and snapping away.
Since Witte’s death in 1980 his descendants have slowly dismantled the boatyard, known by some locals as “the boneyard.” Among the ships “interred” at Witte was the fireboat Abram S. Hewitt, which aided in rescuing survivors of the General Slocum steamboat disaster in 1904, the US Navy submarine hunter PC-1264, “one of only two U.S. Navy ships to have a predominately African-American enlisted complement during the war,” and the tug YOG-64, which still remains.
I’ve often called Pelham Cemetery in City Island, Bronx, New York’s only waterside cemetery, but I’ll amend that to include the Blazing Star Burying Ground (aka Sleight Homestead Graveyard) on Arthur Kill Rd. east of Rossville Ave. It was founded before 1751, as that’s the date on its oldest gravestone. The stones bear names familiar to Staten Island residents aware of the names on its street map: Sleight, Seguine, LaForge, Poillon. The last burial was in 1865 for John G. Shea, of the same family Shea’s Lane, now Rossville Ave., commemorated.
According to Find A Grave, the Seguine family has the most family members buried here, with 11 of the surviving 46 gravesites. Here’s one of the 18th century sandstone markers, which still remain thoroughly legible: though sandstone can and does decay, the marble and limestone markers that followed sandstone in the 19th century are much more subject to the predations of wind, pollution and rain. Israel Oakley (1739-1824), whose gravestone is the largest in the cemetery, was the great-great-grandfather of Staten Island historian William T. Davis, an entomologist by trade who wrote several Staten Island histories and guidebooks. He co-founded the Staten Island Museum, which features a large preserved insect collection.
St. Luke’s Ave. is one of the oldest routes in Rossville. It runs one block from Arthur Kill Rd. to Veterans Road North, a service road of the West Shore Expressway. In 1844 St. Luke’s Church was founded in Rossville by several trustees of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Richmondtown, among them William E. Ross. The new church was designed by famed Staten Island painter Jasper Cropsey. The attendant cemetery (see below) was also founded at this time, incorporating two older and smaller cemeteries belonging to the Woglom and Vaughn family cemeteries, where the older grave markers are found.
Though St. Luke’s Church was consolidated with St. Stephen’s Church in Tottenville in 1945 and Rossville became a Staten Island ghost town until the 1970s, two church buildings on the old property was still there, the parsonage, restored by the nearby Old Bermuda Inn as a bed and breakfast.
Another St. Luke’s church building is now Big Nose Kate’s Saloon, on a bend of Arthur Kill Rd. between St. Luke’s Ave. and Hervey St. Named on WCBS-TV’s list of best biker bars in NYC, the saloon is named for a perhaps better-known venue in Tombstone, AZ; both commemorate Mary Katherine Horony Cummings (1850-1940), the companion of John Henry “Doc” Holliday, dentist and participant in the famed Gunfight at the OK Corral. Big Nose Kate’s ghost supposedly haunts the Arizona saloon.
A fancier venue used for wedding receptions, the nearby Old Bermuda Inn was originally constructed in 1832 (The New York AIA Guide reports 1855) by the Mersereau family. The older part of the expanse is at Arthur Kill Rd. and Hervey St., but the original restaurant has greatly expanded in recent years, converted to a wedding caterer and event space.
Another tangible remnant of St. Luke’s Church is its cemetery, established in 1844 between Zebra Pl. and Bloomingdale Rd. In 1874 the church began selling gravesites to the public and thus, it’s always been non-sectarian and non-segregated. St. Luke’s was absorbed into St. Stephen’s in Tottenville; as early as 1920, St. Luke’s was losing parishioners, as by then the steamboat landing and local post office had closed, the mansions were becoming dilapidated and the stench from the factories in Carteret, NJ across the Arthur Kill became overwhelming. Today, the cemetery is well-maintained and kept neat by the diocese of the Episcopal, or Anglican, church of New York.
Two smaller and older cemeteries, the Woglom and Vaughn family burial grounds, were incorporated into St. Luke’s Cemetery when it was founded in 1844. Today the delineations between the cemeteries are indistinct, but several very old stones give a general idea where they were. Unlike Blazing Star, many of these markers are unreadable unless you want to spend time clearing the moss.
—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)