Walking Is Transportation

WHAT AWAITED ME AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

FORBIDDEN FRUIT, LOW HANGING

Last fall, a Tompkinsville neighbor--an admirer of Walking is Transportation's Vertical Life series, I'm pleased to report--told me he's always wondered where a particular flight of stairs leads. It's clearly visible from Victory Boulevard, just down the hill from Silver Lake Park.

To which I replied, conspiratorially, Me, too.

What made each of us hesitate to investigate further is that the staircase is on private property, church property. Still, the thought tantalized. Just a few big strides from the sidewalk and I'd be there.

Last week, on my first long-ish walk of the season, I put my caution aside and strode confidently onto church property, toward the staircase at the back of a large parking lot.

I tried to look like a parishioner. It didn't come naturally.

What the stairs led me to was this--a macadam parking lot, slathered over what probably was a lawn, some simple perennial beds or even beds of ivy.

The covered-over windows are the perfect accompaniment, completing a setting that manages to be grim and dreary even on a sunny spring day.

Then I walked through the parking lot, unprepared for the part of the building that faces the street.

It's what I believe must have been the original Our Lady of Good Counsel R.C. Church, a small, charming, beautifully sited building with a school building or rectory attached. 

But it seems the original complex, located on Austin Place between Victory Boulevard and Chester Place, wasn't big enough in the church's estimation, and so . . .

. . . in the early 1960s, the church replaced its original building with this brick and poured concrete structure on Victory Boulevard between Austin Place and Louis Street.

Some day, it may be obscured by that generous planting of fruit trees lining the property. So far, so good.

Careful––You Might Like It

NOT HOT: Postcard view (dated 1910) looking south on Westervelt Avenue from Richmond Terrace, St. George, Staten Island. Because this hasn't been a hot neighborhood for slightly more than a century, every building shown in this image is still intact and in a moderately good state of preservation. A portion of our house is shown in the upper left section of the image (notice the double-windowed gable and the spire to its right).

LIVING WHERE THEY WOULDN'T BE CAUGHT DEAD

Despite the sneering disdain of metro journalists who pay two grand a month for a closet in a renovated tenement on Avenue C and Houston Street, it's possible to live where they wouldn't be caught dead and actually like it. On Staten Island, I mean. Specifically, in one of the older neighborhoods on the north shore, near the ferry.

After a while, the plucked-from-the-Midwest streetscapes of Staten Island's north shore stop looking quite as foreign as they did. It starts to seem normal to be able to see the sky without craning your neck. Or to be the only person walking down the street, utterly alone with your thoughts, and not feeling in the least unsafe. You even get used to the quiet.

What You Give Up and What You Get

Don't get me wrong now. Staten Island is hardly Valhalla. We live in a place everybody's heard of but very few actually know--a place routinely overlooked, underserved and dismissed. But there are times when going unnoticed, unacknowledged and underrepresented pays off.

Leaving Manhattan for places like New Brighton, St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton gets you twice the space for half the price, give or take a hundred or two. And maybe a view, a garden or a fireplace as well. There's always a seat on the FREE Staten Island Ferry. Always a chair at the barber's. Always a table at a decent restaurant; no reservations required. At public parks, even on the weekend, it can often seem like everybody's left town. Though the north shore's hilly streets are challenging for cyclists, they're one of the best non-park environments I've found so far as a walker.

My neighbor Martha, who moved to St. George from Battery Park City with her husband and two children, is hyper-alert for signs of gentrification hereabouts. She winces whenever she sees positive media coverage of our area, which she's certain can mean only one thing: She and her family, having found a pleasant place to live they can afford, will be forced out by high rents once again.

Given the national economic downturn and the shaky state of real estate everywhere, including Manhattan, I don't think Martha has a lot to worry about for the forseeable.

Discovered While Walking

This granite curbstone in Tompkinsville was put in place before Staten Island became part of the five-borough consolidated City of New York in 1898. I walked on it, over it and around it for 30 years before noticing it just the other day.

AS IF FOR THE FIRST TIME

After my friend Simon relocated to Santa Barbara from St. George several years ago, he came back for a visit and remarked how old and small everything about New York seemed after a year or two in the West.

Before I had a chance to be offended by the words 'old' and 'small,' he added, "I feel as though I never really saw the city when I lived here, maybe because I never really looked."

Simon's words came back to me the other day when I happened to see, as if for the first time, the curbstone I was stepping onto from the roadway, shown in the photo at the top of this entry. I saw it was made of granite, still serviceable, and beautiful, after more than a century of service.

MOSTLY STILL HERE

What makes me pretty sure that curbstone has been in place more than 100 years are the markings chiseled into its surface: "TK AR 2." Though I can only speculate as to what the numeral '2' refers to, I'm a lot more certain about the pair of paired letters that precedes it.

Here's why:

The caption of this undated, un-postmarked, hand-colored postcard reads, "Public Square, Arrietta Street, Tompkinsville, S.I." The 'TK' incised into the curbstone stands for Tompkinsville; the 'AR' for Arrietta Street . The buildings clustered on the right of the image are on the north side of today's Victory Boulevard, formerly Richmond Turnpike, between Central Avenue/Bay Street and today's St. Marks Place, formerly Arrietta Street.

This row of simple post-Civil War red brick commercial/residential structures, like the granite curbstone only steps away, owe their survival to disinvestment and decline that began after World War II and accelerated with the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Will they survive the visions of the developers, who see St. George/Tompkinsville and Stapleton not as neighborhoods but as a concept called 'Downtown Staten Island'?

The granite curb shown at the top of this entry can be found at the northwest corner of St. Marks Place and Victory Boulevard, outside the Liggett-Rexall drug store.

Here's another postcard image of that corner, postmarked 1918.