The Lenape had called Staten Island Aquehonga Manacknong, “the place of the bad woods,” but in 1609 Henry Hudson rechristened it in honor of the Dutch parliament, the Staaten-Generaal. Later, the British renamed it Richmond, for the duke of the same name, a bastard son of Charles II. For decades, Staten Island was officially if not popularly known as Richmond Borough, until, in 1975, the name changed again. (For a brief period in the 1990s, after the Wu-Tang Clan blew up, you’d also hear Shaolin.) Staten Island’s most apt name dates back nearly a century, however. Since 1928, when the opening of two bridges to New Jersey prompted a miniature real estate boom in this heretofore sleepy part of New York City, it’s been called “the Forgotten Borough,” a moniker that is by turns descriptive and pejorative.
You might think that the average Staten Islander would resent the designation. But we cherish the chip on our shoulders. We’re the whitest borough, with the highest rate of homeownership and the second highest median income. We’re the only borough where most people live in detached, single-family homes—but somehow, we’re the oppressed ones. Somehow, we’re the chumps who are always getting spit on, chewed up, forgotten. And who is it that’s doing the forgetting? The liberals, Manhattanites, the policymakers, Albany, whoever else you want to blame.
In fact, most Staten Islanders think that it’s better when those people forget us. When they remember us, nothing good ever happens. Look at the Fresh Kills Landfill, or as we called it, the Dump. Back in the 1940s, the city needed a place to put its garbage, which was fast outgrowing the capacity of local landfills. City officials said the arrangement was just going to be for a few years, until they had a chance to build out a network of incinerators around the city. Opened in 1948, the Dump instead became Staten Island’s single most notable geographic feature and its claim to ignominy through much of the twentieth century. Already the largest landfill in the world by 1955, it consisted of literal mountains of garbage, barged in from all over the city and then trucked, shoveled, and backhoed into alps of rubbish atop the salt marsh on the Island’s New Jersey side. Over time, the trash would settle, oozing noxious fumes into the air and God knows what into the water. I grew up on the North Shore, where the Dump wasn’t part of daily life, but whenever we drove across the Island it made its olfactory presence known. Even in a car with all the windows up, I could smell it long before I could see it, and long after its crags of trash had receded into the rearview mirror.
We all hated the Dump. The odor was a pervasive reminder that for many people, Staten Island would never amount to much more than the landfill. If anyone wanted proof of what the city thought of us, you couldn’t ask for anything more conclusive than the barges full of garbage. It was an obvious metaphor, one that fueled provincialist resentments for decades: anything coming across the bay from the rest of the city, especially anything imposed by politicians, was trash. Much of that mentality still persists. Last year, Staten Islanders responded predictably when the city moved to house hundreds of newly arrived migrants in makeshift facilities around the Island. Since spring 2022, a much greater number of migrants than usual had been making their way to New York from the U.S.-Mexico border, but by summer 2023, the trend had peaked. The city had to put tens of thousands of people somewhere thanks to its right-to-shelter law, which mandates that anyone seeking a bed must be offered one. With a shelter system already stretched to the limit, authorities decided to ship some migrants to Staten Island and convert two disused properties into short-term housing.
Ultimately, Staten Island did not host a particularly large number of migrants; the people sent to Staten Island comprised only about 2 percent of people housed in city shelters overall, despite Staten Island representing around 6 percent of New York’s population. But for some Staten Islanders, even one was too many. In August and September of last year, their anger—at the shelters, at the city, at the Democratic mayor, at the Democratic president, at the migrants (people primarily from Latin America and Africa who had escaped circ*mstances far more horrific than living next to the Dump), at the idea of immigration itself—exploded into protests, some of them turning violent.
At St. John Villa Academy, a shuttered Catholic high school acquired by the city, these protests went on for weeks. Hundreds of Staten Islanders turned up at rallies, decked out in camo and U.S. flags, holding signs saying close the border and protect our children. One nearby resident erected a giant blue yard sign reading no f%kin way! within view of the school and used a loudspeaker to broadcast a message that said “immigrants are not safe here” in six languages all day. But things got really out of hand at Island Shores, a former senior citizens’ home owned and operated in Midland Beach by Homes for the Homeless, a shelter operator that contracts with the city. On the evening of September 19, an estimated one thousand protesters blocked a bus of migrants. Shouting “send them back” and “protect our children,” they surrounded the bus, striking the windows and blocking the doors. According to the Staten Island Advance, a man was observed “yelling he was going to kill migrants while dragging his thumb across his neck repeatedly in a threatening motion.” Cops made ten arrests; one man was charged with assault on a police officer after the cop complained of a knee injury. Hours after arriving, the travelers trapped on the bus finally disembarked while the crowd pelted them with stones, some, according to the Advance, as large as the palm of your hand.
It was shameful, and it was classic Staten Island. The city’s handling of the migrants was controversial everywhere, but the protests on Staten Island were the largest and the most explosive demonstrations against the shelter policy, in part because Staten Island already has an active right-wing ecosystem. (Even Democratic elected officials on the Island opposed the placement of the shelters; State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, for example, went as far to appear on Fox and Friends to stress respect for the neighborhood and criticize the city’s lack of collaboration with local politicians.) The city agreed to close the shelter at St. John Villa Academy after an inspection discovered inadequate fire safety measures. While politicians and protesters who spoke to the press had focused on the unsuitability of both the neighborhoods and the facilities for housing recent arrivals, the hostile tactics targeting the people housed in the shelters, rather than those who made the decision to house them there, made it clear that these were hate rallies. They also showcased the ways that Staten Island’s political culture, its whole public life, even, is now dominated by some of its most radical and antisocial members.
Meanwhile, the migrant shelter issue remains unresolved. At Island Shores, protesters were still rallying (albeit in much smaller numbers) in March 2024 to “Bring Back Our Seniors”—senior residents had been evicted ahead of a sale that never happened, the facility sitting empty until its conversion into a shelter. Only two Staten Island shelters remain open. A further planned shelter in an Episcopal church was scrapped in January after clergy “received disturbing threats from anti-immigrant groups.” Another new shelter is planned, this time in the working-class, majority-minority Port Richmond section of the borough. The antimigrant coalition now shows signs of expanding: this shelter has met resistance from both Democratic and Republican elected officials and even representatives from the Staten Island NAACP. These groups emphasize Eric Adams’s administration’s mishandling of the issue and continued preference for last-minute, unilateral action, but in accepting the inherent undesirability of migrant shelters, they also legitimate some of Staten Island’s most hateful voices.
2020 Vision
People hate on Staten Island because it’s far away, because it’s trashy, because there’s nothing to do, because people have accents and fake tans and live in McMansions and do the mob wife aesthetic without it being a bit. I defend Staten Island whenever someone starts mouthing off about what a dump it is, or whenever some transplant who’s lived in New York for a half-dozen years admits to never having set foot there—you literally know nothing about it, so what gives you the right to talk sh*t? There’s half a million Staten Islanders. There’s no way the stereotype you’re thinking of applies to all of us.
There’s no way the stereotype you’re thinking of applies to all of us.
With all that said, though, the truth is that Staten Island kind of sucks, in the way all New York suburbs kind of suck. Housing is expensive. Public transit is not great. Traffic is terrible. Commutes are scandalously long. Staten Island shares these features in part because it shares similar developmental and demographic patterns: the borough developed mainly during the suburbanization boom of the 1960s, as new bridges and highways funneled capital for residential development further out from the center of the city. The major difference between Staten Island and the suburbs is that Staten Island remained politically yoked to New York City, for better or for worse. Other places around the metro area are just as politically wayward, but at least residents get to make their own laws. Staten Islanders, on the other hand, act out.
Lately, it seems Staten Islanders have been acting out more than usual. I don’t remember them seeming this angry, this alienated, this desperate. Whenever I’m home now, it seems, I’m surrounded by Blue Lives Matter flags, Three Percenter decals on cars, and f*ck joe biden signs. Over the past few years, an increasingly vocal and mobilized political right has come to control Staten Island politics. It’s a change that’s as much stylistic as it is substantive: the Island’s politicians have often been Republicans, but they haven’t always been this distasteful. You might trace the roots of the problem back to the Tea Party in the late 2000s (the people who organized to elect Michael Grimm, the FBI agent-turned-convicted-felon best known for threatening to throw a reporter off a balcony in the Capitol), the Island’s fanatical support for Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s, and even the 1970s and 1980s rise of the conservative congressman and later Borough President Guy Molinari.
Still, 2020 felt like a tipping point. That year saw large rallies against Covid restrictions, which included at least one bar owner declaring that he would not follow Board of Health directives and that his bar was an “autonomous zone” where Covid-spreading activities would be protected. He got his bar shut down, but not before he ran over a cop. The Blue Lives Matter thing only goes so far when we’re talking about your right to go out for a beer at the height of a global pandemic. But if Covid pushed Islanders to break the law, the George Floyd uprisings reaffirmed their inherent respect for law enforcement. The massive demonstrations against police power were perceived as direct affronts to the 3,500 Staten Islanders who are NYPD officers and the 490,000 other Staten Islanders who are related to them by blood and/or marriage. The electoral defeat of Donald Trump, for whom Staten Islanders voted by a fifteen-point margin, was the final blow that rounded out a destabilizing year.
As in many other Republican-dominated places, Staten Island Republicans of every stripe still take their cues from Trump, his policies, and his rhetoric. Here, they are led by Nicole Malliotakis, the sitting congresswoman and borough powerbroker. A Greek-Cuban Republican, Malliotakis has evolved over the years from a Marco Rubio supporter to a full-throated Trump-embracer. Other key figures are Joe Borelli, the city councilman who casts himself as the party intellectual because he sometimes adjuncts at the College of Staten Island; Vito Fossella, the borough president and former congressman who has clawed his way back into political life after resigning when a 2008 drunk-driving arrest led to the discovery of his Virginia-based second family; Curtis Sliwa (not from Staten Island but frequently sighted there), talk radio host, founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group, and failed Republican mayoral candidate; and John Tabacco, the Staten Island-born Newsmax host whose show, Wise Guys, “brings to light the hypocrisy and dangerous policies of the elitist government class” (the show’s logo uses the Godfather font). And then there’s Scott LoBaido, the organizer, artist, and self-styled “Creative Patriot” who first became famous for throwing horse manure at the Brooklyn Museum in protest of the museum’s decision to display Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting that used elephant dung as one of its media. In 2020, LoBaido painted a twelve-foot tall star-spangled T for Trump, which was displayed on the lawn of local activist Sam Pirozzolo. When the T burned down in a suspected arson, LoBaido built it back bigger and better. In 2022, Pirozzolo was elected to the New York State Assembly.
This same crowd shows up at just about every right-wing event, providing political cover while simultaneously egging the mob on to ever greater acts of depravity. They believe in their cause, but they are also there to have a good time among their constituents. Curtis Sliwa, after all, doesn’t get all that many opportunities to address his hundreds of screaming fans.
Running Riot
It’s no coincidence that the local politicians and agitators have names like Fossella, Borelli, and LoBaido. You probably think of white ethnics when you think of Staten Island culture. The borough is, per capita, the most Italian American county in the United States, and though the Irish and Italians had settled here before the Verrazzano Bridge, even more of them flocked to the South Shore once the bridge was open. My mother was born on Staten Island, but my father’s family came over from Brooklyn not long after he was born in the early 1960s. (Staten Island’s population has more than doubled since the bridge opened in 1964.) Like almost all the new arrivals, they were white Brooklynites looking to spread out. Many of these new Staten Islanders came to escape the crowded city and to live in more spacious surroundings with people who were more like them. They also watched with anxiety as more and more people kept coming. That’s part of the reason Staten Islanders always seem ready to pull up the ladder behind them: eventually, they figure, so many people will live here that Staten Island won’t be Staten Island anymore. It will just be full, and all the things they came here for—the space, the houses, the residential neighborhoods, the hom*ogeneity—will have been lost.
The Island remains racially hom*ogenous not because other kinds of people don’t want to live here, but because many can’t afford it, and those who do manage are made to feel unwelcome—or worse.
Despite the white majority, this slice of suburbia within the city has long attracted people of color too. A longstanding black town, Sandy Ground, is described by the Sandy Ground Historical Society as “the oldest continuously inhabited free black settlement in the United States.” Not all the people who came to Staten Island after the bridge were white either. Audre Lorde is not often thought of as a Staten Island writer, but she lived on the Island for nearly fifteen years. Attracted by the idea of a large house, a yard, and a garden, the Harlem-born Lorde purchased 207 St. Paul’s Avenue in Stapleton Heights in the early 1970s. Even on the more urbanized and relatively more diverse North Shore, though, integration into the neighborhood cannot have been easy for Lorde. Her poem “Outlines,” a meditation on navigating an interracial lesbian relationship as a middle-aged black woman, characterizes the racist intimidation that lingered under the surface of Staten Island life: “Ten blocks down the street / a cross is burning / we are a black woman and white woman / with two black children / you talk with our next-door neighbors / I register for a shotgun.” As College of Staten Island professor David Allen notes in Gotham, the Gotham Center for New York City History’s blog, Lorde had saved a 1979 Advance article describing a cross burning in New Dorp on the South Shore, not far from the Midland Beach neighborhood that hosted some of last year’s migrant protests. It was one of several cross burnings across New York that summer; in late September another cross burned in Fort Wadsworth, even closer to Lorde’s home.
The Island remains so racially hom*ogenous not because other kinds of people don’t want to live here but because many can’t afford it (Staten Islanders, for all their complaining about being downtrodden, are substantially better off financially than the average New Yorker, mainly due to high rates of homeownership), and those who do manage are made to feel unwelcome—or worse. Staten Islanders, even or perhaps especially those who came after the bridge, have long preferred racial exclusivity. In 1980, a year after Lorde saved the clipping from the Advance, the Island was 89 percent white; even today, some of the neighborhoods on the extreme southern tip of the Island are supermajority white and less than 1 percent black. (There are few neighborhoods on Staten Island in which a migrant shelter and its residents could go unnoticed, or blend into the surroundings.) Antidevelopment battles on the Island were often driven by the fear of building dense housing that might attract non-white residents, as was the case when neighborhood activists defeated the 1970s South Richmond Plan, an urban renewal project that would have brought urban planning and denser development to the South Shore. Like contemporary antimigrant protesters, the 1970s antidevelopment activists were so successful in their efforts to kill the plan that New York lawmakers instead ended up adopting zoning rules that drastically limited density without making provisions for affordable or low-income housing.
While most opposition to integration consisted of ostensibly peaceful civic engagement, violent racist encounters occurred with some frequency, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, residents of New Dorp burned a home purchased by a black family intending to move into the neighborhood. At New Dorp High School, where in 1980 white students outnumbered black students thirty to one, an unfounded rumor that a white student had been assaulted sparked a race riot. Black students were eventually evacuated in buses as their white classmates pelted them with rocks and bottles. In 1985, again at New Dorp High, a group of thirty white students targeted a black student who had been accused of stealing another student’s gold chain, then punching his friend in the face. Hoping to find him, they ambushed a school bus, attacking the vehicle with baseball bats and chains and smashing the windows. (Having already been arrested, the student was not on the bus.) New Dorp High School was a hotbed of such conflict, but New Dorp was far from the only Staten Island neighborhood (indeed, far from the only New York neighborhood) marred by racist violence in the 1980s.
Consider Rosebank, a historically Italian American neighborhood about two miles away from Audre Lorde’s home. Though Rosebank is located near several of the Island’s black neighborhoods, it has long maintained its mainly white, mainly Italian identity. It has also been associated with both racist violence and de facto segregation: in another one of her Staten Island poems, Lorde calls the neighborhood “the home of the Staten Island ku klux klan.” The year after she left the Island, a motorist struck and killed Derrick Antonio Tyrus, a black teenager who had relocated from Alabama to Staten Island. Tyrus had been out walking with friends when they got into an argument with a white man outside a bar who reportedly said, “What are you doing in this neighborhood? You don’t belong here.” One of Tyrus’s friends alleged that the man had used a racial slur. The boys ran off, with most running in one direction but Tyrus running in another. That was the last they saw of him.
The investigation into Tyrus’s death hinged on the questions of whether he had been deliberately chased by the man from the bar and whether he died as a result. Early on in the investigation, detectives told press that they felt “certain that there was some type of racial incident.” (A New York Times reporter sent to the neighborhood to cover the story would find that a graffitied rosebank no. 1 kkk had been left on an overpass for as long as anyone there could remember.) Tyrus’s death came after a string of racist attacks on black New Yorkers by police and citizens alike. Less than a year after Tyrus’s death, a group of white youths in Bensonhurst murdered Yusuf Hawkins. Ultimately, the authorities could not determine or prove that Tyrus had been deliberately chased to his death. The investigation was closed, and no one was charged. (Tyrus’s family alleged a cover-up, calling, along with then-state senator and future governor David Paterson, for a special prosecutor to be appointed in the case.) Much the same story would play out more than two-and-a-half decades later when Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan failed to secure an indictment against white NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who used an illegal chokehold that killed Eric Garner, a black Staten Islander, in 2014.
Today, Rosebank is hardly the Italian stronghold it once was, and is now home to a substantial Latino population in addition to more black and Asian residents. Still, on November 4, 2008, the night of Barack Obama’s presidential election, a group of four young men who called themselves the “Rosebank Krew” decided to ride out and hunt down black people. Over the course of a series of hate crimes that lasted over ninety minutes and took place in a handful of neighborhoods across the Island, the four men drove to Park Hill, a black neighborhood, and beat Ali Kamara, a black immigrant teenager from Liberia, with a pipe and a police baton while screaming slurs. They stopped outside a hair salon to shout racial abuse; threatened a Latino man, demanding to know who he’d voted for; and pushed a black man to the pavement. Afterward, they ran down a white man whom they had mistaken for black with a car. That victim, Ronald Forte, spent forty-five days comatose as a result of his injuries. Three members of the crew had Italian last names; one of the perpetrators, however, Michael Contreras, went by “Dominican Mike.”
People here generally want to pretend that Staten Island has moved past its integration troubles (except, I suppose, where migrants and asylum seekers are concerned) and that any lingering issues of interpersonal violence are isolated. When Derrick Antonio Tyrus died, many of the residents interviewed in Rosebank by reporters distanced themselves from the neighborhood’s racist reputation. In the aftermath of the 2008 election night attacks, condemnations of the attackers and protestations that they didn’t represent the area were stronger still.
It’s true that white supremacist organizations like the Klan don’t play a role in daily life on Staten Island or in Staten Island politics. But saying that Staten Island is no longer racist is bullsh*t. It’s unbelievably, casually racist, in a way that is familiar to anyone from New York City. This racism runs the gamut from the softer stuff you’ll hear from the official mouthpieces of right-wing protests (we just want to keep this neighborhood safe for families), to a self-congratulatory piety about being among the elect (why would we want them living here after we see what they do to their own neighborhoods?), to the type of guy who openly employs slurs for every ethnic group under the sun, including vintage ones that you have to look up definitions for. It’s the racism of being OK with taking the train with, and working alongside, people from all over the world—as long as they go back to their own neighborhood at the end of the day, and you go back to yours. This mentality is all over New York: just look at the Upper West Side, one of the city’s toniest and most liberal neighborhoods, where residents have organized over the last decade to oppose both school integration and the placement of homeless and migrant shelters. But small-mindedness predominates on Staten Island because it’s, well, literally an island.
Sexit
Which is to say there are more little Staten Islands around New York City than you’d think. Anywhere you have low-density housing, high rates of homeownership, and strong local control over development, you’ll find the same attitudes that produce Staten Island politics. Staten Islanders aren’t the only ones who find the concept of new neighbors revolting. They’re just the most obnoxious about it. In April 2024, the Adams administration held hearings on their City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposal, a suite of zoning changes that would make it easier to build and develop dense, multiunit housing across the city, including, or even especially, in low-density neighborhoods. In the Bronx, the plan prompted talk of secession in predominantly white neighborhoods like Riverdale (already home to a longstanding secessionist movement), Throgs Neck, and City Island. As a Staten Islander, this is a delightful idea. Secession from New York? We invented it. In fact, it’s the borough’s only positive political project and has been for decades.
Saying that Staten Island is no longer racist is bullsh*t. It’s unbelievably, casually racist, in a way that is familiar to anyone from New York City.
The secessionists are right that Staten Islanders contend with an asymmetry of political power that comes from living in a hinterland of New York City. Mayoral elections are high stakes, electing an executive with broad power to shape city policy, and Staten Islanders almost always back the losing candidate. The proportional representation of New York City Council means Staten Island, despite its nominal equality with Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens as a borough, sends only three council members to Manhattan, hardly enough to constitute a powerful bloc in a legislature of fifty-one. Staten Islanders live with what the political scientists Daniel C. Kramer and Richard M. Flanagan call a “democracy deficit,” meaning that their politics are far more likely to express themselves through ugly protest and antisocial display than coalition-building and legislative reform.
This is part of the reason why secession is a perennial hobbyhorse. The first real interest in seceding came during the controversy over the Dump. The landfill was a betrayal of the borough’s promise. What good is a little house, a little yard, a little white picket fence, if it constantly smells like garbage? By the time the city charter was amended in 1989 to remove the Board of Estimate, a governmental body that helped give the borough president disproportionate representation in decisions about major projects and city spending, Staten Islanders tired of Fresh Kills had begun to think secession deserved a hearing.
The movement reached its apex with a nonbinding referendum in the November 1993 election, in which 65 percent of Staten Islanders voted to secede from New York City (more, in terms of percentage, than voted for Donald Trump in either election). While there were no concrete plans to implement the will of the voters, the result was a strong testament to Staten Island’s alienation. Also on the ballot that November was mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani, the philandering Italian American prosecutor who hated the mob and loved the police (and now, of course, is a sad-looking though still lecherous, disbarred defendant in one of Trump’s many criminal trials). He narrowly defeated David Dinkins in a rematch of the 1989 mayoral election that Dinkins won. This time, Staten Islanders were so eager to vote for secession that turnout jumped by over 23,000 voters (a 19 percent increase over the previous mayoral election). Giuliani, who received 84 percent of the Island’s votes, won by only 44,000 votes out of the 1.8 million cast citywide. In other words, Staten Island’s increased turnout gave Giuliani about half his margin of victory. He rewarded Islanders by closing the Dump, which is now being converted to a city park, the largest in New York City in over a century.
Now, under Eric Adams, secession is back, thanks mainly to Councilman Joe Borelli, who has cannily used the issue to raise his political profile. Irrespective of whether it’s even possible, it’s just stupid. Just this year, Brooklyn City Council member Justin Brannan asked the city’s Independent Budget Office to prepare a report on the potential economic consequences of secession. The projections were grim: because Staten Island is so residential, and because it has a much smaller commercial tax base than the city as a whole, an independent city-county of Staten Island would be born into a fiscal crisis. The budget office estimates that the only way to balance the books would be to raise property taxes or cut services like schools, libraries, police and fire departments, public transit, and more. Staten Island would also lose economies of scale in purchasing and service provision and would incur new expenses, like buying water from the New York City system and building a new jail. Even the bridge toll discounts and the free ferry, both concessions to Islanders’ needs to travel into other boroughs, might have to go away or at least be renegotiated.
Call it Sexit: as in Britain, Staten Island’s leadership would gleefully plunge the borough into an economic nightmare just for the sake of sticking it to everyone else and boosting their profiles. Most of their constituents would likewise be happy to do themselves an injury just to spite the rest of the city. There’s no doubt that another secession referendum would pass, perhaps as resoundingly as it did in 1993. The migrant shelters have not helped already strained relationships with the city, and, in fairness, there’s no strategic reason for a Democratic city administration to prioritize the interests of Staten Islanders, since they will never be part of any Democratic mayor’s electoral coalition. Beyond the shelters, a host of local issues threaten to continue inflaming tensions. These include the buildout of renewable energy storage systems (basically giant batteries) in residential neighborhoods; proposed zoning changes that could increase density in residential neighborhoods; and, of course, the now-stalled and likely dead congestion pricing plan for cars entering lower Manhattan, which Staten Islanders seem to believe was designed as a f*ck you specifically to them.
What Staten Island would gain is its independence, the right to govern itself according to whatever value system its voters choose. According to today’s Staten Island secessionists, Staten Island should leave the city because Islanders deserve the chance to preserve their way of life. So what are we preserving? Staten Islanders have higher rates of smoking, heart disease, obesity, and cancer than other New Yorkers (some of this may itself be the result of environmental factors related to the landfill, oil storage, and other polluting industries located on or near the Island). And anyway, what else is so different from much of the rest of New York? Staten Islanders’ preferences—for “law and order,” for NIMBYism, for macho tough guy acts, for constant griping despite enjoying relative economic security and the seemingly unlimited indulgence of both the local and tabloid media—are all as New York as can be. What sets Staten Island apart is that it’s the only borough in which these tendencies go practically unmixed with any of the other character traits that define New Yorkers: say, culture, urbanity, cosmopolitanism, or tolerance. In most boroughs, there’s plenty of both kinds. On the Island, the balance is heavily skewed in favor of the chuds.
Island Time
Maybe you feel that I’ve been unfair to Staten Island here. (You’d probably be from Staten Island, then.) That under the guise of explaining, I’ve joined the chorus of haters who can’t conceive of anything good coming out of the Island at all. So let’s give Staten Island its due: the food is excellent. The views of the harbor, the city, and the bay are incredible. It’s got a beach, a boardwalk, and acres of parks. As mentioned, half a million people live there, which, in terms of population, makes it bigger than Miami, bigger than Oakland, bigger than Minneapolis, and catching up to Atlanta. In any group of half a million, you’re going to find some wonderful people and some truly terrible ones. Despite the growth, the old New York ways on the Island haven’t been fully replaced by international monoculture in the way most of Manhattan and huge parts of Brooklyn have. There are no Cavas and no Pain Quotidiens. There is, as far as I know, only one third-wave coffee shop.
Staten Islanders have higher rates of smoking, heart disease, obesity, and cancer than other New Yorkers.
I have a little girl now, and I even sometimes fantasize about moving home and raising her there. Doesn’t she deserve the same birthright as me? I’m a fourth-generation Staten Islander; if my kid grew up there, she’d be fifth-generation. And it is still, technically, New York City, so she’d get a little street cred. Mostly, though, I worry it’s not worth it for her—growing up in a faraway place that everyone looks down on.
These are the kind of things you think about when you can easily choose where to settle down and raise your kids. The tens of thousands of migrants who’ve come to New York didn’t have that luxury. Many of them didn’t pick the city, and none of them chose Staten Island. Staten Island may call itself the forgotten borough, but it’s the migrants who have more of a claim to having been forgotten than anyone. Nearly a year after the huge increase in the number of arrivals, most remain housed in city shelters, while only 5 percent have found a permanent or semipermanent stable housing situation; 92 percent continue to seek temporary or informal employment, and only 7 percent have been able to receive work permits. This has led to an explosion in informal street vending, particularly in and around public transit. The city has responded with more policing—and Eric Adams’s suggestion that migrants might make good lifeguards for the city if they can get status, since he believes them to be great swimmers (presumably because he thinks they swam across the Rio Grande).
It’s unlikely that many of the migrants who’ve arrived in the city in the past few years will have the opportunity to remain permanently. New York is the most difficult state in which to win an asylum case: only around 5 percent of such cases are granted. As the Democratic Party looks to tighten restrictions in a play to outflank the Republicans on immigration, that number is set to fall further still. The odds are that the migrants currently housed on Staten Island won’t settle down there. They’ll end up moved, resettled, or sent back. Among those few who are lucky enough to win their court cases, would any of them choose to stay on the Island? Unlikely, given the welcome they’ve received from our residents. And that’s by design: the protests are intended to make living on Staten Island, even for a few months, so unpleasant that no one wants to attempt it.
The facts are, however, that no matter how much Staten Island Republicans and anti-immigrant activists want to stand athwart history, Staten Island is changing. Soon, the borough will no longer be majority white: in fact, between the 2010 and 2020 census, whites went from constituting 64 percent of the population to only 56 percent. By 2030, if this trend holds, Staten Island will, like all other boroughs, be majority-minority. As the white population declines, every other racial group on the Island has grown. Latinos now constitute nearly a fifth of the population, while Asians are the fastest-growing racial group on the Island. The black population has also increased, if modestly.
With the white majority’s days numbered, I wonder how much Staten Island’s culture will change along with its demographics. So far, each successive generation of new Islanders has managed to oppose the coming of the next wave, and maybe nothing better sums up the dominant Staten Island outlook than “I got mine.” Because for everyone who comes to Staten Island seeking a shot, there are many more who are here because they’ve already made it. The existing arrangements of political power and influence in the borough still favor the classic Staten Island way of seeing the world: small, provincial, suspicious of outsiders and of change. But things can’t stay the same forever, particularly as major population shifts continue. The anti-immigrant protests, and the politics that made them possible, may be the beginning of the end for the old Staten Island ways.
That’s the optimistic view, anyway. The alternative? The mob wins—forever.
