Try To Get In a Staten Island State of Mind

Unstably tethered to the southeastern edge of Brooklyn, Staten Island welcomes no one, and no one welcomes Staten Island. Every afternoon, while the great orange ferry docks at Fort George, the ship’s bow weighs heavy on the sea as digital cameras snap their final shots of downtown Manhattan. Then all turn a fretful face to the shore and race to catch the same boat right back home.

Yet for all the derision it bears, Staten Island has little ammunition to stave off the jeering throngs. Its two most famous emblems, the Staten Island Ferry and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, principally involve leaving its shores. Amidst the industrial wastelands of New Jersey, the island sprawls in pseudo-suburban mediocrity. Older homes are clad in aluminum siding like the plastic-covered sofas of old women, while newer ones are continually usurped by the gaudy McMansions of Italian sons. The streets—noiseless, empty, and uninteresting—have neither grids nor numbers, and wind in an incomprehensible and tedious malaise. In all, and pardon the criticism, it is the antithesis of New York.

Though its anglicized Dutch street names carved by old cow trails certainly lend far less hope to the weary traveler than the geometric totality of Manhattan, these dreary paths do sometimes lead to grand and unanticipated spectacles. Head east of Grasmere, where Bay Street becomes New York Avenue just before the Verrazano-Narrows bridge makes its bounding leap across the New York Bay into Brooklyn, and find the old Battery of Fort Wadsworth snugly tucked beneath a bluff along the narrows.

Here, as single-family homes give way to rolling green fields and stone fortresses, Staten Island gets a little more interesting. Though today nominally used by the Coast Guard and primarily under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, Fort Wadsworth was, until 1994, the longest continually manned military installation in the United States, having been used since the 1600s. Through history, it has been occupied by the British, outfitted with heavy artillery during the Civil War, and given former president Teddy “Bull Moose” Roosevelt a 21-gun salute welcome home after his year abroad.

Past the visitor center, a path leads to a high bluff overlooking the Narrows. From this cliff, alongside the vestiges of 19th-century fortresses, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge spans a splendid vista, while the Battery Weed, a prodigious military bastion, safeguards the calm and expansive waters at the riverbank below. The semi-hexagonal battery boasts vertical rows of internal stone colonnades, perforated by rusted windows, today packed shut with bricks. Through its locked metal gates, one can glimpse the single cannon left inside, and through its tiny dark windows, small and suffocating rooms see little light and even less use.

Most bizarrely, this site might have looked very different today had history proceeded along another trajectory. In 1911, a Philadelphia department store mogul named Rodman Wanamaker proposed the site for the National American Indian Memorial, a 165-foot statue of a Native American chief designed by Daniel Chester French. Situated atop the bluffs at Fort Wadsworth overlooking the New York Bay, the statue would have told, according to former president William H. Taft, “the story of the march of empire and the progress of Christian civilization to the uttermost limits.” The project ceremonially broke ground in 1913, but fundraising issues and World War I stalled construction and it fizzled. One can only imagine what hugely ironic identity crisis New York might have confronted had a 165-foot Lenape waved his tomahawk at his copper clad rival Lady Liberty, bearing her torch of freedom for all (except the Native Americans).

Though the megalithic statue would never guard the harbor, the battery beneath the high bluffs strikes an imposing presence nonetheless. At the base of the bridge, the fort, reached by a long, sloping walkway, stands strong and intact amid scattered steel and stone ruins. Locked from the outside, low fences guard areas closed to the public, but these are easily surmounted. Facing Brooklyn, the bay feels close at hand and the battery assumes a timeless trepidation as hulking barges pass wearily through the harbor.

Just north, at Caitlin Battery, the ramparts are grown over with moss and the stairs are crumbling from disuse. Still, through the tangled weeds, one can discern where training gunmen must have fired at the invisible warships of despotic empires, and though the fort was never threatened, the sense of tension remains. Past here, the road leads back to high ground, where a single, tree-lined block of officer’s homes flanks the way back to Bay Street.

On the great orange ferry ride back to Manhattan, Staten Island fades into the distance, but no one watches it go. Instead, with their backs forever turned to its coast, all watch as the downtown skyscrapers fill the horizon, and then lose themselves in the caverns of Wall Street. But if any passengers look back, they’ll see the great Verrazano jump to Brooklyn, making Staten Island distinct against the industrial furnaces of New Jersey. They may wonder if Staten Island was more than a place they’d merely visited for the purpose of seeing another place from afar, never planning to go further. And if so, they may have much cause to regret it.