You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Staten Island.”
From 2022 to 2025, before I moved to Brooklyn, I saw Dahlia on the SIM3C express bus from Staten Island to Manhattan seventeen times.1. Oh my god. 2. Oh my god! Again! 3. I’m so happy we have this. 4. Still good, yes, everyone’s good, thanks. 5. Only a few people still from high school, like, I don’t know, do [...]
In the summer of 1980, Rob Curatola and I played on the same team at Tiger Basketball Camp. I was a spaghetti-limbed, prepubescent 12-year-old. Rob, a formidable ten-year old, was still encased in baby fat. We made up the team’s front court, with me leaping incessantly around under the basket, doing my frantic best, and Rob expertly racking up points [...]
Moran Early in the pandemic, I started posting photographs from my wanderings in Staten Island. Old storefronts, tugboats on the Kill, old signs from long extinct businesses…whatever caught my eye. In response to one post, I got a DM from a guy called Richie. He said he liked my posts, recognized a lot of the buildings, and wondered if I’d [...]
My father took me to the Coney Island Freak Show every summer growing up. My artist Dad seemed unfettered from his day job as a social worker, sketching subway riders on the hour train ride from the Lower East Side, where we lived surrounded by junkies and prostitutes wandering derelict streets. On the boardwalk, he had directed my eyes to [...]
When the ramp to the Staten Island Ferry was razed, I happened to be passing, and stopped to watch, feeling a sense of loss as the crane took out the span that dangling across from Borough Hall, repeatedly smashing it, and sending large sections crumbling to the ground below. Hurrying to catch a boat on my way to work, where [...]
The strip of Bay Street that runs through Stapleton is an example of conspicuous gentrification. There's a Spanish tapas bar, and a Japanese Bistro, and a Sri Lankan clay pots restaurant, all opened in the last few years. In counterpoint, the old Paramount Theater has failed at numerous incarnations, and a White Castle sits stripped of any franchise signage, leaving [...]
Wild turkeys roam the grounds of Staten Island University Hospital. When my mother was hospitalized in April 2011 with a respiratory infection, I had the opportunity to observe them in detail. Turkeys stand around a lot, sort of like escaped mental patients who suddenly find themselves free, but then what. One day, they might be inside a fence, another day [...]
It was with a sense of being robbed that I watched, from a television set on Staten Island, the events that unfolded on September 11th. The smoke emanating from the two buildings as if they'd been sliced by some reckless cosmic lawnmower gone berserk, and the camera angle that made the bodies falling look like drifting pieces of paper, large [...]
