Eric Garner was murdered by police on a Staten Island street in July 2014. That stretch of street on the island’s North Shore – urban, densely populated, a main artery in a mainly Black and Latino community – bears little resemblance to much of the rest of Staten Island. Indeed, Staten Island as it now exists in most people’s minds – a car-dominated suburbia of cookie-cutter homes populated by white working class ethnics out of the Sopranos or Jersey Shore – was born in the aftermath of an exodus from urban New York. That exodus was made possible by the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Staten Island Expressway in 1964, which promised to finally link Staten Island to the rest of the city and open the door to large-scale development. As the rural Mid-Island and South Shore of the borough was transformed from open space to suburban sprawl, industrial production and pollution intensified on the North Shore, where Staten Island’s relatively few communities of color were overwhelmingly located. Some activists fought the plans to build up the open spaces and won major victories against New York’s midcentury master builder Robert Moses. Yet they could neither stop the North Shore’s decline nor the proliferation of tract homes to the south. As quickly as these homes went up, new Staten Islanders, mostly white ethnics from Brooklyn, came to fill them, seeking to escape the urban problems and cramped quarters of their own neighborhoods. The battles over development in the 1960s and 1970s cemented ethnic and political geographies that persist on Staten Island. Indeed, they are indispensable for understanding contemporary battles over development, as neighborhoods like Eric Garner’s find themselves surveilled, overpoliced, and once again a target for real estate speculators and developers.
In the 1960s, New York City continued to expand into its peripheries in order to both relieve the pressures of population density and scale up the industrial economy away from population centers. Staten Island offered tracts of undeveloped land which translated into opportunities for industrial and residential construction. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, opened in 1964, played a major part in this expansion. The year 1964 remains an inflection point in the Island’s history, a singular event that transformed a community of small towns separated by green space into a picture postcard of white flight suburbia. Central to this transformation was a system of highways designed by Robert Moses, the powerful regional planner best remembered as the villain of Jane Jacobs’ struggle to save Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park. In addition to helping plan the Verrazano Bridge, Moses built the enormous Staten Island Expressway across the island at its widest point, running a line of concrete from the bridge to Brooklyn in the east to the Goethals Bridge crossing to Elizabeth, New Jersey in the west. The expressway offered an artery to commercial traffic and opened the way for port and industrial facilities on the North and West shores. But the expressway acted as a physical barrier, too, dividing the more developed North Shore from the rest of the island, which remained largely rural, a mix of wetlands, primeval forest, tiny communities, and small family farms. In the early 1960s, the entire North Shore waterfront was zoned for industrial use while the rest of the Island was opened for residential construction as tract houses began to spring up on streets that had until then been only imaginary lines on city maps. Tens of thousands of new residents streamed across the bridge to occupy these new homes, which sold almost as quickly as they could be built. The suburban dream thrived in Staten Island, even if the reality – one of inadequate plumbing, poor neighborhood infrastructure, and overflowing septic tanks – failed to live up to the promise. Moses envisioned a city spread out across islands but united by grand infrastructural interventions: bridges, tunnels, and highways inaugurating an era of connection and mobility. He wanted to complete the borough’s transition from farm, forest, and wetland to bedroom community. He planned parkways to link recently constructed neighborhoods to the bridges and expressways he had just built. Had Moses prevailed, the island would have been crisscrossed by a handful of highways, circling the shorelines and running right through the central highlands.
Yet by the late 1960s a victory over Moses, unthinkable throughout much of the previous decades, seemed newly possible. Moses’s power was waning as car-centered roadway construction and bulldozer-heavy urban renewal had not delivered the promised benefits to New Yorkers. Meanwhile, on Staten island, an organization called the SICPC (Staten Island Citizens Planning Committee) made up of mostly educated, progressive citizens from the North Shore, was opposing development and embracing conservationism. They never built a broad popular base, but they succeeded through their organizational capacity, alliances with borough and city politicians, and facility manipulating the levers of city bureaucracy.
Their fight centered first on the effort to save High Rock Park, a forest summer camp owned by the Girl Scouts of America and located near the geographic center of the island. The Girl Scouts had acquired the property cheaply in 1951, but as property values ballooned during bridge construction, they planned to sell the property to a developer of garden apartments. The SICPC, allied with local environmental advocate Gretta Moulton and Girl Scout parents to convince the city to halt the sale, condemn the property, pay off the developer, and designate the land as a city park. Moses himself played a major part in the effort; the park included a right of way for his planned Richmond Parkway, set to cut diagonally across the island from the Outerbridge Crossing in the southwest to the Verrazano bridge in the northeast. But a parkway through the forest preserve was not what the activists wanted, and they turned their opposition to the parkway itself. By engaging in savvy manipulation of bureaucratic processes, engineering public relations stunts like high-publicity nature walks with politicians, and taking advantage of the new Mayor John Lindsay’s commitment to public input in the planning process, the environmentalists managed to indefinitely delay the construction of the northern portion of the parkway (the southern portion had already been built in the 60s). By the 1970s, Moses was out and highway construction was no more.
By 1984, the green space had been officially designated a park system, the Greenbelt, which today remains the largest open space in New York City. Soon, the Greenbelt will be expanded to include the hills and marshlands of Freshkills Park, created by transforming what was once the largest landfill in New York City. Ultimately, Robert Moses lost and the Staten Islanders won. The struggle is appropriately commemorated by a 260-foot pile of Serpentinite rock cut from the island’s bedrock to build the interchange where the Staten Island Expressway was to meet the Richmond Parkway. When construction stopped, the pile was covered over with dirt and allowed to become part of the Greenbelt. Residents have jokingly named it Moses Mountain to celebrate their victory over the titan. Yet it is impossible to recall the struggle over the parkway without also highlighting a social dynamic characterized by suspicion and resentment of outsiders. When those environmentalists gathered to oppose the expressway they gathered, too, to express their disdain for the cheap, cookie-cutter homes that had begun to take over the southern part of the island. They shared a vision of the Island as a small community with extensive tracts of wild hinterland. Until the 1960s, a long tradition of commoning – surviving off of hunted, trapped, fished, and foraged wild food – had existed among ordinary Staten Islanders (and had helped many survive economic downturns), but conservationists hardly registered this popular practice in opposing the highways. Instead, they fought for a «forever wild» natural preserve that they hoped would remain, at least to the casual observer, relatively free of human interference. This ideal was at odds with life as it had been lived by many Staten Islanders, who viewed the wild land as a public resource, but it was even more at odds with the lives of new residents who sought picket-fenced suburbia. In the end, the environmentalists were able to compromise with the politicians and the real estate developers, accepting that the rest of Staten Island would be yielded up to rapacious building in exchange for the preservation of the Greenbelt (this loss was sorely felt by those who had long used the coastal wetlands as sources of fish, game and wild forage).
New residents who came to Staten Island in the 1960s were mainly Irish and Italian-Americans from Brooklyn who saw in the promise of the building and real estate boom an opportunity to escape poverty, violence, and blight in the what would come to be called the inner city. Their choices were heavily influenced by infrastructural projects like the bridge and the expressway that made it possible for them to work and maintain close family ties in Manhattan and the Brooklyn neighborhoods they left behind. While they retained their identity as transplants (and pre-bridge Islanders clung to their Island roots), they exercised an outsize influence on local politics. White ethnic identification surged and other demographic groups, including descendants of early British, Dutch, and French Huguenot settlers, retreated to the background. Yet both new and old Islanders coalesced around a politics of cultural conservatism and economic support for any proposal deemed likely to increase property values in the one borough where most residents own their homes. They were united by whiteness and a desire to keep Staten Island free from the so-called urban problems that plagued the rest of New York City through the 70s and 80s.
Now, Staten Island faces a new challenge: New York City again looks to the borough as a place where land is (relatively!) cheap and high-density development has not yet taken place. New York City’s industrial waterfronts have again been rezoned to accommodate high-density residential development. If Robert Moses wanted Staten Island to spread out into its unbuilt areas and convert its northern waterfront into an industrial zone, contemporary development interests see the North Shore as a target for a new kind of expansion. Developers hope to confront this working waterfront into a gentrified zone of luxury condos and high-priced amenities, as they have done with great success in Brooklyn and Long Island City. The North Shore largely escaped the residential building boom that characterized the 50s and 60s, when suburban building concentrated on the South Shore. As these new homes filled with white Brooklynites, Black, Latino, and Asian Staten Islanders were largely concentrated in North Shore neighborhoods that received comparatively less attention but, as the anthropologist Melissa Checker has documented, pose environmental dangers to human health, due to the presence of heavy industry on the waterfront. These neighborhoods are now prime targets for urban revitalization, that is to say, gentrification.
These two cycles of speculation, displacement, and building I’ve described have a great deal in common. In both instances, city policy paved the way for land hoarding and transactions that rewarded, or will reward, large property owners at the expense of renters and homeowners. In both instances, development is heavily concentrated in one part of Staten Island while residents in other neighborhoods watch with concern from the sidelines. In both cases, the sought-after new residents are white and well-off, even if they will not resemble current Islanders in cultural preferences or ethnic background. Though the parties responsible for North Shore development are generally large corporations, the existing real estate interest also stands to benefit as North Shore home values increase and so-called quality of life policing (like strictly enforcing laws against selling loose cigarettes on the street, which is what first led NYPD officers to confront Eric Garner) ramps up. Since the 1960s, the political center of gravity on the island has been located to the south of the Expressway. Even in partial defeat Moses’ construction cemented the social and racial geographies of the borough. Whatever their feelings on top-down development generally, it is the residents living on the South Shore, most of them either transplants from Brooklyn or their descendants, who now lead the charge against new waves of immigrants, support Donald Trump’s presidency, and seek to secede from New York City. In coming to Staten Island, they destroyed one kind of idyll; they now interpret a new wave of urbanization and demographic change as a threat to their own. They do not want to see a gentrified, high-density waterfront built in their borough, and would resist any effort to extend such a program to their own neighborhoods. Yet it is overwhelmingly likely, unless either New York’s housing market cools or a different coalition of Staten Islander can mobilize around a more inclusive plan for renewing and decontaminating the North Shore, that they, like other citizen activists before them, will accept the change. After all, they have been the beneficiaries of development before, so why should this time be any different?