An unannounced midweek post by a guest blogger,
my friend Victoria Hallerman, a longtime resident of Staten Island who has been my
guide there many a time, showing me the wonders of her island, undreamed of by
most Manhattanites. Victoria is a published author, and she maintains a blog
about her and her husband's experience in 1976 running a movie palace, a story that is fascinating, sad, and hilarious. I invited
her to speak frankly on the subject of her beloved island, and that is what she
has done. Brace yourselves, Manhattanites, here she comes.
Staten Island, the Edge of the Known World
She says I should write about
Staten Island: it’s out there somewhere...people, she says, are afraid of it, “or
they think it’s the land of big hair and too much make-up.” Well it’s out there
all right, but Upper West Siders afraid of Staten Island? I don’t think so.
Twenty
minutes later, I walk into Kirsh on the Upper West Side, my favorite cafe for
writing. A man, strolling past, says to a woman, “Staten Island? (chuckling)
– doesn’t really exist.” He drools the
words in a string of smugness, while they move on. Now that’s more like it, what I’m
used to, what I’ve come to accept: people in Manhattan aren’t aware enough of
the island that anchors the other side of the Verrazano Bridge to fear it.
We
(Staten Island) are the third-largest of New York City’s five boroughs, with
the smallest population. We contain more parkland (9,300 acres) than any other
borough, including better than 94.10 acres of forest in High Rock Park, part of
the Greenbelt, where you can hike till your shoes are worn through. Staten
Island exists all right.
Yet,
as if to ratify the views of the man on the street, when we islanders plan a
trip to Manhattan, we persist in saying, “I’m going to the city.” We don’t just
accept our outlier status, we claim it as the booby prize some other New
Yorkers think we deserve. Ditching the hair and the outer borough accent,
Melanie Griffith’s character in Working
Girl got out; that was her victory. She “passed” for what was considered a
real New Yorker.
Somehow
Staten Island often gets left behind. We were charming and rural in the nineteenth century, a place “city” people went to eat oysters and enjoy the harbor view. A
short list of notable people who once lived in the forgotten borough is surprising:
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the
abolitionist Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, Herman Melville, Frederick Law Olmstead
Sr., and photographer Alice Austen – to
name a few – all lived on the island
and/or were born there.
But
for lack of a subway connecting the island to Brooklyn that was almost built, Staten
Island in the twentieth century became
Pluto, ejected from the NYC solar system, or if you prefer to think of the
city as a theater, we became its backstage. Here’s where the mounds and mounds
of pre-2000 garbage from all five boroughs (1947 forward) and the tragic
remains of the 9/11 attacks got buried. Fresh Kills Park is dealing with that
very slowly, turning the garbage back to nature, if not without some rough
botanical transformations.
I’ve
endured condescension from Manhattanites for fifty years, in conversation and
in print, and I’m sick of it. A recent friend of the island, Ian Frazier of The New Yorker, seems to have friends
here, and especially in his post-Hurricane Sandy piece of February 3, 2013,
has written deeply, without hubris or insult, about the borough I’ve called
home since 1969. In another article I’ve been unable to locate but remember
reading, about the raising of the deck of the Bayonne Bridge, the writer (New York Times?) insisted it was okay to
close the Bayonne for several years, insisting that nobody really uses that
bridge anyhow. That’s right, nobody but Staten Islanders.
Perhaps
my friend, who started me off on this post, is right after all: people are
often afraid of what they don’t know or understand, and Staten Island, a
23-minute ferry ride from the lower tip of Manhattan, is baffling in many ways.
There are, for example, at least two Staten Islands, but almost nobody knows
that. I’ll write about that next time I’m a guest blogger for Clifford, that
fearless adventurer who journeys to the very edges of the known world, which
would include Staten Island.
* * * * *
Victoria Hallerman is a published poet and author whose upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, relates her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, in 1976. Her blog, with a new post every Wednesday, is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were:
www.startswednesday.com/blog.
I hope she will do more guest posts about Staten Island in the future.
* * * * *
Victoria Hallerman is a published poet and author whose upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, relates her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, in 1976. Her blog, with a new post every Wednesday, is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were:
www.startswednesday.com/blog.
I hope she will do more guest posts about Staten Island in the future.
Coming soon: Lady Gaga: She makes Madonna look tame.
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