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Staten Island ( STAT-ən) is the southernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is separated from New Jersey by the Arthur Kill and the Kill Van Kull and from the rest of New York by New York Bay. With a population of 495,747 in the 2020 census, Staten Island is the least populated borough but the third largest in land area at 58.5 sq mi (152 km2). It is the least densely populated and most suburban borough of the city. The borough is coextensive with Richmond County, one of the 62 counties of New York state, and includes the southernmost point of the state.
Originally home to Lenape Native Americans, the island was settled by Dutch colonists in the 17th century. When the British took over, Richmond County became one of the 12 original counties of New York. Staten Island became one of the five boroughs of New York City during consolidation in 1898. Always known as Staten Island (anglicized from the original Dutch Staaten Eylandt), the borough was legally the Borough of Richmond until 1975, when its name was officially changed to Borough of Staten Island. Staten Island has sometimes been called "the forgotten borough" by inhabitants who feel neglected by the city government and the media. It has also been referred to as the "borough of parks" due to its 12,300 acres of protected parkland and over 170 parks.
The North Shore—especially the neighborhoods of St. George, Tompkinsville, Clifton, and Stapleton—is the island's most urban area. It includes the St. George Historic District and the St. Paul's Avenue-Stapleton Heights Historic District, both of which feature large Victorian houses. The East Shore is home to the 2+1⁄2-mile (4-kilometer) FDR Boardwalk, the world's fourth-longest boardwalk. The South Shore, site of the 17th-century Dutch and French Huguenot settlement, developed rapidly beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and is now very suburban. The West Shore has the island's fewest residents and the most industrial development.
Motor traffic can reach the borough from Brooklyn by the Verrazzano–Narrows Bridge and from New Jersey by the Outerbridge Crossing, Goethals Bridge, and Bayonne Bridge. Staten Island has Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bus lines and one MTA rapid transit line, the Staten Island Railway, which runs from the ferry terminal at St. George to Tottenville. Staten Island is the only borough not connected to the New York City Subway system. The free Staten Island Ferry connects the borough to Manhattan across New York Harbor, providing views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Lower Manhattan.
As in much of North America, human habitation appeared on the island fairly rapidly after the Wisconsin glaciation. Archaeologists have recovered tool evidence of Clovis culture activity dating from about 14,000 years ago. This evidence was first discovered in 1917 in the Charleston section of the island. Various Clovis artifacts have been discovered since then, on property owned by Mobil Oil.
The island was probably abandoned later, possibly due to the extirpation of large mammals. Evidence of the first permanent Native American settlements and agriculture are thought to date from about 5,000 years ago, although early archaic habitation evidence has been found in multiple locations on the island.
Rossville points are distinct arrowheads that define a Native American cultural period from the Archaic period to the Early Woodland period, dating from about 1500 to 100 BC. They are named for the Rossville section of Staten Island, where they were first found near the old Rossville Post Office building.
At the time of European contact, the island was inhabited by the Raritan band of the Unami division of the Lenape. In Lenape, one of the Algonquian languages, Staten Island was called Aquehonga Manacknong, meaning "as far as the place of the bad woods", or Eghquhous, meaning "the bad woods". The name is spelled Eghquaons in the deed to Lubbertus van Dincklage for the purchase of Staten Island in 1657. The area was part of the Lenape homeland known as Lenapehoking. The Lenape were later called the "Delaware" by the English colonists because they inhabited both shores of what the English named the Delaware River.
The island was laced with Native American foot trails, one of which followed the south side of the ridge near the course of present-day Richmond Road and Amboy Road. The Lenape did not live in fixed encampments but moved seasonally, using slash and burn agriculture. Shellfish was a staple of their diet, including the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica), abundant in the waterways throughout the present-day New York City region. Evidence of their habitation can still be seen in shell middens along the shore in the Tottenville section, where oyster shells larger than 12 inches (300 mm) are sometimes found.
Burial Ridge, a Lenape burial ground on a bluff overlooking Raritan Bay in Tottenville, is the largest pre-European burial ground in New York City. Bodies have been reported unearthed at Burial Ridge from 1858 onward. After conducting independent research, which included unearthing bodies interred at the site, ethnologist and archaeologist George H. Pepper was contracted in 1895 by the American Museum of Natural History to conduct paid archaeological research at Burial Ridge. The burial ground today is unmarked and lies within Conference House Park.
The first recorded European contact on the island was in 1524 by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who sailed through The Narrows on the ship La Dauphine and anchored for one night.
The Dutch did not establish a permanent settlement on Staaten Eylandt for many decades. Its name is derived from the Staten Generaal, the parliament of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. From 1639 to 1655, Cornelis Melyn and David de Vries made three separate attempts to establish a settlement there, but each time the settlement was destroyed in conflicts between the Dutch and the local tribe. In 1661, the first permanent Dutch settlement was established at Oude Dorp (Dutch for "Old Village") by a small group of Dutch, Walloon, and French Huguenot families, just south of the Narrows near South Beach. Many French Huguenots had gone to the Netherlands as refugees from the religious wars in France, suffering persecution for their Protestant faith, and some joined the emigration to New Netherland.
At one point, nearly a third of the residents of the Island spoke French. The last vestige of Oude Dorp is the name of the present-day neighborhood of Old Town adjacent to Old Town Road. Staten Island was not spared the bloodshed which culminated in Kieft's War. In the summer of 1641 and in 1642, Native American tribes destroyed Old Town.
On July 10, 1657, the Native Americans signed a deed to Lubbertus van Dincklage, attorney of Henrick van der Capelle tho Ryssel, for the purchase of all indigenous lands on Staten Island. However, this deed was annulled when the Dutch purchasers failed to deliver the promised goods for the land a few months later.
At the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, the Dutch ceded New Netherland to England in the Treaty of Breda. The Dutch Staaten Eylandt, anglicized as "Staten Island", became part of the new English colony of New York.
In 1670, the Native Americans ceded all claims to Staten Island to the English in a deed to Governor Francis Lovelace. In 1671, to encourage expansion of the Dutch settlements, the English resurveyed Oude Dorp (which became known as 'Old Town') and expanded the lots along the southern shore. These lots were settled primarily by Dutch families and became known as Nieuwe Dorp (meaning 'New Village'), which later became anglicized as New Dorp.
Captain Christopher Billopp, after years of service in the Royal Navy, came to America in 1674 along with the newly appointed royal governor of New York and the Jerseys, Sir Edmund Andros, in charge of a company of infantry. The following year, he settled on Staten Island, where he was granted a patent for 932 acres (3.8 km2) of land. According to an apocryphal story, Captain Billopp's seamanship secured Staten Island to New York, rather than to New Jersey: the island would belong to New York if the captain could circumnavigate it in one day, which he did. There is conflicting information about the time Christopher Billopp took to complete the race and whether he received a personal prize for doing so. Mayor Michael Bloomberg perpetuated the myth by referring to it at a news conference in Brooklyn on February 20, 2007. Reliable historical documentation of the event is extremely sparse, and, in 1948, Staten Island historian Roswell S. Coles concluded that there was "no real evidence to assume there is any truth in the circumnavigation story." A 2007 The New York Times article concluded that this event was "almost certainly apocryphal" and originated in local folklore, with no written records of the deed before 1873, and a 2019 YouTube video by CGP Grey wasn't able to trace the story back before that 1873 account, which credits the story to Gabriel Disosway, a local chronicler who lived in Staten Island from 1798 through 1868.
In 1683, the colony of New York was divided into ten counties. As part of this process, Staten Island, along with several minor neighboring islands, was designated as Richmond County. The name derives from the title of Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond, an illegitimate son of King Charles II. In 1687 and 1688, the English divided the island into four administrative divisions based on natural features: the 5,100-acre (21 km2) manorial estate of colonial governor Thomas Dongan in the northeastern hills known as the "Lordship or Manor of Cassiltown", along with the North, South, and West divisions. These divisions later evolved into the four towns of Castleton, Northfield, Southfield, and Westfield. In 1698, the population was 727.
The government granted land patents in rectangular blocks of 80 acres (320,000 m2), with the most desirable lands along the coastline and inland waterways. By 1708, the entire island had been divided up in this fashion, creating 166 small farms and two large manorial estates, the Dongan estate and a 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) parcel on the southwestern tip of the island belonging to Christopher Billopp. The first county seat was established in New Dorp in what was called Stony Brook at the time. In 1729, the county seat was moved to the village of Richmond Town, located at the headwaters of the Fresh Kills near the center of the island. By 1771, the island's population had grown to 2,847.
Most Staten Islanders were solidly supportive of the Crown, and the island played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War. General George Washington once called Islanders "our most inveterate enemies". As support of independence spread throughout the colonies, residents of the island were so uninterested that no representatives were sent to the First Continental Congress, the only county in New York to not send anyone. This had economic repercussions through 1776, when New Jersey towns such as Elizabethport, Woodbridge, and Dover instituted boycotts of islanders.
On March 17, 1776, the British garrison in Boston under Sir William Howe evacuated the city and sailed for Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax, Howe prepared to attack New York City, which then consisted entirely of the southern end of Manhattan Island. General George Washington led the entire Continental Army to New York City in anticipation of Howe's attack. Howe used the strategic location of Staten Island as a staging ground for the invasion. Over 140 British ships arrived over the summer of 1776 and anchored off the shores of Staten Island at the entrance to New York Harbor. Onboard them were approximately 30,000 British and Hessian troops. Howe established his headquarters in New Dorp at the Rose and Crown Tavern, near the junction of present New Dorp Lane and Richmond Road. There, the representatives of the British government reportedly received their first notification of the Declaration of Independence.
In August 1776, British forces crossed the Narrows to Brooklyn and outflanked the Continental Army at the Battle of Long Island, resulting in the British control of the harbor and the capture of New York City shortly afterwards. Three weeks later, on September 11, 1776, Sir William's brother, Lord Howe, received a delegation of Americans consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Edward Rutledge, and John Adams at the Conference House on the southwestern tip of the island on the former estate of Christopher Billopp. The Americans refused Howe's peace offer, which called for the withdrawal of the Declaration of Independence, and the conference ended without an agreement.
On August 22, 1777, the Battle of Staten Island occurred between British forces and several companies of the 2nd Canadian Regiment fighting alongside other American companies. The battle was inconclusive, though both sides lost over a hundred soldiers as prisoners of war; the Americans soon withdrew. In early 1780, while the Kill Van Kull was frozen over, William Alexander led an unsuccessful American raid from New Jersey on the western shore of Staten Island. It was repulsed in part by troops led by British Commander Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings. In June 1780, Wilhelm von Knyphausen, a Hessian commander, led many raids and a full assault into New Jersey from Staten Island to defeat Washington and the Continental Army. Although the raids were successful in the Newark and Elizabeth areas, the advance was halted at Connecticut Farms (Union) and the Battle of Springfield.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Staten Island”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.