TELEPORT CALLING, BLOOMFIELD

By SERGEY KADINSKY
Forgotten NY correspondent

In my childhood and into adulthood I’ve had a fascination with maps, to the extent that my mother wished that I’d been born 500 years ago when mapmakers determined where explorers would sail and then they bestowed names to their claimed lands.

On the old Hagstrom map of Staten Island, I was fascinated by a property called the Teleport. It had a sci-fi feel to it and was managed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). I was curious whether the agency that runs the region’s airports, bridges, seaports, and the Path train, could be capable of teleporting people to another location or place in time.

At the entrance to this complex is a signpost with its logo showing a dish with a satellite. I could not name the font here, but I’m sure Kevin knows. I drove past the security booths without stopping. Clearly if this was a vital teleportation hub, getting in was too easy. Turning to the right are Corporate Commons One and Two, a portion on the Teleport site that was acquired by developers Richard and Lois Nicotra as a commercial property. Here and in the surrounding area, the Nicotra Group put their personal touch on the scenery.

Most Staten Islanders have seen Lady Liberty on the ferry ride to Manhattan, but at Corporate commons, she takes the form of Reclining Liberty by sculptor Zaq Landsberg. It is inspired by the giant reclining Buddha statues in Asia. The statue faces a fountain in a circular plaza. On my visit, loudspeakers were playing Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. It felt surreal, as if I were in a corporate theme park.

Looking west is a row of benches with a life-size statue of pop artist Andy Warhol by Robert St. Croix, ideal for this location as his art was filled with corporate logos. Behind him is a row of vines planted by Nicotra. Don’t expect Cabernet Teleport here. These grapes are grown to be served at the table.

Along with Warhol, the walkway paralleling the rows of grapevines has statues of Van Gogh and Monet, with a Parisian-style street sign. This effort at honoring artists resembled Walt Disney meeting Madame Tussaud. Of course Staten Island has a long history of French settlement starting with the Huguenots during the Dutch colonial period. The first European to spot this island, Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailed in the service of France, but this claim was not pursued further after his visit in 1524.

The lights along Teleport Drive and thick forest on both sides have the appearance of Nassau County, where parkways also have long armed black lampposts. It’s one of those places where you feel like you’re not in the city anymore.

With the exception of Corporate Commons, the other buildings at the Teleport do not rise above the treetops. One of them matches the surroundings with a wraparound glass facade. If the design was inspired by secrecy, it has done its job. The biggest tenant at Teleport was AT&T with its 4,000 jobs. It left in 2001 and was replaced with smaller organizations.

A major drawback for the Teleport as a workplace is its isolation, but its streets are marked on the official city map and they are served by the S46 bus that runs between the ferry at St. George and West Shore Plaza. There have been proposals over the past decades to set up a busway, light rail, and passenger rail on the West Shore but so far this bus line is the only transit option here.

I approached the site of the satellite dish farm, which used to hold 17 dishes tilted towards the sky. Each one had a diameter of 25 feet. They stood inside an 18-acre walled compound and looking at the security cameras at its gate, I did not come closer to it. When Teleport opened in 1983, it was the largest satellite dish farm in the world, connected to fiber optic cables to distant places.

When the dishes stood here they were controlled from the Teleport Administration Building, where I imagined visitors entering and being blasted away into another location. The Teleport logo appears on its main entrance and it leads to an aluminum door marked as Telecenter. With improvements to satellite communications and the expansion of fiber-optic networks, Teleport’s role became obsolete and it gradually became an office park for doctors, lawyers, small businesses, and schools.

Besides the city’s bridges, ports, and the Teleport, the PANYNJ also operates the World Trade Center. In memory of the 9/11 attacks, a piece of a beam from the Twin Towers serves as a memorial to Port Authority employees killed in the attack.

Above this memorial is the flag of the Port Authority, which combines the seals and colors of New York and New Jersey, tied together with a rope. If these two states were to unite, this could be their flag. Both states were claimed by New Netherlands, but when English rule arrived in 1664, King Charles II gave New York to his brother James who was then the Duke of York, and to Sir George Carteret of Jersey he awarded the colony of New Jersey. From that point they developed separately as colonies and then as states.

Returning to Corporate Commons Three, the building’s south wall slants downward showing a reflection of the parking lot. It brings to mind scenes from the movie Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character plays a corporate spy who infiltrates people’s thoughts. Atop this postmodern parallelogram is a sizable rooftop farm, which adds to the building’s sustainability score.

Next to this wall is another Zaq Landsberg sculpture, Girl Power. Installed in 2022, it depicts four girls of varying ethnicities working together to hoist a 14-foot elephant roughly 20 feet into the air, exemplifying the power of teamwork.

The only road connecting to Teleport Drive is South Avenue, which runs for 3.5 miles through wetlands, forests and industrial parks between Mariners Harbor and Chelsea. When Richard Nicotra was young, it was a dirt road on the western frontier of the forgotten borough, where his father taught him to drive. Nearly a half century later, this is where he reigns as the island’s biggest commercial developer. The medians here are densely planted by Nicotra with regards to this road as Staten Island’s own Park Avenue. There is an actual Park Avenue in Port Richmond, running for seven blocks. It has no medians or fancy buildings.

On its run past Teleport and through Staten Island Industrial Park, Nicotra donated sculptures for the medians. If they resemble paper clips, it’s fitting for this neighborhood of corporate offices. Among the roads here is the punny Lois Lane, a rare honor for a living person, namely Richard’s wife and business partner.

This park’s name speaks of the city’s ambitions to lure industries to the west shore of Staten Island. In 1962, the Department of City Planning mapped out this industrial park, noting its access to freight rail, highways and waterways. Construction was very slow and in the meantime environmentalists noted that this swampy forest is a unique habitat for sweetbay magnolia, persimmon, possum-haw, and primrose-leaved violet. The rarest of these is the Nantucket juneberry. This led to the designation of Staten Island Industrial Park as a nature preserve. There are no trails in this park. It is fenced-off to the public so that its rare plants can grow undisturbed.

Mayor Ed Koch and other officials helped open the Teleport in the 1970s.

Two office buildings, 900 and 1000 South Avenue were built in this forest before the surrounding parcels were restricted to development. The only open space in this park is a sitting area at Glen Street. Considering its absence of industry, isn’t it time to rename Staten Island Industrial Park after one of its rare plants, or in honor of a deserving individual?

To the west of Teleport and this park is the Bloomfield section of Staten Island. Formerly a massive GATX oil tank farm, it is best known these days for the city’s first unionized Amazon distribution center, restored wetlands, and its recent past as the site of a proposed NASCAR racetrack. On nearby roads, signs for the Teleport speak of the recent past while Amazon vans testify to the neighborhood’s current biggest employer.

Sergey Kadinsky is the author of Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs (2016, Countryman Press), adjunct history professor at Touro University and the webmaster of Hidden Waters Blog. 

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8/20/23