In a borough quickly eradicating much of its historic legacy, no Staten Island neighborhood is preserving as much of its past as Port Richmond…if only from pure inertia, as it has stayed static for decades. Much of that preservation, like much of the rest of New York City’s artifacts, is by pure indifference.Many of its links to the past are here not so much from active preservation as they are from pure indifference and neglect.
Port Richmond has its beginnings in the 1690s and early 1700s when Dutch and French colonists settled here. After the landowning Haughwout family laid out the town’s tight street grid system in the 1830s the town became a commercial and industrial hub, and many of the buildings from Port Richmond’s “golden age” can still be found here. The Bayonne Bridge to New Jersey, the longest steel arch bridge in the world when it was completed, has provided a beautiful backdrop here since 1931.
Port Richmond has remained a commercial hub to the present, although the opening of the Staten Island Mall in the 1970s definitely put a dent in its fortunes. It remains the terminus of Staten Island’s main bus route from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the S53.
This Romanesque Revival building, Northfield Township District School, later PS 20, at 160 Heberton Avenue with its distinctive clock tower was built in 1891 with an 1898 addition. It “may be considered the most elaborately ornamented school ever constructed on Staten Island” according to the Preservation League of Staten Island. Look for the carved cherub heads on keystones above the windows. The school became low-income senior housing in 1994; the conversion revitalized the building. Maybe I’ll wind up here someday, or maybe one of those places along the boardwalk in Rockaway.
Staten Island was once divided into townships such as Northfield, Southfield and Castleton. These were dissolved when Staten Island joined Greater NY in 1898.
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2/7/24
4 comments
Port Richmond is sort of bland but that string of overpasses for the old North Shore line are an interesting sight.
I like clock with no hands.Maintaining large clocks can be such a nuisance
Not so much a nuisance as crazy expensive, particularly for a non-profit senior housing organization. Maybe we can start a GoFundMe page?
Port Richmond quickly went from Staten Island’s “Fifth Avenue” to the borough’s “145th Street” in barely a decade after the SI Mall opened. It was like a spigot was opened and all the high-end stores were siphoned southward five miles to New Springville. Port Richmond, to its credit, has rebounded somewhat in that it is now a shopping mecca for Spanish-Mexican-Central American food and clothing, and many stores that were previously empty are now bustling again. New York has a way of reinventing itself every 25 years or so, and I guess Staten Island is no exception. Some really nice old buildings there that are practically unchanged, so much so that the upper end of Port Richmond Avenue served as a Chicago neighborhood in a few episodes of “Boardwalk Empire” a few years back. Production designers barely had to do anything but place a few 1920s cars onto the street and put up some old-timey signage.