New Springville - Staten Island

Petticoats, Wolf Pits, and a Trip to the Mall

Staten Island is easily the most suburban of the five boroughs, and the mid-island enclave of New Springville is where that suburban character reaches its apotheosis. The neighborhood is a warren of dead end streets and cul-de-sacs lined with an endless sweep of one and two family homes all with their own garage.

Clusters of houses, all built at the same time, share a common architectural language: two story high porticos supported by thin white columns, faux rusticated stone and furrowed vinyl shingles, and, my favorite architectural trope, the bifurcated house.

Capping it all off is the most suburban indicator of all: a giant mall, 1.4 million square feet of novelty underwear, Cinnabons, and bath bombs.

Less than half a mile from the mall, you will find Decker Farm, New York City’s oldest continuously working family farm, a trace of the area’s agrarian past.

To the west, the tawny slopes of the East Mound rise up from Richmond Avenue, marking the edge of Freshkills, the massive garbage dump-turned-park. Parks form the neighborhood’s other borders as well with Latourette Park to the southeast and Willowbrook Park to the north.

New Springville borders Bull’s Head and Willowbrook, and includes the residential development of Heartland Village.

NECKS

Staten Island was once teeming with necks. According to William T. Davis’s 1896 book Staten Island Names: Ye Olde Names and Nicknames, there was once a Long Neck, a Tunnisen’s Neck, and a Daniell’s Neck. The southern tip of the island, today’s Tottenville, was simply known as “The Neck.” New Springville’s original European name was Karle’s Neck.

On the map, the odd thing about all these necks is that none resemble the narrow strip of land the term might suggest. That’s because, according to author and historian Bill Bryson, colonists had gotten the name “neck” from the Algonquian word niaick, meaning “corner” or “point,” the root of the uniquely American phrase “my neck of the woods.” No one seems to know exactly who Karle was, but for a time the name stuck.

PETTICOAT LANE

Among Karle’s Neck’s early residents were Hank and Nauchie Vandeveer. In her book Staten Island: Gateway to New York, Dorothy Valentine Smith describes Hank as 6’6” and “half as broad,” with dirty yellow hair. His daughter Nauchie, who inherited her father’s “bulk as well as his stolid disposition, ” was in charge of trimming his hair and looking after the property.

“His fields were overrun with weeds. His cow was little more than a bundle of bones. His hogs were scrawny, and his tiny flock of chickens scratched hopefully for tidbits in the filthy dooryard. Occasionally he paddled into the Sound in a canoe he’d carved from a log, and later trudged back with a basket of dripping shellfish or fish on his shoulder.”

One afternoon, Nauchie watched in disgust as “little” Bornt Symonse struggled to lift a barrel of a cider into his cart. Eventually, tiring of the pathetic spectacle, she elbowed him aside, tossed the barrel in effortlessly, and rewarded herself, and Bornt, with a long swig. Bornt was smitten. He returned the next day in his Sunday best. Nauchie, not much of a romantic, chased him off with one of her father’s oars.

After Hank died, Nauchie lived alone in the slowly collapsing house until she too was found dead beneath a hedge by a local boy hunting rabbits. Soon afterward, people began reporting sightings of her favorite blue petticoat drifting along the road and bobbing across the fields. When the old Vandeveer house was struck by lightning and burned down, the spectral garment’s paranormal cavorting came to an end. For many years, the locals continued calling the road Petticoat Lane, which is today known as Rockland Avenue.

WOLF PIT

Davis’s map reveals other places of interest. Just north of Petticoat Lane was Jones’s Wolf Pit. Farmer Abraham Jones, tired of the very real danger of wolf attacks when visiting neighbors, dug a deep pit, covered it with branches, and suspended a hunk of meat above it as bait. Jones’s pit was eventually filled in with rocks and now lies somewhere in the woods of Willowbrook Park.

Robbins Corner was named after Nathaniel Robbins, “the most despised man on Staten Island.” Robbins aided British forces during the Revolution and was supposedly part of the notorious Hatfield gang which was accused of several murders. He was “English by birth, extremely dissolute in his habits, and a terror not only to his neighbors but to the entire Island.”¹ After his death in 1801, which was “met with relief across Staten Island,” Robbins’s grave was repeatedly vandalized until, like Jones’s wolf pit, it disappeared, unmarked, beneath the forest floor.

FARMING

By the early 1800s, the town was renamed Springville, a reference to the area’s freshwater springs. When and why the “New” was added remains as mysterious as the identity of Karle himself.

For the next century and a half, the neighborhood, surrounded by woodlands and far from ferry connections to Manhattan, remained primarily agricultural. Around World War I, immigrants from the Greek island of Lemnos began to settle here and continued farming the land. Families like the Chrampanis, Criaris, and Polychronos cultivated a patchwork of small farms, hauling wagonloads of freshly picked vegetables to sell in Washington Market in Manhattan.

In 1922, Langston Hughes finished his first year at Columbia and decided it wasn’t for him. With $13 to his name, he pounded the pavement looking for work, but job offers were slow to materialize.

“Nine out of ten- ten times out of ten, to be truthful - the employer would look at me, shake his head and say, with an air of amazement: “But I didn’t advertise for a colored boy.”

Desperate, he boarded a ferry for Staten Island and headed to New Springville. Approximately where the Hello Gorgeous Hair Salon now stands on Richmond Avenue, Hughes met John and Emmanuel Criaris, who hired him on the spot:

“I finally got work on a truck-garden farm on Staten Island. The farm belonged to some Greeks, who didn’t care what nationality you were just so you got up at five in the morning and worked all day until it was too dark to see the rows in the field… They paid you fifty dollars a month with bed and board… These were good-natured people to work with, and the Greek owners, two brothers and their wives, worked hardest of all.”

Here is a great issue of the Staten Island Historian that covers both Langston Hughes’s time in Staten Island and the borough’s Greek farming community.

DECKER

Up the hill from the Criaris farm, on Richmond Hill Road, sits the Decker farm, which is the last vestige of what was once a thriving agricultural community. The farm has been operating since 1810 and was endowed to the Staten Island Historical Society in 1955 for use as a museum farm.

Plowing at the Decker Farm c.1935 (From the collection at Historic Richmond Town)

I visited in 2012 as part of my Roof To Table project and was amazed to see 7-foot-high stalks of corn and free-ranging goats. It truly felt like another place and time.

Augustine

Mary Vaccaro, whose great-uncle Tim Anagnostis ran the farm for 41 years, made a documentary featuring footage she shot of her uncle working in the 1990s. The film also features Augustine Juarez, the man pictured above in the cornfield who took part in Cornell University’s farmer training program and has diversified the farm’s offering to include things like chayote, poblano peppers and epazote, produce indigenous to his home state of Oaxaca.

MALL

After the completion of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in 1964 most of these farms succumbed to the development pressures that reshaped the rest of Staten Island. In the 1960s, thanks to this first arterial connection to the rest of the city, the borough’s population jumped by 33%. Developers bought the farmland in New Springville, and quickly erected vast tracts of homes, 200 to 300 buildings at a time. The capstone was the Staten Island Mall which opened to great fanfare in 1973. The mall, described as “a profession of faith by astute, forward thinking businessmen signifying their belief that New York City is very much alive,” is still the biggest mall in the city.²

If I was going to write about New Springville, I figured the least I could do was pay a visit to the mall, a place I had only ever seen as the backdrop to a few episodes of the show Impractical Jokers. With Christmas and Hanukkah looming, I feared the worst, so I timed my visit for a Tuesday around lunchtime figuring, at the very least, I could grab something to eat at the Food Court District, and maybe even do some holiday shopping.

As I entered through Macy’s ground floor, I was immediately assaulted by a cloying miasma of competing fragrances. I forced my way through the olfactory gauntlet, heading straight for the escalators which led to the rest of the mall where the scene was mercifully subdued. While a steady stream of customers patronized the numerous shoe stores and boutiques, most of the action centered around the clusters of massage chairs scattered throughout the complex. Large groups of older men had colonized them, their legs swaddled by the pleather flanges of the well-worn seats as they gossiped and swapped stories. The chairs weren’t actually doing any active massaging, but the men standing nearby still seemed to envy their sedentary peers as they dominated the conversation from their inert thrones.

Later, I came across a rather convincing looking Santa who appeared at loose ends. It was a school day after all, and his intended audience was otherwise occupied. That didn’t stop him from offering the occasional halfhearted “ho ho ho,” but piquing the interest of the massage-chair demographic was an impossible task.

I eventually made my way to the Food District, but the lingering cloud of Chanel Coco Mademoiselle that now permeated my clothes had dulled my appetite for the food court’s offerings, including the Hot Cheeto–crusted wiener at Kong Dog.

I was intrigued by the Exotic Snacks and Drinks vending machine with its beef-flavored Lays potato chips, Milky Way smoothies and Ritz chocolate wafers, but I refuse to patronize a vending machine that asks me to follow it on social media.

Just as I was leaving, I spotted a shop with a display of novelty light-up Christmas sweaters. My in-laws are coming to town for the holidays, and they always appreciate a good gag gift. I still fondly remember their joyous reaction to the Potty Putter golf set I gifted a few years ago. It was, understandably, a huge hit. So setting aside my pathological aversion to the retail experience, I went in search of this year’s Potty Putter.

As soon as I crossed the threshold of the store, I got the full treatment I so dread: “Welcome to Spencer’s! Who are we shopping for today?” I muttered something about a Christmas present for my mother-in-law and that I just wanted to browse, then slipped toward the back of the store. I passed stacks of Ramones T-shirts and a wall of black-light posters, lava lamps, and weed stash boxes. Soon, I found myself, appropriately enough, at the rear of the store, in what could only be described as the butt-plug zone.

While I’m sure there are people who would be thrilled to find an Eye of the Spawn Vibrating & Squirming Silicone Butt Plug With Remote under the tree, I’m not prepared to be the one who gives it. I made a beeline for the exit, and minutes later I was back down the escalator, through the fragrances, and out into the fresh bracing air of the Macy’s parking lot.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

For this week’s field recording, follow along as I enter the mall, pass through perfume alley, listen in on some screaming deals on holiday china, linger at the massage chairs, and pay a visit to a lonely Santa before heading back out into the streets of New Springville.

If you missed it last week, I now have a whole website devoted to the filed recordings that you can listen to here: City of Sound.

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FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

I’ve featured Christine Osinski’s fantastic Staten Island work before, and though she rarely indicates where these were taken, the below pictures have the unmistakable feel of New Springville.

“The Island was a goldmine for pictures. Everything seemed interesting,” Osinski says. “Mostly I went out walking for long periods of time. When I began photographing the people were very small in the landscape, but eventually I moved closer and they became the primary focus of my photographs. There were a lot of people outside, people having block parties, at parades and kids hanging out. People were very curious and having the 4×5 camera on a tripod helped me. It was just nice being outside and meeting people. You just never knew what was going to happen. It was an adventure.”

Summer Days Staten Island was published by Damiani Books in 2015.

ODDS AND END

• The Staten Island Airport opened in 1941 in the southwestern corner of New Springville. A few years later, in 1948, the city’s first drive-in theatre opened next door. The airport closed in 1964 followed by the theater in 1965 to make way for the mall.

• Trapping pits date back at least 40,000 years—archaeologists have found pits that old on the Japanese island of Tanegashima though the Japanese, who considered wolves divine protectors, built their pits to capture sika deer and wild boar.

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1. Morris, Ira K. Morris’s Memorial History of Staten Island, New York. 1898.

2. “Opening of Mall Brings Air‐Conditioned Shopping to Staten Island.” The New York Times, 10 Aug. 1973, www.nytimes.com/1973/08/10/archives/opening-of-mall-brings-airconditioned-shopping-to-staten-island.html.