Delafield Place

69 Delafield Place - btw Davis and Bard Avenues - 1931

   This beautiful stone house is the centerpiece of a hidden treasure (well not so much anymore), Delafield Place.  From other information it seems to have been built around 1840.  The NYPL digital collection indicates that in 1898 it had belonged to someone named Voorhis.  A good Dutch name, I like that.
 
   They leave out that it is the Elliot house of Elliot houses.  It was the actual home of  Dr. Samuel MacKenzie Elliot himself.  He built almost two dozen stone homes across the North Shore, including the present parsonage of Our Savior Lutheran Church and St. Mary's Episcopal Church.


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   Today, though bereft of the ivy, the house remains pretty unchanged.  The home to its right is still there though thoroughly obscured by the trees.  To its left, however, only a few years back, a rundown but attractive enough old home was torn down and four unpleasant townhouses put in its place.  Not only are they ugly, but they look seriously out of place across the street from Walker Park.

One More Neighborhood Church

Next to my neighborhood (Cottage Hill, once Hamilton Park) are Livingston and Snug Harbor. Livingston is home to an old and storied Unitarian Church. The present building is the third home of Staten Island's Unitarians, following the original building on Cebra Avenue(which was sold to the German Lutherans to become the original Trinity German Evangelical Lutheran Church who moved the whole thing over the hill to St. Paul's Avenue and Beach Street),





then the "St. Roofus" building in the same location as the present building's.







Finally, in 1895, years after the Great Blizzard of 1888 brought down the roof of "St. Roofus", the present building was erected. It's a tidy little building with a pleasant look to it. You can see the small trees in the older photo now grown old and larger surrounding it in the contemporary picture.


Unitarianism has been described somewhere as a soft pillow on the descent to atheism. Perhaps that's a bit extreme , but it is a bit nebulous and feelgoody. Nonetheless, the track record of the Unitarians on abolition and civil rights is laudable and the building does fit nicely into the neighborhood.