Delafield Avenue - just another pretty house

587 Delafield Avenue (off Broadway), August 1932

   Delafield Avenue is an interesting street.  Like West New Brighton overall it runs the gamut from beautiful to  fairly shambolic.  This house is on the stretch between Broadway and Elizabeth and that piece of Delafield has a bit of both.  There are homes in beautiful states of maintenance, a few looking to fall to bits and some that have been repaired oft seen mix of lousy brick facing and cheap siding.

   I think the house above, listed in 1932 as belonging to the Gordon family, is one of the nicer ones.  Still, I don't like the replacement of the screening on the front porch with year-round windows, even with the added porch.  The loss of contrast between the window frames and the support posts causes their inward angle to be lost to the eye and that's one of the nice touches about the house as originally built.  Also, the siding over what appears to be stucco is disappointing.  Still, it's a nice house, a nice house.


             
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Lost West New Brighton

Sorry my only posts lately haven't been particularly Staten Islandy, but, hey, what can I tell you?
I've written about, and posted about, the lost West New Brighton neighborhood now squatted on by the West Brighton Houses. It was several blocks of homes, a church (the original St. Benedicta), and was served by theaters and stores along Broadway and Castleton Avenue. Nearby where the factories and dockyards where the people made their livings. It must have been something until the City decided packing thousands of people in like ants was a better alternative than small tenements and a vibrant neighborhood.




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Shiloh AME Zion Church, Henderson Avenue between Broadway and Richmond Street (no longer exists) June 29, 1931 - This pretty little wooden church has been long replaced with a larger brick one.




St.Benedicata, northwest corner of Staten and Market Streets, August 7, 1930. The intersection no longer exists.


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St. Benedicata stood on the ground behind the seniors apartments on Broadway.



PS 18, northeast corner of Market Street - March 24, 1930


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This beautiful, ornate structure was torn down and replaced with a fairly generic box of brick and cement a block to the north. The cigar store in the pictures left was where the Broadway senior houses shown above are now located.





North side of Richmond Terrace west of Alaska Street, November 4, 1931


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These two buildings (found at the left of the 1931 picture)are the sole survivors from the five originally shown. I'm sure a featureless brick box (the one on the right) is a much better neighbor that stores with apartments overhead.

An Industrial Bend in Richmond Terrace

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Taking Richmond Terrace westbound heading toward Mariner's Harbor and points beyond, at West New Brighton, right past Broadway, there's a great northward bend in the road. On a low rise on the south side of the road is an old factory building that is the beginning of an industrial and commercial area. Part of me always wondered what that factory made in the sooty days of its youth. Now I know (and you will too), thanks to my new found map friends.

It was the part of the C.W. Hunt Company. According to the NYPL website, the firm were "manufacturers of railway freight cars, coal handling equipment, and related machinery".



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This building appears to have been the boiler house. I assume it's where engine boilers were cast.








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These buildings were all part of the C.W. Hunt Co.'s factory once in a long ago past of red hot iron sparks and clanging machinery and coal dust.