Once Upon a Farm

  Once Staten Island was covered in farms.  Even when I was a boy in the early seventies some lingered on before succumbing to the bank accounts and bulldozers of developers. The last one I remember sat on Forest Avenue near the old Majors department store in Mariners' Harbor (where Lowes and Kohl's sit.  It couldn't have had much land and it vanished when the street was widened (and this is all only the barest of memory and wide open to correction from you folks).
   Willowbrook was, apparently, part of the heartland of the Staten Island farming district.  It was well watered by the stream of the same name that ran through it.  Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church and Chrampanis Farms are remnants of the Greek farming community.  Immanuel Lutheran lingers from the German farmers long gone to New Jersey and points unknown.

573 Watchogue Road, May 1932

Same place, today

Aerial view, 1924

   That little pink splotch is the house and all the patchwork quilt around it is farmed land.  It shows up, unnamed, on the 1874 maps but I have no idea how old it is.  I would guess early 19th century but that is only a guess.  The farm appears to be carved out of a much larger piece of property belonging to the De Puy family, presumably one of the old Dutch families.

   Now, except for the odd placement of the side windows (which, I know, you can't see in the modern picture), you'd probably never suspect how out of time the house really is.    Under that siding is probably nearly two hundred year old wood shingle.  Very cool.

The Church Project Lite

So I'm too lazy/too overwhelmed/too tired, or just too something indefinable to carry out the Church Project the way I originally intended to. So...
So, what I'll do is just get googlemap shots and the occasional old timey picture of the North Shore churches and some information about them.
I'll do it by denomination, starting with my home court, the Lutheran churches.

DAY ONE

Trinity Evangelical Lutheran - 309 Saint Pauls Ave - Stapleton


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My old church and elementary school. Founded by Germans back in the nineteenth century, Trinity really took off in the early twentieth century under the stewardship of Pastor Fredrick Sutter. In the google picture you can see the damage to the steeple caused by the tornado that ravaged the North Shore 2 years ago.


Zion Lutheran - 505 Watchogue Road, Westerleigh


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The group that founded Zion Lutheran started as an adult Norwegian Sunday school class in a no longer standing building in Port Richmond. At some point they collected enough money and built a beautiful neo-Gothic church on Bennett Street alongside Port Richmond Park. In the sixties they relocated to Westerleigh and built the kind of ugly modern church they still occupy on Watchogue and Willowbrook Roads.










I started with Trinity and Zion because they represent the two most active and vibrant Lutheran congregations remaining on Staten Island. They also still have a strong sense of their initial ethnic origins. Trinity was still holding German services in the early eighties.

They also represent two distinct wings of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Trinity came from money (particularly the Stapleton beer barons of the nineteenth century) and Zion from working class poverty. Today Trinity maintains a much more ritual filled worship service and Zion's is more stripped down.

The great wave of Lutheranism that once represented Germans, Norwegians and Swedes in numerous churches has receded with the demographic changes across the Island as well as the general collapse of the mainline denominations.