Fox Hills Golf Club (and some cows)

Once upon a time Staten Island was a home and playground for the rich. Names like Vanderbilt, Barrett and Tompkins still mark our neighborhoods and street signs. Larger signs, like their homes and playgrounds, as I've often tried to illustrate, are long gone with overcrowded streets and shoddy housing taking much of their place.

Fox Hills, now mostly covered with Trump produced apartment buildings and bad reputation, the neighborhood once was the grounds of the Fox Hills Golf Club. There were also several large homes but the gold club seems to have been the primary point of interest.





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The best newspaper reference I found was about someone's cows grazing themselves on the golf club's greens.


NY Times Sept. 13, 1902

OLGC

When I was a kid growing up on Cebra most of the kids around me who were Catholic went to Our Lady of Good Counsel for school and church. It also had a lenient policy about letting neighborhood kids use their schoolyard (really just a blacktop parking lot) for playing softball and just hanging around in so I spent a lot of time there.
There womens' guild or whatever they call it used to hold book fairs every year. My dad and I would walk up to Austin Place and buy tons of paperbacks for something like a quarter a piece. Good times.


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St. Simon's Chapel - Episcopal

St. Simon's Chapel - demolished and rebuilt on Richmond Road



When I came across the Bethlehem Orphan and Half Orphan Asylum I discovered something new to dig into. When the Verrazano Bridge and the Staten Island Expressway were built they obliterated substantial parts of several neighborhoods. I don't know how much I can uncover from just tooling about the NYPL site but it's better than nothing.



Construction on the highway started in 1959 and was opened over the course of 1964. The bridge opened in 1964. Obviously Staten Island's never been the same.






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Before demolition and after - St. Simon's is the yellow building to the left of the pink car barn set where Clove and Richmond Roads meet.

Bethlehem Orphan and Half Orphan Asylum

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In perusing the maps of Rosebank and Fort Wadsworth I wander a little south of my usual hunting grounds and discovered something new: the Bethlehem Orphan and Half Orphan Asylum. A little quick digging revealed it was a Lutheran (yay) undertaking.
A little more research told me that the orphanage had been founded in 1886 by eleven churches in response to large number of children orphaned during a severe cholera outbreak in NYC. In 1915 they were able to buy about 20 acres of land on Staten Island from the Barrett family.

postcard showing the entrance to the orphanage



The establishment operated until it burned down in 1972. As the social services were turning away from orphanages towards foster care the Lutheran Social Services of New York declined to rebuild it and sold off the property. Today it's a huge tract of typically unattractive townhouses.



New York Times article from 1915

Beautiful Hues

Came across this beautiful bright blue New York harbor view. You can see the old Cromwell piers in Tompkinsville, the rail yards at the SI Ferry Terminal and the apartments around Curtis High School. And the V-Z Bridge. Great find. Thank you, NYPL.

First Home

MacGregror Arms Apartments - 1925
In 1965 the late Richard and Jane Vredenburgh moved into this fine building following their marriage. A year later when I came along I guess you could say I moved in too.
We lived there until 1969 when the rent was raised (I think to $137) above what my parents could get a mortgage for. So they moved to Cebra Avenue and spent the rest of their lives there.
I have clear memories from living in the building and numerous stories told me by my folks over the years. I loved to greet my dad coming home walking up the stairs next to Borough Hall from the ferry. The ceilings were nine feet high and our apartment, not subdivided like some, was huge. There was a dentist in the ground floor (later home to Montezuma's, the Side Street and now a tapas place). There were tons of places for my mom to shop along the foot of Victory Blvd. and we were always going to the library.


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But then we moved to then quiet, paving stoned, tree-lined Cebra Avenue. In the summer horses from Clove Lakes Stables would come over Cebra steadily clip clopping along. The woods were filled with possums and pheasants. Strange abandoned treehouses made of doors high up in the trees on the hill rising above Cebra Avenue became visible when the leaves fell in the fall. Moving to Cebra in the summer of 1969 still calls me a back with a magical pull that I hope never fades completely away.


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ERRORERRORERROR

Our computer died last night. Got a new Tb hard drive in the mail for tomorrow and after an XP install hope to salvage data from the old drive. I don't expect good luck with this.