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Early Addition
With its own music festival, budding arts community, and plenty of backlash...is Staten Island primed to become the next hipster haven? One tipster sent in these photos taken in the St. George section of SI last week. Yuppies and hipsters and street art, oh my! It will be like New York City's very own island of misfit toys...toys with neon accessories and a breathtaking air of entitlement.
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what?
"New York City's very own island of misfit toys"
No child wants to play with a Charlie-In-The Box
Whoooaaaa! Calling it too soon, are we? They haven't built the Cross-Harbor subway tunnel yet.
I only wish it was true to have all the hipster move out BK and the city would be a dream
Is the SI Ferry the new L Train?
haaha i wish, but not likely
i second that "what?" comment
The ferry sucks. No way the hipster crowd is going to handle that kind of commute.
they've been saying staten island has a "budding arts community" for 20 years. let 'em go, they'll be back...
This was actually done just to see if gothamist would post it.
Man. Is there a way we can please detach the "arts community" from the whole hipster thing? There are plenty of regular working artists in this city. Don't drag us into that mess. Just because dumb hipsters think arts and crafts time makes them cool doesn't mean they're really artists.
Everyone is always so desperate to find "the next Williamsburg" that they gobble up whatever ridiculous gossip spends time in print. I've heard this one before. People said it about Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, etc. The people behind it all are real estate types looking for the next cash cow neighborhood that'll go from slum to luxury in a few years time. They're the ones who want people convinced.
I've noticed that Gothamist refers to Staten Island as SI now. Are you curtailing in your letters?
The big problem with Staten Island is location. If you look at it geographically you would say it should be part of New Jersey. (The apocryphal story goes that it was one by New York in a boat race.) In fact the MTA has a bus route that goes to Bayonne where people can catch the NJ Transit Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Line. There are also express buses that go via New Jersey into the city.
Thanks to Robert Moses (allegedly) the plan to link the BMT (present day R train) into the Staten Island Railway died when the V-N went up. Reportedly he had some of the infrastructure for a cross narrows subway tunnel destroyed. An ideal cross harbor subway would be one that stops at Governor's Island and hooks into the SIR. The SIR had a North Shore line at one time, too. Probably a cheaper option would be to have the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail expanded into Staten Island, since it would probably be a lot cheaper.
i love staten island. it's an amazing place and the ferry while a bit longer than the L train serves beer making it ideal for commuting hipsters.
if you don't believe all the talk of quality bands and the like emerging from s.i. perhaps you should stop by the knitting factory tonight where the heavenly tenants are playing at 8:30pm.
also our bands the rabbits and the great unwashed are playing southpaw on july 16th.
community pride rules!!!
nice try Prudential Douglas Elliman, you almost had people fooled!
>>>Thanks to Robert Moses (allegedly) the plan to link the BMT (present day R train) into the Staten Island Railway died when the V-N went up. Reportedly he had some of the infrastructure for a cross narrows subway tunnel destroyed
It was Mayor Hylan who scotched the BMT to Staten Island plan in the 1920s, but Moses would have undoubtedly done the same had the plan lingered into his tenure as transit czar.
www.forgotten-ny.com
Groups of (mostly) pseudo-hip real-estate owners have been trying to gentrify the north end of Staten Island for a lot more than 20 years, so they could sell out to their successor poseurs and move to Florida. However, it seems to be a hard go. Most of the North Shore (Stapleton, Tomkinsville, St. George, West Brighton) has actually gone downhill and has become a magnet for poor immigrants from Nigeria, Albania, Mexico, and other such places who can't afford even the Bronx. The main hope of the gentry-wannabes is a big influx of government money, hence proposals like the 40 million dollar arts center and the movie studio in Stapleton. But forty million isn't so easy to come by, even from the government. There was some local street and club life, but much of it was destroyed by police pressure in the 90s. So, basically, there's nothing to do, and going anywhere takes a long time -- and you're at the mercy of the ferry, which has stopped running for hours or days more than once in recent years. But I think most of the folks there like it that way, a bovine, Patagonian existence. The others move away.
Sure, all that could change at any moment. But if you were holding your breath, you would have been holding your breath for thirty or forty years.