Staten Island

Staten Island is often referred to as the ‘forgotten borough’, the one that gets less infrastructural spending compared to others in New York and gets generally derided in popular culture as being not-real-New-York or otherwise kinda sucky. With over 476,000 residents, though, it’s actually slightly larger than Edinburgh all by itself. So is this a fair characterisation?

The answer is yeah, pretty much, at least if you’re a tourist. Navigating around the place car-free is more or less impossible, so for ‘Staten Island’ mostly read ‘St. George and a part of Stapleton’.

All images from November 18th, 2017.

The best of many, many crap photos of the Statue of Liberty. The actual statue, of course, is 46m high, which renders it tiny to anyone not on Liberty Island.

You’ll like Staten Island — or at least the terminal area — if you like seagulls.

(Insert joke about how Crystal Pepsi’s rereleases haven’t actually reached SI).

If you wander anywhere in the outer boroughs for long enough — often a matter of minutes — you’ll run into a baseball stadium — in this case, for the Staten Island Yankees.

Postcards, Masayuki Sono’s 9/11 memorial to the 274 Staten Island residents who died in the attacks.

Nice try, Staten Island.

The view facing Stuyvesant Place from Richmond Terrace.

The 120 Bay Cafe on Bay Street, with no photoshopping — that’s on the building, for some reason.

Same venue, from the back.

New York had many of its local, state and mayoral elections in November 2017; Bill de Blasio was comfortably re-elected (and immediately had to deal with a scandal around lead paint inspections), but it turns out Staten Islanders didn’t want to ‘imagine more’ — Hanks was not elected.

The meat supermarket, because there are no sissy vegetarians on the island.

I am Here at Bay Street and Victory Boulevard, a public artwork by Harumi Ori. Photos for the work were taken on Bay Street.

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is the only way to access Staten Island by car that doesn’t involve a very fast car, some serious courage and a sufficiently large ramp on Manhattan’s West Street.

I… I don’t remember where this is. It’s in St. George, somewhere.

The St. George Ferry Terminal, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.