I am confident that I grew up in the best place in the world — Staten Island.
Really.
No, really.
That sentence, which I’ve repeated many times, has raised eyebrows, produced uncontrolled snorts, and, mostly, brought about heated debate. But I believe it. To this day.
In the mid-1970s, Manhattan was dead to most (and quite notably to Gerald Ford). Entire neighborhoods were burnt out. Central Park was a place people got mugged. Taking the subway meant taking your life in your hands. The population in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan was dropping. It seemed no one wanted to live in New York City anymore.
Unless they moved to Staten Island.
Back then, The Rock was the only place middle-class families wanted to be.
They came in droves, and why not?
For the first four years of my life, we lived in a duplex of a three-block development in Eltingville. For the most part, the houses on Ray Street, Arden Avenue and Bent Street were quite similar — and so were the people inside them. Dads worked for the city. Moms stayed home to take care of the kids and dog. And the kids, well, we pretty much had the run of the place.
The doorbell would usually ring early in the morning, and if it wasn’t some older kids asking my mom if they could play with our dog, Tiger, it was Timmy or Kim or Andrea or Mickey-Michael (sometimes all of them) seeking out me and my brother. Every backyard had a pool. Every front yard had a lawn. There were swingsets. There were sandboxes. And there was the street where, occasionally, a car slowly passed, the driver waving to the kids playing ball around freshly painted bases.
To our parents, who moved here from Brooklyn in the late ’60s, it was paradise. Our neighbor, Andy, even refused to put up a fence.
“I own what I survey,” he would say — and he didn’t want anything to disrupt his view.
Staten Island gave our parents the promise that their kids would get the things they didn’t have, growing up in small apartments in Brooklyn. Who would believe that three boys wouldn’t have to sleep in the same bed — or even in the same room?
In 1975, with a building boom going full throttle and my parents in need of a two-family house, they didn’t have to look far. They found a home five blocks away on Serrell Avenue. It was the last house on a block of new houses, each with a garage and carport. When we moved in, the road was still dirt. Our neighbor was the woods.
During the next 10 years, my two brothers and I, along with a dozen or so kids our age living on the block, explored every nook and cranny. We built forts, played manhunt, rode bikes, climbed trees and hung swings so we could fly over brooks.
Our homes were just places to eat and sleep. Ballgames were interupted by a dad’s distinct whistle, calling Matt or Mark or James or Aaron or Bird in for dinner. We lived a life not found anywhere else in New York City at that time.
By the time the woods finally fell during the mid-’80s building boom, we turned our sights north. We hopped a train from the Annadale station and headed to the ferry. Within an hour, we were in Manhattan, making a comeback. We’d walk up Broadway and buy knock-off sunglasses on Canal Street and fake IDs (that nobody accepted) at Times Square. We learned we could get to Yankee Stadium without even taking a car!
We worked at the Mall, or some mom-and-pop in town. We went to good public schools. We partied at Midland Beach, where the cops could keep an eye on us.
And then, for most of us, we moved on. A lot of us went to Jersey, seeking out the childhood we experienced for our own kids. Others went the other way, to Manhattan or Brooklyn, in search of a truer city life.
And then there’s a guy like me, torn between the two.
So what did I do?
I moved to the North Shore, which offers the Zoo, the Ballpark, Snug Harbor, a new, excellent public school, the Serpentine Commons and a free boat ride all minutes away from my house.
Ah, paradise!
