New York 13th District

Staten Island is part of New York City, yet is a land apart, closer geographically and culturally to New Jersey than to the city’s other boroughs. The sixth-largest island in the continental U.S., its inclusion in Greater New York as part of the great 1898 consolidation was something of an afterthought. It was connected to the rest of the city only by ferry or through Bayonne, N.J., until the Verrazano Narrows Bridge—one of Robert Moses’s last and most impressive infrastructure achievements—opened to traffic in 1965. Hilly Staten Island (or Richmond County) is the state’s southernmost county, one-tenth as densely populated as Manhattan, and that’s after it grew 22% between 1990 and 2004, the fastest growth rate of any county in New York state. Its rate of home ownership, 70%, is nearly double that of the rest of New York City and nearly meets the national average. Ethnically, the 13th District has the highest percentage of residents of Italian ancestry in the nation. The signs on coffee shops read Caffe and on delicatessens, Salumeria. The Staten Island Ferry docks at St. George, the home of the Staten Island Yankees’ new ballpark. The north and south shores that spread out from there are notable for their pleasant Victorian homes, while the island’s west shore is industrial marshland, with plans for the eventual development of a 2,200-acre park—more than twice as large as Central Park—on top of the now-closed Fresh Kills dump. Staten Island’s interior consists of blocks of suburbia alternating with scrubland that’s rapidly being turned into suburbia. Population growth, plus a shortage of mass transit, has brought significant traffic congestion to the island, which is more dependent on cars than the other boroughs.

Culturally, Staten Islanders are more conservative than people from the boroughs, particularly the Manhattanites who live a 20-minute ferry ride away. Taking a cue from Fresh Kills, their motto is “Don’t dump on us.” Not many people here read the New York Times; the local paper is the Staten Island Advance. Fed up with the city’s high income taxes and social programs, Staten Island residents voted in 1993 for secession, but the Legislature never acted to carry out their wish. In that same election, Staten Islanders provided the margin of victory for Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose agenda of cutting crime and welfare rolls soothed the secessionist fervor. The Giuliani years produced an economic boom, with a new ferry terminal, additional shops and hundreds of new houses near cleaned-up beaches. The biggest victory was the closing of Fresh Kills in 2001, though it opened again temporarily for the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. The September 11 attacks killed nearly 250 residents of Staten Island. They made up nearly 10% of the dead and nearly a fourth of all the firefighters who died.

The 13th Congressional District of New York is made up of Staten Island plus Brooklyn neighborhoods with similar demographics. These include heavily Catholic and Italian Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst, middle-class enclaves with large single-family brownstones that are nowhere near a subway stop and thus impervious to the gentrification spreading across Brooklyn. The entertainment industry has found some memorable characters in these neighborhoods: The Three Stooges (Moe, Curly and Shemp) grew up in Bensonhurst, which also was the home to the fictional Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners. John Travolta danced to fame in the film Saturday Night Fever on the streets of Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge. The district also includes Gravesend, with its large population of Sephardic Jews, and Fort Hamilton, the only active-duty military base in New York City and one of the oldest military posts still in operation in the United States.

The 13th is seeing a rising number of immigrants. There are growing numbers of Muslims in Bay Ridge and an influx of newcomers from West Africa, Mexico, South America, Southeast Asia, and Russia in white ethnic neighborhoods near St. George. But Staten Island remains New York’s whitest borough and has the fewest immigrants. It is only 7% black and 14% Hispanic. Voters here solidly backed Republican George Pataki for governor and gave then-Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg his slim winning margin in 2001. The district voted 52%-44% for Democrat Al Gore in 2000, but snapped back to Republican George W. Bush four years later, 55%-45%. In 2008, it voted for McCain 51%-49%.