Staten Island is three times as large as Manhattan, which might come as a surprise to those of us who best know New York City’s southernmost borough as a beige blob tucked into the lower left-hand corner of the M.T.A. subway map, dwarfed by its neighbors. It makes no sense to scale Staten Island accurately on a subway map, because it has no subways—just a single, twenty-two-stop rail line that curves down from St. George to Tottenville. But the island’s shrunken footprint in the M.T.A.’s rendering is emblematic of the island’s position in the broader New York consciousness, to the qualified extent that it has a position at all.
Popular representations of Staten Island typically take shape as slights: in “Saturday Night Live” sketches, MTV reality shows, and elsewhere, the borough is a teeming natural habitat for spray-tanned guidos and guidettes; a goombah paradise of big hair and mobbed-up pizzerias; the city’s orange-skinned stepchild. Staten Island is the odd borough out not only culturally but also politically (it leans reliably Republican) and geographically (one bridge and a thirty-minute ferryboat ride connect it to the rest of New York; three bridges connect it to New Jersey.) In 1993, Staten Islanders voted to secede from New York City, unhappy with what they saw as a disproportionately small share of city services and a disproportionately high share of city garbage, which was stored by the mountain-load at the Fresh Kills landfill for decades. The vote to secede, largely symbolic, went nowhere, but secession chatter on the island has never fully quieted.
And so there’s a complex history of otherness, mistrust, ostracism, and isolationism at play when residents and elected officials on Staten Island—which has earned a grim new distinction in Sandy’s wake as the city’s deadliest zone—complain to reporters that they have been underserved by relief efforts and that the enormity of their misfortune has been widely ignored in accounts of the hurricane’s wrath. At a press conference in South Beach on Thursday, James Molinaro, the borough president, condemned “a lack of a response” on the part of the federal government and called the Red Cross an “absolute disgrace,” urging people not to donate to the organization. A resident named Natvel Pritchard lamented the borough’s obscurity in an interview with CBS News: “Though people don’t talk about Staten Island much, people are here, a lot of people are hurting, so it’s upsetting.” The New York City Marathon, which begins on Staten Island, and which Mayor Bloomberg waited until late this afternoon to cancel, became a particular sore spot. In the local paper the Advance, Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis said, “To take one resource, one police officer to supervise a stupid marathon is a slap in the face to the borough.” Councilman James Oddo told the paper, “To begin this one mile away from where we are still looking for bodies is sinful.”
The devastation on Staten Island is staggering. NBC reports that hundreds of homes—mansions and bungalows alike—have been destroyed, and that dozens of streets remain impassable. Some residents were forced to wait out the storm on their rooftops. In all, nineteen bodies have been found so far on Staten Island, accounting for about half of the fatalities reported citywide. The dead have ranged from very old to very young: on Thursday, a search-and-rescue team that included sniffer dogs and police divers discovered the bodies of two young boys who were swept away from their mother by flood tides during a failed evacuation attempt on Monday. On Yetman Avenue, in Tottenville, a two-story house was reduced to a plot of mud and cinderblocks, collapsing while people were inside. Two of them, George Dresch and his daughter Angela, were killed; the Dresches, burglarized in 2011 when they evacuated in advance of Hurricane Irene, had decided to stay put this time. Even now, old stereotypes die hard: Gothamist quoted an unnamed borough resident who claimed that search teams had turned up corpses unrelated to Sandy and who theorized that these bodies were the result of “mob hits, no joke.”
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