Latest / Revisionist History / The Staten Island Problem - Part 2: A New Map

Transcript

The Staten Island Problem - Part 2: A New Map · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin Ben Mata Haffer Here before we get into this episode,
0:22
Speaker 1: I wanted to let you know that you can hear
0:23
Speaker 1: all episodes of Revisionist History the Staten Island Problem ad
0:27
Speaker 1: free right now. By signing up for Pushkin Plus. You'll
0:31
Speaker 1: also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks, and other binges from
0:34
Speaker 1: your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors. Plus, your support helps
0:37
Speaker 1: independent shows like us continue making the stories you love.
0:41
Speaker 1: Sign up and save on the Revisionist History Show page
0:44
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, where at Pushkin dot fm, Slash plus
0:48
Speaker 1: use the code R twenty five for twenty five percent
0:51
Speaker 1: off an annual subscription. All right, let's get into the series.
0:57
Speaker 1: One day I came across a box of tapes in
0:59
Speaker 1: the College of Staten Island Archives. They were these mostly
1:02
Speaker 1: unmarked VHS tapes jammed in no particular order into a
1:05
Speaker 1: cardboard box. The extremely helpful archivist set me up with
1:09
Speaker 1: an old v I popped in the tape and I
1:12
Speaker 1: met Dan Singletary.
1:16
Speaker 2: Do you realize? Nineteen eighty six, a federal law was
1:18
Speaker 2: passed mandating every school system in the country provide safe
1:23
Speaker 2: schoolrooms free of asbestos. The only school district in the
1:26
Speaker 2: entire country that did not comply.
1:28
Speaker 3: You know it New York City.
1:31
Speaker 1: This guy, Dan Singletary. He looked like a cowboy, big mustache, lanky.
1:37
Speaker 1: I remembered seeing his name all over newspapers from the time,
1:40
Speaker 1: usually described vaguely as an artist who wanted Staten Island
1:44
Speaker 1: to secede, but no one ever said what exactly his
1:47
Speaker 1: art was. This intrigued me. And here he was at
1:51
Speaker 1: a debate on secession, going off about the shoddy schools.
1:56
Speaker 2: Why because of mismanagement, because of ineptitude. There is no
2:00
Speaker 2: way in the world that staff Mound would be able
2:02
Speaker 2: to allow that, none whatsoever.
2:05
Speaker 1: And as I watched those tapes, it became clear to
2:08
Speaker 1: me that Dan Singletary it was really the voice of
2:10
Speaker 1: this movement.
2:12
Speaker 2: Well, if there's a son of secession, it's got to
2:14
Speaker 2: be Dan Singletary.
2:15
Speaker 4: Dance.
2:16
Speaker 2: Singletary said, if you're against secession, you're in favor of
2:20
Speaker 2: keeping things the way they are.
2:23
Speaker 1: There were many problems with keeping things the way they were,
2:26
Speaker 1: at least as Staten Islanders saw it, and nothing was
2:30
Speaker 1: talked about more than the dump fresh kills. It was
2:35
Speaker 1: so remarkable that Ripley's Believe It or Not featured it
2:39
Speaker 1: the scale of it could not be believed.
2:41
Speaker 5: Eleven thousand tons a day, six days a week, and
2:46
Speaker 5: that's expected to more than double soon to over twenty
2:50
Speaker 5: two thousand tons a day.
2:54
Speaker 1: Dan Singletary would parade national reporters out to see the dump.
2:57
Speaker 1: Everyone wanted to see the dump. It was the symbol
3:00
Speaker 1: of Staten Island secession. Over seven million people lived in
3:04
Speaker 1: New York City in the nineteen eighties. Every day they
3:07
Speaker 1: threw stuff out. Most of that stuff wound up at
3:10
Speaker 1: the Fresh Kills landfill. The sight of it alone was
3:13
Speaker 1: enough to stop visitors in their tracks.
3:17
Speaker 6: Now the garbage here is piled pretty deep or pretty high,
3:21
Speaker 6: depending on how you look at it. By the year
3:23
Speaker 6: two thousands, some of the piles could be over five
3:28
Speaker 6: hundred feet above sea level, which will make them believe.
3:31
Speaker 4: It or not.
3:33
Speaker 6: The tallest mountains on the entire eastern shore.
3:38
Speaker 1: People said you could see the dump from outer space.
3:41
Speaker 1: Ornithologists wanted to study it because supposedly it was the
3:44
Speaker 1: East Coast's largest collection of seagulls. Stann Islanders meanwhile, rolled
3:49
Speaker 1: up their windows when they passed it. It was next
3:52
Speaker 1: to the mall, and when you went to the mall,
3:54
Speaker 1: you'd cover your mouth and nose and sprint from the
3:56
Speaker 1: car to the front door. It was unclear then if
3:59
Speaker 1: garbage juice was leaking out of the trash mountains and
4:01
Speaker 1: into the groundwater. The people were looking into it. Spoiler
4:05
Speaker 1: alert it was, and rather than coming up with alternatives,
4:10
Speaker 1: all the ingenuity in Manhattan seemed to go towards dumping
4:13
Speaker 1: more faster on Staten Island, and Dan Singletary was paying
4:18
Speaker 1: very close attention to this.
4:20
Speaker 7: We have a environmental disaster sitting on our shores.
4:23
Speaker 1: We all recognize that.
4:24
Speaker 7: We recognize the fact that it outside of a great
4:26
Speaker 7: wall in China's the only thing you can see from
4:28
Speaker 7: outer space. It's a disaster.
4:32
Speaker 1: A weird thing happens to me when I work on
4:34
Speaker 1: stories like this, People who aren't famous at all become
4:38
Speaker 1: like celebrities. In my mind. Here was a man on
4:41
Speaker 1: a misfit island ranting about a mountain of trash thirty
4:44
Speaker 1: years ago, and because I've turned my bizarre fixations into
4:47
Speaker 1: a career, over the course of a year, I had
4:50
Speaker 1: read so many articles about Dan Singletary and watched so
4:53
Speaker 1: many videos of him arguing about Staten Island secession that
4:56
Speaker 1: he became a kind of folk hero to me, wandering
4:59
Speaker 1: around the island doing art looking like a cowboy with
5:03
Speaker 1: his huge mustache. I wanted to track him down to
5:07
Speaker 1: understand the mind of a secessionist. I kept striking out
5:12
Speaker 1: until one day, in an article in Rural Heritage magazine
5:17
Speaker 1: about American milking Devin Cows, I came across a reference
5:22
Speaker 1: to a farmer named Dan Singletary.
5:25
Speaker 8: I found a number, and I called we were the
5:28
Speaker 8: smallest borough. Like on the face of it, it was
5:31
Speaker 8: a disaster. You know, they could walk all over us.
5:36
Speaker 1: Singletary lives. You're listening to revisionist history. This is our
5:42
Speaker 1: mini series, The Staten Island Problem. I'm Ben Matt of Haffrey.
5:48
Speaker 1: Everyone has a problem with the place they live. This year,
5:52
Speaker 1: I paid a lot of taxes to a government waging
5:54
Speaker 1: a war I have no interest in supporting. Maybe you
5:57
Speaker 1: think the schools in your neighborhood suck. Maybe you hate
6:00
Speaker 1: the police. Maybe there's a methadone clinic down the block
6:03
Speaker 1: and you can't stand it. Maybe you think the things
6:06
Speaker 1: your neighbor believes are fundamentally evil and he thinks the
6:09
Speaker 1: about you. Those feelings have reached a real boiling point
6:14
Speaker 1: in this country on all sides. And this is a
6:17
Speaker 1: story about a place with a lot of those kinds
6:19
Speaker 1: of problems, saying you know what, screw it, we're out.
6:25
Speaker 1: What does that look like? Who chooses to do that?
6:28
Speaker 1: And why this episode the things that are meant to
6:33
Speaker 1: keep our politics together and why some people want out?
6:40
Speaker 1: Episode two, A New Map. When I finally did meet
6:52
Speaker 1: Dan Singletary, he was living on a farm with his
6:54
Speaker 1: wife Alice, way out in rural upstate New York. I
6:58
Speaker 1: had brought the old videos i'd found with me.
7:01
Speaker 8: I don't know if I ever even want to see.
7:03
Speaker 8: It's a must see the videos there.
7:06
Speaker 1: They're sort of fantastic. I don't look like I do.
7:10
Speaker 1: You're recognizable. He still looked like a cowboy to me.
7:14
Speaker 1: So far working on the project, I'd only heard the
7:17
Speaker 1: New York City view of secession. I wanted to hear
7:20
Speaker 1: the Staten Island one. We sat down at the kitchen
7:22
Speaker 1: table and started to talk.
7:25
Speaker 8: Well, we had to do something one way or another,
7:28
Speaker 8: because we were the losers.
7:31
Speaker 1: The Singletaries had moved to Staten Island because they had
7:34
Speaker 1: two kids and wanted a pleasant place to live, and
7:37
Speaker 1: they liked what they found there. Alice worked in the schools,
7:40
Speaker 1: eventually as a principal. He was a nice community, except
7:43
Speaker 1: of course, for the dump.
7:46
Speaker 8: And I had a friend that lived around the corner
7:48
Speaker 8: that worked out there, and he said, hey, Danny, come
7:51
Speaker 8: on out here and have lunch with us. So I
7:53
Speaker 8: came out, went out one day and the fresh skills
7:56
Speaker 8: and met the guys in the bar that you know.
7:59
Speaker 8: We came in and there we started making They were
8:01
Speaker 8: all Italian. They all made you know, sausages and stuff.
8:04
Speaker 8: And I thought this was great.
8:06
Speaker 1: All of a sudden a barge full of trash showed
8:09
Speaker 1: up and the rats are jumping off or kicked in
8:12
Speaker 1: the rats in the water.
8:14
Speaker 8: You've never seen anything more disgusting on all your life.
8:17
Speaker 8: And it had, you know, mostly done. And I said,
8:19
Speaker 8: where are you going? I said, I'm sick to my stomach.
8:22
Speaker 8: I'm going to go to all home. I said, I
8:23
Speaker 8: can't eat any lunch now. Oh come on, daddy, you know,
8:27
Speaker 8: I said no. But it was pretty pretty incredible.
8:32
Speaker 1: Of course, it wasn't just the dump that got under
8:34
Speaker 1: Staten Islander's skin. There were developers cramming the island with
8:38
Speaker 1: crummy houses or sewers the constant disrespect and also the
8:43
Speaker 1: reality of living in the city with a lot of homelessness.
8:47
Speaker 8: People decided that the ferry terminal was a great place
8:53
Speaker 8: to feed the people that needed food with the almost people,
8:58
Speaker 8: and it impacted with the people from Staten Island.
9:02
Speaker 1: Staten Islanders would walk essentially through a soup kitchen to
9:05
Speaker 1: catch the ferry home from Lower Manhattan.
9:08
Speaker 8: They worked all the law. They wanted to come home
9:10
Speaker 8: and you know, wait for their kids or do whatever,
9:13
Speaker 8: and they got all these you know, all these bums
9:16
Speaker 8: are all around, and it smells like urn, and you know,
9:19
Speaker 8: it's just absolutely terrible. So I went in twice to
9:24
Speaker 8: meetings of the community board and I said, guys, what
9:26
Speaker 8: can we do? I said, can you find some other place?
9:29
Speaker 8: I said, I'm not against any of that stuff, but
9:31
Speaker 8: this is not the right place.
9:34
Speaker 1: The singletary is kept using this word for what it
9:36
Speaker 1: felt like in New York City at the time, sand papering.
9:40
Speaker 8: It was that constant sandpapering. You know, of sensitivities.
9:46
Speaker 1: What do you mean sandpapering with sensitivities.
9:48
Speaker 8: Well, it's it's always being rubbed by something. Ah, you know,
9:53
Speaker 8: it's just around you saying back off or you know it's.
9:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, you feel like the environment is real express somewhere.
10:01
Speaker 8: Yeah.
10:03
Speaker 1: And around that time Singletary learned that there might be
10:07
Speaker 1: a way to fix all this. A beloved lawmaker on
10:10
Speaker 1: the island named John Marky had come up with a plan,
10:14
Speaker 1: a pathway to secede. It had two parts. First, Staten
10:19
Speaker 1: Islanders would be allowed to vote on whether or not
10:22
Speaker 1: to study secession and make a charter for a new city. Then,
10:27
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three they'd vote on that plan. Against
10:31
Speaker 1: all the odds, the state approved this proposal. Now it
10:35
Speaker 1: was on the secessionists to whip the votes.
10:39
Speaker 8: Our dining table became the war room, Am I correct? Yeah?
10:45
Speaker 1: Singletary began to organize an official secession party. If they
10:49
Speaker 1: got enough signatures, they could get politicians on their party
10:52
Speaker 1: line on the ballot and raise the profile of the issue.
10:57
Speaker 8: I was out almost every night for months, and we
10:59
Speaker 8: had other people and other people, and we collected them
11:02
Speaker 8: all and brought them back. And Alice's job was set
11:05
Speaker 8: with these other ladies to go through and make sure
11:07
Speaker 8: everything was signed correctly and dotted all the press of
11:10
Speaker 8: that stuff. And they were drinking, you know, had a
11:13
Speaker 8: beer and coffee and chatting it up. And you had
11:16
Speaker 8: a great time, and you got the short end of
11:18
Speaker 8: the stick.
11:20
Speaker 1: You had a great time checking the signatures.
11:24
Speaker 8: Go to work next day, keep doing the same thing.
11:29
Speaker 1: They would have to collect several thousand signatures to make
11:31
Speaker 1: the secession party in electoral reality, and they did.
11:36
Speaker 8: When we took all those boxes into the Board of Elections,
11:40
Speaker 8: they said, you got to be kidding. They put them
11:42
Speaker 8: in that corner. I'm sure they just sat there.
11:45
Speaker 4: We didn't think it could be done, so the table
11:48
Speaker 4: didn't think what could be done to get any signatures.
11:55
Speaker 1: I once read about this political science concept called the
11:58
Speaker 1: logo map. The idea is that when we make a
12:01
Speaker 1: map of a place, we show a simplified picture that
12:05
Speaker 1: leaves out a lot of the actual territory. Think of
12:07
Speaker 1: a map of the United States. What's on it? The
12:11
Speaker 1: continental contiguous United States, not American Samoa, not the US
12:15
Speaker 1: Virgin Islands, not Puerto Rico. Alaska gets put in a
12:19
Speaker 1: little box. So does Hawaii, and Guam is nowhere to
12:23
Speaker 1: be found.
12:24
Speaker 9: Now.
12:25
Speaker 1: Picture New York City. You're probably imagining the long, tall
12:29
Speaker 1: island of Manhattan. Maybe you're seeing Brooklyn and Queens and
12:33
Speaker 1: part of the Bronx. But you're almost certainly not seeing
12:36
Speaker 1: Staten Island on the logo map of New York unless
12:39
Speaker 1: it's been included in a tiny box in the bottom
12:41
Speaker 1: left corner like on the old subway maps, and even
12:44
Speaker 1: then never at scale. The logo map reflects the psychological
12:49
Speaker 1: reality for most New Yorkers when it comes to Staten Island.
12:52
Speaker 1: It's that place miles out to sea, reachable only by
12:56
Speaker 1: ship in what was in its day the longest suspension
12:58
Speaker 1: bridge ever built. It's off screen by design, because the
13:04
Speaker 1: whole point of throwing things out is you don't want
13:07
Speaker 1: to see them anymore. The dump the metaphor for New
13:10
Speaker 1: York City's relationship to Staten Island, the place they put
13:14
Speaker 1: the things they don't want. Secession was about making a
13:17
Speaker 1: whole new map. After the break the Supreme Court case
13:24
Speaker 1: that set all this in motion in the eighteen nineties,
13:39
Speaker 1: New York City did not exist, at least not like
13:41
Speaker 1: it does today. Brooklyn and Manhattan were separate cities. Queen's
13:45
Speaker 1: Staten Island and the Bronx had little to do with
13:48
Speaker 1: each other. Everyone competed for the same resources, nobody really
13:52
Speaker 1: coordinated how and this was a big problem. The harbor
13:57
Speaker 1: was polluted, epidemics and crime. Waves didn't care that these
14:00
Speaker 1: were different cities. They spread wherever they pleased. The competing
14:04
Speaker 1: areas would bicker about water supply, which when it ran short,
14:08
Speaker 1: let huge fires blaze up. So in the eighteen nineties
14:13
Speaker 1: a wealthy group of Manhattanites came up with a plan.
14:16
Speaker 1: They would convince these five disparate places to join into
14:21
Speaker 1: one gigantic city. This was called consolidation. In eighteen ninety eight,
14:27
Speaker 1: the greater New York City was born. But just like
14:32
Speaker 1: when the United States came together, there was a concern,
14:36
Speaker 1: how could the new boroughs be sure that they wouldn't
14:38
Speaker 1: just be dominated by Manhattan. The answer was an obscure
14:43
Speaker 1: legislative body known as the Board of Estimate.
14:49
Speaker 9: Well, the Board of Estimate, for all intents and purposes,
14:53
Speaker 9: was sort of designed like the US Senate.
14:56
Speaker 1: Frank Sippola, who was the assistant press secretary for the
14:59
Speaker 1: Staten Island Borough President about forty years ago.
15:03
Speaker 9: Regardless of what the population of each borough was, the
15:07
Speaker 9: borough president voted for the entire borough. He was the
15:10
Speaker 9: mayor of that particular bar.
15:13
Speaker 1: The deal that was struck at the dawn of the
15:15
Speaker 1: city was that each borough president would have an equal
15:18
Speaker 1: vote on the board, right alongside the mayor, the comptroller,
15:22
Speaker 1: and the city council president. And to be clear, these
15:25
Speaker 1: weren't just some perfunctory meetings. The compromise was that the
15:29
Speaker 1: Board of Estimate held all the real power in the city,
15:33
Speaker 1: the city's budget, the city's land, the city's operations. And
15:38
Speaker 1: Sapola found himself attending meetings of the Board of Estimate
15:41
Speaker 1: for his boss.
15:43
Speaker 9: And you'd sit there as bus loads of New Yorkers
15:46
Speaker 9: would show up and spend hours trashing you, hours just
15:54
Speaker 9: talking about how your decisions are so shortsighted.
15:58
Speaker 1: Citizens could weigh in on the important issues of the
16:01
Speaker 1: day as the borough presidents deliberated in real time. It
16:05
Speaker 1: was the pinnacle of democracy. What was it like in there?
16:13
Speaker 8: It was brutal.
16:15
Speaker 9: Then Sometimes the meetings went till two or three o'clock
16:18
Speaker 9: in the morning. I remember once there was a guy
16:22
Speaker 9: just had fallen asleep on one of the chairs, just
16:24
Speaker 9: fell asleep.
16:26
Speaker 1: The whole thing was kind of a sham. Frank wasn't
16:29
Speaker 1: the borough president, he was just the assistant press guy.
16:32
Speaker 1: And yet he was sitting up there because early in
16:35
Speaker 1: the meeting, the borough presidents would all just disappear.
16:40
Speaker 9: He'd show up, he'd sit there for about twenty fifty
16:43
Speaker 9: to twenty or thirty minutes, and then somebody from his
16:46
Speaker 9: cabinet in several places me would have to sit there
16:51
Speaker 9: for the rest of the meeting, and he'd say, you're
16:54
Speaker 9: going to vote know on this, yes on this, no
16:56
Speaker 9: on that, yes on this, no on that. Okay.
17:00
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, even if the borough presidents were doing what they
17:03
Speaker 1: were supposed to be doing, they were still a big
17:05
Speaker 1: problem because the burrows they represented were not at all
17:08
Speaker 1: the same side. At the time, Brooklyn had two point
17:12
Speaker 1: two million people, Staten Island had three hundred and fifty
17:16
Speaker 1: two thousand, and yet the borough presidents each had the
17:20
Speaker 1: same one vote on the Board of Estimate, which seemed
17:23
Speaker 1: pretty unfair because Staten Island had way more power than
17:26
Speaker 1: it should have given its size. They'd weigh in on
17:29
Speaker 1: city wide issues and managed to use their power to
17:32
Speaker 1: say no to a lot of things. They were the
17:35
Speaker 1: only county in New York City that didn't have a jail,
17:38
Speaker 1: for instance, and don't ask them about homeless shelters. All
17:42
Speaker 1: this worked fine enough until this particular arrangement came to
17:47
Speaker 1: the attention of the Supreme Court, and all hell broke loose.
17:54
Speaker 10: Well here argument now in number eighty seven ten twenty two.
17:57
Speaker 10: Board of Estimate of the City of New York versus
17:59
Speaker 10: Beverly Morris, Number eighty seven eleven twelve Frank Ontario versus
18:04
Speaker 10: Beverly Moras.
18:06
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen eighties, the New York Civil Liberties
18:09
Speaker 1: Union brought a lawsuit against the Board that said that
18:12
Speaker 1: the fact that Staten Island got the same vote as
18:14
Speaker 1: Brooklyn violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
18:18
Speaker 1: One person, one vote. The case wound its way up
18:21
Speaker 1: to the Supreme Court. The lawyer for New York City
18:24
Speaker 1: begged the court to leave it alone. He said, if
18:27
Speaker 1: you strike this down, the city's going to fall apart.
18:31
Speaker 3: Every One has said that this structure is the glue
18:35
Speaker 3: that has kept the City of New York together, and
18:37
Speaker 3: don't change it. And oh, I'm in New.
18:40
Speaker 10: York is going to disintegrative, that you lose this loss
18:42
Speaker 10: of the U integrate Dadon Island's units, the seed.
18:46
Speaker 1: This thing was really all about Staten Island. The lawyer
18:50
Speaker 1: from the Civil Liberties Union encountered every time a big
18:52
Speaker 1: citywide initiative comes up for debate. We got to get
18:55
Speaker 1: those guys from Staten Island to agree to it.
18:58
Speaker 3: Why not have total at large elections and give every
19:01
Speaker 3: Staten Islander six votes, every brooklyn Er won, every Queen's two,
19:06
Speaker 3: every Bronx three, of Manhattan three and Bronx or could
19:10
Speaker 3: we do that?
19:11
Speaker 1: The city's lawyer was arguing that Staten Island was holding
19:14
Speaker 1: the rest of New York back.
19:17
Speaker 3: There were three six to five votes recently where we're
19:19
Speaker 3: a Staten Island, weighted by virtue of population. Those votes
19:24
Speaker 3: on a incineration plant, on homeless shelters, and on middle
19:28
Speaker 3: income housing in the Bronx all would have gone the
19:31
Speaker 3: other way. They all would have been the opposite result.
19:38
Speaker 1: In the end, the court agreed. They ruled that the
19:41
Speaker 1: structure of New York City government was unconstitutional because ultimately,
19:45
Speaker 1: the population of a place should determine the representation it gets.
19:50
Speaker 1: The entire system of government in New York City was
19:53
Speaker 1: being redrawn, and one thing was certain, Staten Island was
19:58
Speaker 1: going to lose a whole lot of power. That's when
20:01
Speaker 1: secession kicked into gear. But the reason this movement took
20:05
Speaker 1: off wasn't because everyone was intricately following this new voting system.
20:10
Speaker 1: It had to do with something a whole lot deeper,
20:14
Speaker 1: with people who didn't just want to get their old
20:16
Speaker 1: votes back, but who wanted to get their old island back.
20:23
Speaker 1: That's after the break. One day on the island, in
20:39
Speaker 1: my attempt to understand the secessionist's mind, I sat down
20:42
Speaker 1: with a local attorney named Bobby Scamerondella. I'd seen Scamerondella
20:46
Speaker 1: in those videotapes alongside Dan Singletary.
20:50
Speaker 11: My primary involvement with it was as a debate. There
20:54
Speaker 11: were a series of debates conducted by all sorts of
20:59
Speaker 11: civic organizations on Staten Island where they would invite a
21:04
Speaker 11: pro secessionist and an anti successionist to come before these
21:08
Speaker 11: civic groups.
21:10
Speaker 1: He was an absolute bruiser on the debate stage, arguing
21:13
Speaker 1: for secession. I met him in his law office, which
21:16
Speaker 1: had these led lights on the ceiling that changed color
21:19
Speaker 1: as we spoke. Unlike the Singletaries, Scameronella grew up on
21:23
Speaker 1: Staten Island. He remembered it from way back when.
21:27
Speaker 11: I mean it was like Dyllick. I grew up in
21:29
Speaker 11: an area was wooded right after nineteen sixty four. When
21:34
Speaker 11: the bridge was built, it was culture shock, even for
21:37
Speaker 11: I guess at the time of fourteen year old boy.
21:40
Speaker 8: I lived in an area.
21:41
Speaker 11: Called Sunnyside, and the Staten Island Expressway which was built
21:45
Speaker 11: along with the bridge. It it just went through this huge
21:50
Speaker 11: wooded area that I used to play in. I'll remember
21:53
Speaker 11: to the day I died waking up in this huge
21:57
Speaker 11: wooded area where I used to play was gone.
22:03
Speaker 1: The great irony of Staten Island secession is that back
22:06
Speaker 1: when the city consolidated, No Burrow had been more enthusiast
22:09
Speaker 1: stick about joining. But they regretted that decision almost immediately.
22:14
Speaker 1: There were a series of attempts to fix that problem,
22:17
Speaker 1: to make this distant place feel like it was part
22:19
Speaker 1: of the city, but they all failed. There was the
22:22
Speaker 1: train tunnel to Staten Island, which the city even broke
22:25
Speaker 1: ground on and then never finished. The bridge was the
22:29
Speaker 1: last gambit. The writer Gates Alise wrote his first book
22:32
Speaker 1: about the building of that bridge. He wrote, the bridge
22:36
Speaker 1: had become the symbol of hope.
22:40
Speaker 4: For a sparsely populated Staten Island. This is an hour
22:43
Speaker 4: almost a rediscovery from the island through the toll gate
22:47
Speaker 4: rides the first vehicle and estimated twelve million vehicles will
22:51
Speaker 4: follow in the first year.
22:53
Speaker 1: This bridge was a big deal and for the rest
22:56
Speaker 1: of New York it was like it had opened up
22:57
Speaker 1: a portal to a whole new world. Here's a newsreel
23:00
Speaker 1: from nineteen sixty four when the bridge first opened.
23:04
Speaker 4: Across the Narrows the entrance to New York Harbor, the
23:07
Speaker 4: longest suspension bridge in the world. Town On Narrows Bridge
23:10
Speaker 4: is the first fixed link between Staten Island and the
23:13
Speaker 4: City's for other.
23:14
Speaker 1: Boroughs, everything on the island is pre or post bridge,
23:19
Speaker 1: pre bridge. It was a kind of paradise. You collic farmland,
23:23
Speaker 1: rolling hills, shoals of oysters rimming the island. Post bridge,
23:28
Speaker 1: it was all tiki, tax suburban houses, white people fleeing
23:32
Speaker 1: the increasingly black and brown Brooklyn and of course the
23:35
Speaker 1: ever expanding mountains of trash. To be from Staten Island
23:42
Speaker 1: is to have this sense that something grand has been
23:45
Speaker 1: buried under garbage and forgotten.
23:48
Speaker 11: But it wasn't the Board of Estimate that changed that.
23:50
Speaker 11: It was a very sound Narrows Bridge that changed that.
23:54
Speaker 1: And so here we are, well, let's look at that
23:57
Speaker 1: because one person one vote makes sense. Yeah, so but
24:01
Speaker 1: then what is that what is that missing? That ruling.
24:06
Speaker 11: Staten Island was uh, culturally and geographically different than the
24:14
Speaker 11: rest of the City of New York. And and I'll
24:16
Speaker 11: go so far as to say physically in the sense
24:19
Speaker 11: that uh, Staten Island's an island out there. It just
24:26
Speaker 11: it just is.
24:30
Speaker 1: In the New York Times at the height of secession,
24:33
Speaker 1: one Staten Islander said, the first thing an independent Staten
24:36
Speaker 1: Island should do is quote, tear down the Arizona and
24:39
Speaker 1: Narrows Bridge and let us go back to life the
24:42
Speaker 1: way it used to be. Talking to Scamerondella, I felt
24:48
Speaker 1: like that was a big piece of it for him.
24:52
Speaker 1: How would you convince people pretend I'm I'm a skeptic,
24:55
Speaker 1: make the pitch.
24:57
Speaker 11: The bottom line is really my position was to ask yourself,
25:01
Speaker 11: what cost freedom? What cost freedom? You have no say
25:06
Speaker 11: over what happens in your community? Virtually no says or
25:09
Speaker 11: is your schools and your police department, your fire department
25:12
Speaker 11: and everything else is not run here?
25:14
Speaker 5: Just not.
25:16
Speaker 1: Was anyone opposed to it because they're like New York City,
25:18
Speaker 1: greatest city in the world, and we're part of it.
25:21
Speaker 1: One of the five boroughs.
25:23
Speaker 11: We can't be pushed any further away from the big city.
25:25
Speaker 11: You want to go to Broadway, Go to Broadway? Right,
25:27
Speaker 11: want a job all Wall Street? Go get a job
25:29
Speaker 11: on Wall Street. None of that's going to change. None
25:31
Speaker 11: of it's going to go to a Yankee game. Go
25:33
Speaker 11: to a Yankee game. By seceding, what are you giving up?
25:38
Speaker 11: You can't say I live in the City of New York.
25:45
Speaker 1: This series is about the politics of resentment and alienation
25:48
Speaker 1: and how we handle them, and this was for me
25:51
Speaker 1: an interesting moment in the case study. There's a big
25:55
Speaker 1: difference between feeling you're treated poorly and feeling that you've
25:58
Speaker 1: lost something. The former might lead to a quest for justice,
26:02
Speaker 1: the latter leads to resentment. Secession wasn't just Dan Singletary's
26:08
Speaker 1: arguments about voting structures and the quality of life. There
26:12
Speaker 1: was for a lot of Staten Islanders the feeling that
26:15
Speaker 1: something had been taken away from them. Scamerdella was that
26:19
Speaker 1: kind of secessionist. Something powerful was taking shape on Staten Island.
26:28
Speaker 1: It was going to lead somewhere big, and so a
26:31
Speaker 1: group of people got together on the island to try
26:34
Speaker 1: and stop it. That's next week it's.
26:38
Speaker 8: A pipe dream.
26:39
Speaker 9: It's just not going to happen.
26:41
Speaker 7: You have just seen a perfect example, a classic example
26:45
Speaker 7: of what's being played out in what's called the politics
26:48
Speaker 7: of fear.
26:50
Speaker 8: There's nothing worse than having two islands next to each other.
26:55
Speaker 8: We can't stand them.
26:56
Speaker 3: All of you who are in favor of seceding from
27:01
Speaker 3: the City of New York, would you please raise your hands?
27:11
Speaker 1: The Staten Island Problem is written and reported by me
27:14
Speaker 1: Ben Mattapaffrey, who was produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina
27:18
Speaker 1: Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakergee. Our executive producer
27:22
Speaker 1: is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Russick, Sound design
27:26
Speaker 1: and mastering by Jake Gorsky. Original music by Stellwagon, Symfinet,
27:30
Speaker 1: Luis Garra and Jake Gorsky. Special thanks to Todd Reynolds
27:34
Speaker 1: for his track The Solution from the album Outer Borough,
27:37
Speaker 1: and to the College of Staten Island and the New
27:39
Speaker 1: York City Municipal Archives for all of the amazing tape,
27:43
Speaker 1: and to Daniel M. Erwir for his book How to
27:45
Speaker 1: Hide an Empire, which is where I learned about the
27:47
Speaker 1: logo map. And thanks, of course to Malcolm Gladwell I'm
27:52
Speaker 1: Ben Mattaphaffrey,