Stapleton, Staten Island
Stapleton is a neighborhood in northeastern Staten Island in New York City, United States. It is located along the waterfront of Upper New York Bay, roughly bounded on the north by Tompkinsville at Grant Street, on the south by Clifton at Vanderbilt Avenue, and on the west by St. Paul's Avenue and Van Duzer Street, which form the border with the community of Grymes Hill.
Stapleton is one of the older waterfront neighborhoods of the borough, built in the 1830s on land once owned by the Vanderbilt family. It was a long-time commercial center of the island, but has struggled to revive after several decades of neglect following the 1964 construction of the Verrazzano–Narrows Bridge, which shifted the commercial development of the island to its interior.
Stapleton is part of Staten Island Community District 1 and its ZIP Code is 10304. Stapleton is patrolled by the 120th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.
History
19th century
The neighborhood was the site of the farm where Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up, at the location of the present-day Paramount Theater building on Bay Street. In the early 19th century it became the commercial center of Southfield Township. In 1832 William J. Staples, a merchant from Manhattan for whom the neighborhood is named, as well as Minthorne Tompkins, the son of Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, acquired land from the Vanderbilts and laid out the streets. Staples and Tompkins started a ferry service from the neighborhood waterfront to Manhattan and began advertising their new village in 1836.Seaman's Retreat, a hospital for sailors entering New York Harbor, opened in 1832 and later became Bayley Seton Hospital, the largest employer in the neighborhood until the Sisters of Charity, an order of Roman Catholic nuns which operated the facility, closed it in 2004. It was also for many years the site of a United States Public Health Service hospital.
The neighborhood was the location of several springs which led to the establishment of several German-American breweries in the middle 19th century. The last brewery closed in 1963.
In 1884, Stapleton was incorporated as the village of Edgewater. The old Village Hall still stands, located in Tappen Park. In 1884, the Staten Island Railway extended its track from the neighborhood northward to St. George, with a stop at Stapleton station. Direct ferry service from the neighborhood to Manhattan was halted two years later in 1886.
20th and 21st centuries
Between 1929 and 1931, Stapleton had its own NFL pro football team, the Staten Island Stapletons. In their last two years they were known as the Staten Island Stapes. This professional American football team was founded in 1915 and played in the National Football League from 1929 to 1932. Jack Shapiro, who was a blocking back for the Stapletons, was the shortest player in NFL history.In 1963, I.S.49, which sits across from the Stapleton Houses, opened. The Houses, a housing project sponsored by the State of New York, had opened two years earlier; at eight stories high, its buildings are the tallest within any such project on Staten Island, and is the largest New York City Housing Authority project in the borough.
In 2016, a 900-apartment housing complex named Urby opened on the site of the former Stapleton Homeport. The city government announced the North Shore Action Plan in 2023, which included various improvements in St. George, Tompkinsville, and Stapleton. In Stapleton, these would include a promenade, the Stapleton Beacon development project, and the redevelopment of another site on Front Street. Work on the promenade began in September 2024. The next year, city officials announced that a mixed-use development with 500 apartments would be built on part of the Stapleton Homeport site, next to Urby.
Waterfront
The city built piers in 1920, but they were never fully exploited. From 1937 to 1942 several of the piers were used as the first Foreign Trade Zone in the United States. From 1942 to 1945, they became the Staten Island Terminal facility of the Army's New York Port of Embarkation. The U.S. Coast Guard operated their Section Base 2 there from the early 1920s until 1967, when they moved to Governors Island. After World War II, the piers once again became a foreign trade zone, but their use declined and most of the piers were demolished by the 1970s. The last, used for fishing, was removed when the U.S. Navy proposed to build a base in Stapleton in the 1980s.In 1983, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman selected Stapleton to be the homeport for a naval unit headed by the battleship, as part of the dispersal of the navy during a military build up ordered by President Ronald Reagan. This proposal became highly controversial throughout Staten Island when analysis of the proposal showed a net loss of civilian jobs on Staten Island. It was also controversial because of the belief that the Tomahawk cruise missiles aboard the Iowa and an accompanying Aegis cruiser would, in at least some cases, be carrying nuclear warheads.
Following years of debate, which slowed development of the base, the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a major cutback in military spending, and the still incomplete base was cancelled in 1993. Shortly thereafter, a plan was floated to build a race-track on the site, to be primarily used by NASCAR. The plan was quickly forgotten. Also headquartered at the site is one of three fireboats, FDNY Marine company 9. The site is now also used as part of the annual Fleet Week in New York City. After sitting empty for a couple of years, the base site was used by a bagel manufacturer briefly. Then a proposal was made to have a movie studio occupy a portion of the site. For never-explained reasons the city administration opposed this, and finally some of the civil courts took over a small part of the site, leaving most unused while various proposals were made for housing, parkland, and an educational complex, among others.
On October 26, 2006, the New York City Council approved a massive redevelopment plan for the site. It will be transformed into a new community with 350 housing units, restaurants, parks, a recreation center and farmers' market. The City Council pushed the project through its final regulatory hurdle when it approved the $66 million blueprint for the former Navy base. The city will use the money and an additional $1.1 million state grant to create streets, utilities and a mile-long waterfront esplanade while soliciting proposals from private developers to build on six sites—three residential and three commercial—across the base. City officials have said infrastructure work could begin in early 2007 with a projected completion date of 2009. Demolition of the old Navy buildings began in late 2011.
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy threw the tanker John B. Caddell ashore on a vacant part of Front Street.
Demographics
For census purposes, the New York City Department of City Planning classifies Stapleton as part of a larger Neighborhood Tabulation Area called Tompkinsville-Stapleton-Clifton-Fox Hills SI0102. This designated neighborhood had 19,027 inhabitants based on data from the 2020 United States Census. This was an increase of 2,835 persons from the 16,192 counted in 2010. The neighborhood had a population density of 34.2 inhabitants per acre.The racial makeup of the neighborhood was 15.8% White, 31.7% Black, 9.6% Asian, and 4.2% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 38.7% of the population.
According to the 2020 United States Census, this area has many cultural communities of over 1,000 inhabitants. This include residents who identify as Mexican, Puerto Rican, African-American, and Chinese.
The largest age group was people 10-34 years old, which made up 37% of the residents. 65.0% of the households had at least one family present. Out of the 13,141 households, 30.5% had a married couple, 6.7% had a cohabiting couple, 24.8% had a single male, and 38.0% had a single female. 37.7% of households had children under 18. In this neighborhood, 71.2% of non-vacant housing units are renter-occupied.
The entirety of Community District 1, which comprises Stapleton and other neighborhoods on the North Shore, had 181,484 inhabitants as of NYC Health's 2018 Community Health Profile, with an average life expectancy of 79.0 years. This is lower than the median life expectancy of 81.2 for all New York City neighborhoods. Most inhabitants are youth and middle-aged adults: 24% are between the ages of between 0–17, 27% between 25 and 44, and 26% between 45 and 64. The ratio of college-aged and elderly residents was lower, at 10% and 13% respectively.
As of 2017, the median household income in Community District 1 was $48,018, though the median income in Stapleton individually was $58,373. In 2018, an estimated 21% of Stapleton and the North Shore residents lived in poverty, compared to 17% in all of Staten Island and 20% in all of New York City. One in fourteen residents were unemployed, compared to 6% in Staten Island and 9% in New York City. Rent burden, or the percentage of residents who have difficulty paying their rent, is 51% in Stapleton and the North Shore, compared to the boroughwide and citywide rates of 49% and 51% respectively. Based on this calculation, as of 2018, Stapleton and the North Shore are considered high-income relative to the rest of the city and not gentrifying.