Tottenville, The End of New York City
This week, for my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Tottenville, the southernmost and westernmost point in the city. It lies farther from Midtown Manhattan than any other neighborhood in the five boroughs.
The area's first European settler, Royal Navy captain Christopher Billopp, supposedly won Staten Island for New York by sailing around it in under 24 hours. As a reward, the story goes, the Duke of York granted him 1,000 acres on the island’s southern tip, where he built a home that still stands today.
While likely apocryphal, Billopp’s real life was no less strange. Billopp was court-martialed for stealing a ship full of enslaved people, arrested for beating a man who refused to sign indenture papers, fired as Commander of the Delaware River and Bay for “extravagant speeches in public,” and later convicted in London of forging documents to collect war widows’ funds. He died in a debtors’ prison in 1725.
Three months after the Declaration of Independence, the Billopp house hosted a failed peace conference between Lord Howe, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge. Four days later, the British took Manhattan.
The house passed through many owners and later served as an inn, a multi-family residence, and even a place to manufacture rat poison. It was set to become an insecticide factory until the city stepped in and purchased the building in 1926. It was later designated a National Historic Landmark.
For much of the 19th century, Tottenville was a hotbed of oyster farming. At a time when New Yorkers were consuming an estimated one million oysters a day, none were more prized than those from Raritan Bay. It all ended when the last oyster bed closed in 1927 after the harbor had become too polluted to support them.
Though much of Staten Island was reshaped after the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964, Tottenville remained relatively isolated until development picked up in the 1980s.
Despite the uptick in housing and population, Tottenville still feels like a small town. With its modest Main Street and large, freestanding homes set back on generous lawns, the neighborhood moves at a slower pace.
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