The Staten Island Dump saved Staten Island from Sandy.  (say 5x fast!) The 2,200-acre site of the former landfill that once served as the biggest eyesore in the world was instrumental in serving as a protective mass for communities neighboring it, such as Travis, Bulls Head, New Springville and Arden Heights. Its presence served as a line of defense against Hurricane Sandy’s powerful storm surge, according to New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who credited the future park’s hills and waterways for sparing several Staten Island neighborhoods.
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The Staten Island Dump saved Staten Island from Sandy.  (say 5x fast!)

The 2,200-acre site of the former landfill that once served as the biggest eyesore in the world was instrumental in serving as a protective mass for communities neighboring it, such as Travis, Bulls Head, New Springville and Arden Heights.

Its presence served as a line of defense against Hurricane Sandy’s powerful storm surge, according to New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who credited the future park’s hills and waterways for sparing several Staten Island neighborhoods.

Da Forgotten 5th: Five Staten Stories Making Headlines

Potential trash to energy plant stirs controversy
 

Last week, Deputy Mayor Caswell Holloway said the city wants to launch a pilot project to transform waste into energy by establishing a plant somewhere in the five boroughs or within an 80-mile radius of the city. But in its Request for Proposals, Fresh Kills is listed as “the Staten Island City Provided Site” with a notation that a shuttle bus to view the location will be offered to prospective contractors after an April 9 pre-bid meeting in Manhattan.
 

Fresh Kills — which the city is in the process of transforming into parkland — is the only site listed in the RFP.
 

“I spent half of my life fighting against the garbage dump,” said former Borough President Guy Molinari, one of the principal architects of landfill closure in 2001. “To think that this administration could even think about something like this makes me want to vomit.”



Decommissioned Staten Island ferry sinking

So much for a dignified retirement for the decommissioned Staten Island Ferryboat Herbert H. Lehman.

The boat, docked at Steelways Inc., is now sitting sideways on the Hudson River’s.  It was initially decommissioned in 2007 and sold to a Bronx salvage yard, which was the top bidder in an auction held by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.
 

Last year, the boat was put on eBay for a price of $500,000.

City taking ideas for Staten Island’s Farm Colony

 

The city’s Economic Development Corporation is trying once again to entice developers to consider the old Farm Colony in Sea View — this time hoping a more open-ended approach will lure them in.
 

“This is no-commitments,” said City Councilman James Oddo (R-Mid-Island/Brooklyn), who has long advocated development of the site. “This is just to measure, engage, and see if anyone has any creative ideas.”
 

The EDC is issuing a “request for expression of interest” for the 46-acre site on Brielle Avenue today. The agency is looking for “creative proposals that will consider a broad range of possible uses for the site, in order to transform the area in a way that will complement and enhance the surrounding community.”



 

Wreckers make short work of Staten Island’s ‘Castle’

 

In the end, nothing could save the castle.

The painful thwack of the wrecking ball came before 7 o’clock the morning of March 5th, 2012, leveling the old Staten Island Hospital, her distinctive four corner towers reduced to little more than a pile of splinters at the foot of Castleton Avenue in Tompkinsville.
 

Her fate was sealed late last year when the city Department of Buildings issued an emergency declaration for demolition, but neighborhood residents say they learned the date had been set only when they heard the sounds of the heavy equipment rumbling onto the six-acre patch of land.
 

“The Castle,” as it is lovingly known, had no legal protection, since preservationists were unsuccessful in their years-long battle to obtain landmark status for the hospital heralded as the “county’s greatest charity” when it opened in 1889 to care for Richmond County’s sick.

Victoria Gotti slams ‘Mob Wives’ as ‘train wreck,’ says she doesn’t have much in common with Karen Gravano

  

They may both be daughters of Mafia members, but Victoria Gotti doesn’t think she has much in common with Karen Gravano.

Ms. Gotti’s father was John Gotti, the Gambino crime boss who Ms. Gravano’s father, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, testified against. Gotti died in federal prison.

Ms. Gotti called “Mob Wives” a “train wreck,” and said it wasn’t “real.”

“I’ve never met this girl. I don’t know her. I don’t like what I see, per se, and hear, but at the same time, I think the whole ‘Mob Wives’ thing is a complete joke,” she said.
 

“God bless them, is what I say,” Ms. Gotti said. “If you ask me, do I see any major talent there in each of them, or any of them? No.”

The Forgotten 5th: Five Stories, One Island: Miracle Baby, Fresh Kills Sneak Peek, MTA weighs Rail, 7 Train to NJ!?, Baby Joseph dies

Teddy Atlas Foundation helping Miracle Baby

These stories rarely make front-page news, but while Lindsay Lohan is being perp-walked and Kim Kardashian is doing a cakewalk, Teddy Atlas’s foundation is helping to keep a baby alive.  Give thanks this year for that, or better still, help Teddy work that kid’s corner by buying a ticket to the Atlas foundation fund-raiser.

“We also are helping out a family with a beautiful 21-month-old girl who got shot in the eye in September in gangbanger crossfire as she sat in her stroller in the Arlington Terrace Apartments,” says Atlas. “It’s a miracle Samyah Bailey lived, but she lost her left eye.

“We have a surgeon named Dr. Irene Gladstein volunteering to perform the surgery free if we pay for a prosthetic eye. That doctor to me is a pure woman of medicine, caring about a child more than money. She’s an undisputed champion. Our foundation is paying for the prosthetic eye with money from other champions like the Daily News readers who come to our dinners, or mail donations, every year. Because of your generosity, Samyah Bailey will have a life with the beautiful restored face she was born with.”  Leave it to an ex-pug and a doc with a heart of gold to reinvent “an eye for an eye.”

 MTA weighs Staten Island Rail

New York City Transit has unveiled a short list of three public transit alternatives for the North Shore rail line right-of-way, roughly paralleling the Kill Van Kull waterway. One of the three options is light rail transit, vocally supported by numerous political officials within New York’s “forgotten borough.” Staten Island is not served by the city’s subway network, though MTA NYCT does provide Staten Island Railway service along the borough’s eastern shore, which links with Staten Island ferry service to and from Manhattan. MTA NYCT culled from longer list of seven options and now is considering a $589 million light rail transit line between St. George and Arlington, with trains continuing to West Shore Plaza along South Avenue, in mixed traffic with road vehicles. Two other options involve buses: a $357 million dedicated bus transit way, with eight stops between St. George and Arlington; and a #37 million package to improve existing North Shore bus service, including a new transit center.

7 Train to New Jersey; What about Staten?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city is considering extending the route of the No. 7 subway line into New Jersey, and the economics of the proposal “seem to make some sense.” But a Staten Island transit honcho hit at Bloomberg for leaving the borough out of his grand vision for regional transit. “I applaud the mayor for his vision of connecting part of the region to the transit system,” said Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member Allen Cappelli, a Livingston resident. “I’d hoped that his vision would include Staten Island and its 500,000 residents.” Cappelli, a Livingston resident, said City Hall should widen its scope. He said Bloomberg should put his muscle behind the proposal to build a West Shore light rail line that would cross the Bayonne Bridge and connect to the New Jersey light rail system, the PATH train and the city subway system beyond. “We ought to be talking about connecting Staten Island too,” he said. “That’s regional interconnectivity. It’s fine to give lip service to the world’s greatest parking lot - the Staten Island Expressway - but words are not good enough.”

From dump to paragon of ecology: A first peek

As befits what used to be the world’s largest landfill, the future Freshkills Park on Staten Island may represent the planet’s greatest act of ecological atonement. The 2,200-acre site, which the Department of Parks and Recreation calls a “reminder of wastefulness, excess and environmental neglect,” will, as it evolves into a park over the next 25 years, feature every environmentally correct practice known to landscape architecture. The park will be vast — nearly three times the size of Central Park — but it will eventually be divided into five main areas. The first area to be developed is in the 240-acre North Park, which will consist of 21 acres and include walking paths with views of wetlands in the middle distance, a bird observation tower, a tree nursery and a seed farm. Budget cuts have, for now, shelved capital funding for the 425 acres of South Park, but design plans for the first 20 acres there are under way. The garbage mounds beneath North and South Parks were capped in the 1990s; this fall workers will finish capping the mound that will eventually become East Park. Capping of the final mound — the future West Park — will be finished in 2018. Collection of methane gas from the four mounds will continue for 30 years after capping.

Baby Joseph dies

Baby Joseph, the Canadian boy who became the face of an international end-of-life debate, died September 27th, about four months before his second birthday, according to a family spokesman. Joseph Maraachli was brought to the United States in March by New Dorp-based Priests for Life to receive a tracheotomy that his family hoped would extended his life. Brother Paul O’Donnell of St. Paul, Minn., the family’s spokesman and spiritual adviser, said Joseph’s father, Moe, told him the baby died at home surrounded by his family. He said it was likely that the child died of complications related to his disease but that the cause of death has yet to be announced.