The Staten Island Problem - Part 2: A New Map

Introduction

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1:56Ben Nadeff-Haffer here. Before we get into this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can hear all episodes of Revisionist History, The Staten Island Problem, ad-free right now by signing up for Pushkin+. You'll also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks, and other binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors. Plus, your support helps independent shows like us continue making the stories you love. Sign up and save on the Revisionist History show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. Use the code RH25 for 25% off an annual subscription.

Staten Island Secession

2:31All right, let's get into the series. One day, I came across a box of tapes in the College of Staten Island archives. They were these mostly unmarked VHS tapes, jammed in no particular order into a cardboard box. The extremely helpful archivist set me up with an old VCR. I popped in a tape, and I met Dan Singletary.

2:53Do you realize in 1986 a federal law was passed mandating every school system in the country provide safe schoolrooms free of asbestos? The only school district in the entire country that did not comply. You know it. New York City. This guy, Dan Singletary, he looked like a cowboy. Big mustache. Lanky. I remembered seeing his name all over newspapers from the time. Usually described vaguely as an artist who wanted Staten Island to secede. But no one ever said what exactly his art was.

3:26This intrigued me. And here he was, at a debate on secession, going off about the shoddy schools. Why? Because of mismanagement. Because of ineptitude. There is no way in the world that Staten Island would be able to allow that. None whatsoever. And as I watched those tapes, it became clear to me that Dan Singletary was really the voice of this movement. Well, if there's a son of secession, it's got to be Dan Singletary. Dan Singletary said, if you're against secession, you're in favor of keeping things the way

3:58they are. There were many problems with keeping things the way they were. At least the Staten Islanders saw it. And nothing was talked about more than the dump. Fresh kills. It was so remarkable that Ripley's Believe It or Not featured it. The scale of it could not be believed. 11,000 tons a day, six days a week. And that's expected to more than double suit to over 22,000 tons a day.

4:31Dan Singletary would parade national reporters out to see the dump. Everyone wanted to see the dump. It was the symbol of Staten Island secession. Over 7 million people lived in New York City in the 1980s. Every day, they threw stuff out. Most of that stuff wound up at the Fresh Kills landfill. The sight of it alone was enough to stop visitors in their tracks.

4:55Now the garbage here is piled pretty deep or pretty high, depending on how you look at it. By the year 2000, some of the piles could be over 500 feet above sea level, which will make them, believe it or not, the tallest mountains on the entire eastern shore.

5:16People said you could see the dump from outer space. Ornithologists wanted to study it because supposedly it was the East Coast's largest collection of seagulls. Staten Islanders, meanwhile, rolled up their windows when they passed it. It was next to the mall, and when you went to the mall, you'd cover your mouth and nose and sprint from the car to the front door. It was unclear then if garbage juice was leaking out of the trash mountains and into the groundwater, but people were looking into it. Spoiler alert, it was. And rather than coming up with alternatives,

5:47all the ingenuity in Manhattan seemed to go towards dumping more faster on Staten Island. And Dan Singletary was paying very close attention to this. We have an environmental disaster sitting on our shores. We all recognize that. We recognize the fact that outside of the Great Wall on China, it's the only thing you can see from outer space. It's a disaster. A weird thing happens to me when I work on stories like this. People who aren't famous at all become like celebrities in my mind.

6:18Here was a man on a misfit island ranting about a mountain of trash 30 years ago. And because I've turned my bizarre fixations into a career, over the course of a year, I had read so many articles about Dan Singletary and watched so many videos of him arguing about Staten Island secession that he became a kind of folk hero to me. Wandering around the island doing art, looking like a cowboy with his huge mustache. I wanted to track him down, to understand the mind of a secessionist. But I kept striking out.

6:50Until one day, in an article in Rural Heritage magazine about American milking Devon cows, I came across a reference to a farmer named Dan Singletary. I found a number, and I called. We were the smallest borough. Like, on the face of it, it was a disaster. You know, they could walk all over us. Singletary lives.

Dan Singletary

7:17You're listening to Revisionist History. This is our miniseries, The Staten Island Problem. I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffrey. Everyone has a problem with the place they live. This year, I paid a lot of taxes to a government waging a war I have no interest in supporting. Maybe you think the schools in your neighborhood suck. Maybe you hate the police. Maybe there's a methadone clinic down the block and you can't stand it. Maybe you think the things your neighbor believes are fundamentally evil, and he thinks the same about you.

7:49Those feelings have reached a real boiling point in this country, on all sides. And this is a story about a place with a lot of those kinds of problems saying, you know what? Screw it. We're out. What does that look like? Who chooses to do that? And why?

8:08This episode, the things that are meant to keep our politics together, and why some people want out. Episode 2, A New Map When I finally did meet Dan Singletary, he was living on a farm with his wife Alice, way out in rural upstate New York. I had brought the old videos I'd found with me.

8:38I don't know if I ever even want to see the videos. You gotta, it's a, you must see the videos. They are, they're sort of fantastic. I don't look like I do now, do I? You're recognizable. He still looked like a cowboy to me. So far, working on the project, I'd only heard the New York City view of secession. I wanted to hear the Staten Island one. We sat down at their kitchen table, and started to talk. Well, we had to do something. One way or another. Because we were, we were the losers.

9:09The Singletaries had moved to Staten Island because they had two kids and wanted a pleasant place to live. And they liked what they found there. Alice worked in the schools, eventually as a principal. It was a nice community. Except, of course, for the dump. And I, I had a friend that lived around the corner that worked out there. And he said, hey, Danny, come on out here and have lunch with us. So I came out, went out one day and to Fresh Kills. And met the guys in the bar. You know, we came in, they were starting to make, and they were all Italian.

9:40They all made, you know, sausages and stuff. And I thought, this was great. All of a sudden, a barge full of trash showed up. And the rats are jumping off, and they're kicking the rats in the water. You've never seen anything more disgusting in all your life. And I had, you know, mostly done. And I said, where are you going? I said, I'm sick to my stomach. I'm going to go the hell home. I said, I can't eat any lunch now. Oh, come on, Danny, you know. I said, no. It was pretty, pretty incredible.

10:10Of course, it wasn't just the dump that got under Staten Islanders' skin. There were developers cramming the island with crummy houses, poor sewers, the constant disrespect. And also the reality of living in a city with a lot of homelessness. People decided that the ferry terminal was a great place to feed the people that needed food. The homeless, basically. The homeless people. And it impacted with the people from Staten Island.

10:40Staten Islanders would walk, essentially, through a soup kitchen to catch the ferry home from lower Manhattan. They worked all day long. They wanted to come home and, you know, wait for their kids or do whatever. And they got all these, you know, all these bums are all around and it smells like urine. And, you know, it's just absolutely terrible. So I went in twice to meetings of the community board. And I said, guys, what can we do? I said, can you find some other place? I said, I'm not against any of that stuff. But this is not the right place.

11:10The Singletarys kept using this word for what it felt like in New York City at the time. Sandpapering. It was that constant sandpapering, you know, of sensitivities. What do you mean sandpapering with sensitivities? Well, it's always being rubbed by something, you know, around you, saying back off or, you know, it's... Yeah, you feel like the environment is sort of like aggressive in some way. Yeah.

11:40And around that time, Singletary learned that there might be a way to fix all this. A beloved lawmaker on the island named John Markey had come up with a plan, a pathway to secede. It had two parts. First, Staten Islanders would be allowed to vote on whether or not to study secession and make a charter for a new city. Then, in 1993, they'd vote on that plan. Against all the odds, the state approved this proposal.

12:13Now it was on the secessionists to whip the votes. Our dining room table became the war room. Am I correct? Yeah.

12:23Singletary began to organize an official secession party. If they got enough signatures, they could get politicians on their party line on the ballot and raise the profile of the issue. I was out almost every night for months and we had other people and other people and we collected them all and brought them back and Alice's job was sit with these other ladies to go through and make sure everything was signed correctly and dotted and, you know, all the rest of that stuff and they were drinking, you know, had a beer and coffee and chatting it up and we had a great time.

12:54It's not like you got the short end of the stick. You're like, you had a great time checking the signatures. Go to work next day, keep doing the same thing.

13:06They would have to collect several thousand signatures to make the secession party an electoral reality. And they did. When we took all those boxes into the Board of Elections, they said, you got to be kidding me. Put them in that corner. I'm sure they just sat there. They didn't think it could be done. Yeah. So the table was... Didn't think what could be done. To get that many signatures.

13:32I once read about this political science concept called the logo map. The idea is that when we make a map of a place, we show a simplified picture that leaves out a lot of the actual territory. Think of a map of the United States. What's on it? The continental contiguous United States. Not American Samoa. Not the U.S. Virgin Islands. Not Puerto Rico. Alaska gets put in a little box. So does Hawaii. And Guam is nowhere to be found. Now picture New York City.

14:04You're probably imagining the long, tall island of Manhattan. Maybe you're seeing Brooklyn and Queens and part of the Bronx. But you're almost certainly not seeing Staten Island on the logo map of New York. Unless it's been included in a tiny box in the bottom left corner like on the old subway maps. And even then, never at scale. The logo map reflects the psychological reality for most New Yorkers when it comes to Staten Island. It's that place miles out to sea, reachable only by ship in what was in its day

14:35the longest suspension bridge ever built. It's off screen. by design. Because the whole point of throwing things out is you don't want to see them anymore. The dump became the metaphor for New York City's relationship to Staten Island. The place they put the things they don't want. Secession was about making a whole new map. After the break, the Supreme Court case that set all this in motion.

Board of Estimate

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18:01In the 1890s, New York City did not exist. At least not like it does today. Brooklyn and Manhattan were separate cities. Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx had little to do with each other. Everyone competed for the same resources. Nobody really coordinated how. And this was a big problem. The harbor was polluted. Epidemics and crime waves didn't care that these were different cities. They spread wherever they pleased. The competing areas would bicker about water supply, which, when it ran short,

18:32let huge fires blaze up. So, in the 1890s, a wealthy group of Manhattanites came up with a plan. They would convince these five disparate places to join into one gigantic city. This was called consolidation. In 1898, the greater New York City was born. But, just like when the United States came together, there was a concern. How could the new boroughs be sure that they wouldn't

19:02just be dominated by Manhattan? The answer was an obscure legislative body known as the Board of Estimate. Well, the Board of Estimate, for all intents and purposes, was sort of designed like the U.S. Senate. Frank Cipolla, who was the assistant press secretary for the Staten Island borough president about 40 years ago. Regardless of what the population of each borough was, the borough president voted for the entire borough.

19:33He was the mayor of that particular borough. The deal that was struck at the dawn of the city was that each borough president would have an equal vote on the board, right alongside the mayor, the comptroller, and the city council president. And to be clear, these weren't just some perfunctory meetings. The compromise was that the Board of Estimate held all the real power in the city, the city's budget, the city's land, the city's operations. And Cipolla found himself attending meetings of the Board of Estimate

20:05for his boss. And you'd sit there as busloads of New Yorkers would show up and spend hours trashing you. Hours just talking about how your decisions are so short-sighted. Citizens could weigh in on the important issues of the day as the borough presidents deliberated in real time. It was the pinnacle of democracy. What was it like in there?

20:37It was brutal, Ben. Sometimes the meetings went till 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. I remember once there was a guy just, he had fallen asleep on one of the chairs, just fell asleep. The whole thing was kind of a sham. Frank wasn't the borough president. He was just the assistant press guy. And yet, he was sitting up there because early in the meeting, the borough presidents would all just disappear. He'd show up, he'd sit there for about 20 or 30 minutes,

21:08and then somebody from his cabinet, in several cases, me, would have to sit there for the rest of the meeting. And he'd say, you're going to vote no on this, yes on this, no on that, yes on this, no on that. Okay. Meanwhile, even if the borough presidents were doing what they were supposed to be doing, there was still a big problem. Because the boroughs they represented were not at all the same size. At the time, Brooklyn had 2.2 million people. Staten Island

21:38had 352,000. And yet, the borough presidents each had the same one vote on the Board of Estimate, which seemed pretty unfair because Staten Island had way more power than it should have given its size. They'd weigh in on citywide issues and managed to use their power to say no to a lot of things. They were the only county in New York City that didn't have a jail, for instance. And don't ask them about homeless shelters. All this worked fine enough until this particular

22:09arrangement came to the attention of the Supreme Court and all hell broke loose. We'll hear argument now on number 87-10-22, Board of Estimate of the City of New York versus Beverly Morris. Number 87-11-12, Frank Ponterio versus Beverly Morris. In the early 1980s, the New York Civil Liberties Union brought a lawsuit against the Board that said that the fact that Staten Island got the same vote as Brooklyn violated the Equal Protection Clause

22:41of the 14th Amendment, One Person, One Vote. The case wound its way up to the Supreme Court. The lawyer for New York City begged the court to leave it alone. He said, if you strike this down, the city's going to fall apart. Everyone has said that this structure is the glue that has kept the city of New York together and don't change it. And all I'm saying is... Do you think New York is going to disintegrate if you lose this lawsuit? You're really going to do Staten Island's going to secede? This thing was really all about Staten Island.

23:12The lawyer from the Civil Liberties Union countered, every time a big citywide initiative comes up for debate, we've got to get those guys from Staten Island to agree to it. Why not have total at-large elections and give every Staten Islander six votes, every Brooklyner one, every Queens two, every Bronx three, Manhattan three, and Bronx four? Could we do that? The city's lawyer was arguing that Staten Island was holding the rest of New York back. There were three six-to-five votes recently

23:43where Staten Island weighted by virtue of population, those votes on an incineration plant, on homeless shelters, and on middle-income housing in the Bronx, all would have gone the other way. They all would have been the opposite result.

24:02In the end, the court agreed. They ruled that the structure of New York City government was unconstitutional because ultimately, the population of a place should determine the representation it gets. The entire system of government in New York City was being redrawn. And one thing was certain. Staten Island was going to lose a whole lot of power. That's when secession kicked into gear. But the reason this movement took off wasn't because everyone was intricately following

24:32this new voting system. It had to do with something a whole lot deeper with people who didn't just want to get their old votes back, but who wanted to get their old island back.

Verrazano Narrows Bridge

24:47That's after the break. If your finance team spends more time finding data than using it, if there's one entity here and one there and one here and one there, if scaling your business feels like starting over, you need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite is the AI-native ERP solution

25:17that's powerful, painless, and proven. Learn more at intuit.com slash ERP. We spend hours researching products online and deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit the buy now button? The way we discover and compare things is evolving, happening faster and influenced by new forms of intelligent advice. But the underlying trust question doesn't go away. If anything, it's more important than ever.

25:49That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, they've been a trusted way to pay. And now PayPal can make the agentic era of commerce work for merchants, letting them maintain control of their brand, their customer relationships, so even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most still feels familiar and deeply dependable. Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal Open, built for all business. Visit paypalopen.com to get started.

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27:24Whatever your goal, 4imprint makes it easy to find your perfect promo match. Explore the possibilities today at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, for certain. One day on the island, in my attempt to understand the secessionist mind, I sat down with a local attorney named Bobby Scamardella. I'd seen Scamardella in those videotapes alongside Dan Singletary. My primary involvement with it was as a debater. There were

27:54a series of debates conducted by all sorts of civic organizations on Staten Island where they would invite a pro-secessionist and an anti-secessionist to come before these civic groups. He was an absolute bruiser on the debate stage arguing for secession. I met him in his law office which had these LED lights on the ceiling that changed color as we spoke. Unlike the Singletaries, Scamardella grew up on Staten Island. He remembered it from way back when.

28:27I mean, it was idyllic. I grew up in an area that was wooded right after 1965. when the bridge was built, it was culture shock even for, I guess, at the time a 14-year-old boy. I lived in an area called Sunnyside and the Staten Island Expressway which was built along with the bridge. It just went through this huge wooded area that I used to play in. I'll remember to the day I died waking up in this huge wooded area

28:57where I used to play was gone. The great irony of Staten Island secession is that back when the city consolidated, no borough had been more enthusiastic about joining. But they regretted that decision almost immediately. There were a series of attempts to fix that problem, to make this distant place feel like it was part of the city. But they all failed. There was the train tunnel to Staten Island which the city even broke ground on and then never finished.

29:27The bridge was the last gambit. The writer Gay Talese wrote his first book about the building of that bridge. He wrote, the bridge had become the symbol of hope.

29:40For sparsely populated Staten Island this is an hour almost of rediscovery. From the island through the toll gate rides the first vehicle an estimated 12 million vehicles will follow in the first year. This bridge was a big deal. And for the rest of New York it was like it had opened up a portal to a whole new world. Here's a newsreel from 1964 when the bridge first opened. Across the Narrows the entrance to New York Harbor the longest suspension bridge in the world. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge is the first fixed link

30:11between Staten Island and the city's four other boroughs.

30:15Everything on the island is pre- or post-bridge. Pre-bridge it was a kind of paradise. Bucolic farmland rolling hills shoals of oysters rimming the island. Post-bridge it was all ticky-tack suburban houses white people fleeing the increasingly black and brown Brooklyn and of course the ever-expanding mountains of trash.

30:40To be from Staten Island is to have this sense that something grand has been buried under garbage and forgotten. But it wasn't the Board of Estimate that changed that it was the Verrazano Narrows Bridge that changed that.

30:54And so here we are. Let's look at that because one person one vote makes sense. Yeah. So but then what is that what is that missing that ruling?

31:06Staten Island was culturally and geographically different than the rest of the city New York and I'll go so far as to say physically in the sense that Staten Island is an island