The Staten Island Problem - Part 3: The Tuvalu Effect

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1:50Pushkin.

Host Introduction

1:54Ben 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 Movement

2:27All right, let's get into the series.

2:32Every morning, a Staten Island attorney named David Goldfarb used to walk by Borough Hall on his way to the ferry. Some days, he'd see a short, white-haired man with big glasses waving him down. Borough President Guy Molinari. Molinari, you might remember from episode one, was Staten Island's rabble-rouser-in-chief. He was constantly feuding with the Dinkins administration. He would stop and see me and ask me to come into his office. He liked to talk to anybody and everybody.

3:03He would just call you in their office and would sit down and just have this, and I would say, you know, I have to go to work to get a ferry. But he loved to talk about it. The it here is secession. Molinari loved to talk about it because everyone was talking about it. And David Goldfarb was worried.

3:29He liked being part of New York City. He and his wife lived on the North Shore, the most diverse part of the island, closest to Manhattan. In a house with a pool and, depending on the season, two pink lawn flamingos. He worked in a law firm in Manhattan. He did not want to secede from New York. And from their conversations, it seemed like Molinari was maybe on his side. He had not yet endorsed secession. He told me in the beginning, point blank, that this is never going to be allowed by the Assembly.

4:02He said, you know, he'd say, don't worry about it. It's not going to happen. That may have been what Molinari was saying, but something was clearly brewing. The movement was everywhere. Welcome to our special Cable in the Classroom feature on the history of secession, produced exclusively by Staten Island Cable. The local cable station had even made tapes for classrooms to teach kids about secession. The people know why they feel the way they do, because they know the facts through learning and education.

4:33They were not exactly unbiased. The future of Staten Island is being decided now. History is being made. Be a part of it.

4:44David Goldfarb did not want to be part of it.

4:49What is your nightmare situation here? I mean, would the North Shore end up like Northern Ireland? Some of the communities on the North Shore that voted against it would not be included. It would be the same situation you have now where Staten Island felt alienated from the city of New York. Parts of the North Shore would have felt alienated from the rest of Staten Island. The secessionists had to be stopped. You're listening to Revisionist History.

Series Introduction

5:23I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffrey, and this is the Staten Island Problem, our series about the Staten Island secession movement of the 1990s, and more broadly, about what we do when a democracy fractures.

5:36Last episode was about the psychology of secession. Who wants to leave and why? This episode is about the people who don't want to leave. And the fight that ensued between them in the battle for Staten Island.

5:53This is episode three, The Tuvalu Effect. As the secessionists marauded around the island, and the cable news station went to work brainwashing the children,

Opposition to Secession

6:12the people on Staten Island who actually liked being part of New York City realized they had to get organized. So Goldfarb joined a group of like-minded individuals, Staten Islanders for a unified New York, Syphoony. The message of which was, what are you doing? This is going to ruin Staten Island. It'll be fairly, it'll be a free-floating debate. The debaters will feel free to interrupt each other. One spring evening in 1993, Syphoony and the pro-secessionists gathered at the College of Staten Island for a debate.

6:47The space looks like a lecture hall. Four men in suits at a table with mics, heroes and cokes on a table in the back. A handful of students and concerned citizens sit in the audience. And Goldfarb was front and center. Speaking against secession will be Mr. David Goldfarb, an attorney active in many local civic groups. In fact, all these people... Syphoony went toe-to-toe with the secessionists all around the island, again and again. The big secessionist organization was called Vote Yes, Inc.

7:19Speaking in favor of secession will be Mr. Dan Singletary, a local artist. Dan Singletary, the artist-slash-cowboy from last episode, represented them. If we start and rebuild a new city of Staten Island, a city for the first, for the 21st century, the first city of the 21st century we could be. Singletary was promoting a glorious vision of what the island could be. Goldfarb was bringing them back down to earth. If Staten Island became an independent city, they were going to have to take care of a whole lot of things for themselves.

7:53Like a police department or a public school system. They'd finally have to build a jail.

8:00David Goldfarb had a lot to say about that.

8:04These are the things that you're just going to have to lose. Because there's absolutely no way that Staten Island's going to be able to add this to their capital budget. Because you're not going to be... When the police officer arrests somebody on Staten Island, they're not going to be able to send that person to Rikers Island. They're not going to be able to send them to the lockup overnight in Brooklyn. They're going to have to have a jail on Staten Island. The city of New York is just not going to take our prisoners. These are costs you're going to have to face. I think it's going to be a major step backwards financially. Goldfarb, it's worth noting, has argued in front of the Supreme Court.

8:35Singletary fired back. You have just seen a perfect example, a classic example of what's being played out in what's called the politics of fear. He never said one good thing. Isn't there any hope? They don't have any hope.

8:54As I watched the tapes, I felt like Saifuni was pointing out the obvious. Being part of New York City was financially a great deal for a small island. Goldfarb was saying the future is unknown and probably worse. Singletary was arguing that the present was known and bad, and the future might be a lot better. To either of you guys, I've asked this question before. Know how many agencies and commissions there are in New York City? Why don't you tell us, Dan? I have no idea. And the mayor won't tell us either, but this is what's being funded.

9:24This is what's being funded. We have the last time. Singletary holds up an ominous-looking stack of papers. Singletary was joined by Vote Yes, Inc.'s champion debater, Robert Scamardella. You met him last episode, too. He's the attorney who grew up on Staten Island and remembers it pre-bridge as an entirely different and better place.

10:00At the debate, he sat back in his chair, arms folded, looking a little grumpy. What I do know is this, that since the end of World War II, the city of New York has been in economic decline. I believe that that economic decline will continue because the city of New York doesn't have the people or the willingness to embark upon those policies that are necessary to turn that decline around. The other thing I know is that Staten Island has the highest per capita income of any borough in the city of New York.

10:30From that, I can do. Staten Island will have the economic resources to survive and to be in a position to make their own decisions about firemen and policemen and college professors and every other decision that affects me and everyone else who lives on Staten Island. Like the Great American Revolution, this secession debate was really all about taxes. Vote Yes was saying, we'll figure it out, and who needs all those services anyways? Goldfarb was saying, you need more than you think, and it's going to cost you. And that's fair because if it's a political decision and you're willing to pay those extra taxes,

11:03that's something that has to be considered. But let's talk about... Or maybe save on the lower taxes. Or maybe if you want to speculate, I'll speculate the taxes will be lower. Let me finish. This spilled out way beyond the debate stage. It was in the paper all the time. It was the hot topic of conversation all over the island. When I sat down with Scamardella, he remembered this one time he and his wife went to a wedding at the Staten, the island's grand catering hall. You go out to a social event, a wedding, you're sitting at a table with people you don't know,

11:34and the bride cuts the cake was irrelevant. Here we are talking about the secession movement. How did your wife feel about this? Well, she was very upset. We're on the way home, and she was like, you know, can't you just deal with the secession thing when you're at these debates? You've got to turn a wedding into a secession debate. I didn't start it. They asked me the question, and here we went. So it was a bit of an embarrassing moment for me, I guess. I regret that I did what I did.

12:04But the point is, it was a hot-button issue. An interesting fact I learned about city secession movements at large is most of the time, it's about taxes. A rich area thinks, why should we pay for all of those services the poor people are getting? If we just hoarded our resources, we could have it so much better here. What's weird about Staten Island secession is that multiple studies by New York City and the secessionists

12:34agreed that Staten Island got more in tax revenue than it paid. The secession movement you'd expect from New York City is that Manhattan, with all that Wall Street money, leaves the other four boroughs, not Staten Island. Goldfarb was raising kind of a good point. What was the long game here? What was the tax base? How are they going to close the dump if that was Staten Island's most valuable asset? Also, what about the fact that New York City controlled their water supply?

13:05So Goldfarb, I think, was right. But the momentum was not at all on his side. Because something else was going on here. Something hiding, in plain sight,

The Tuvalu Effect

13:17having to do with a remote Polynesian island called Tuvalu.

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16:27I have this feeling that nothing holds anymore. Like, I work in media, and where a career used to mean you go work at a big newspaper or magazine, these days it's starting your own newsletter. Or podcast. One person, maybe two, and a mic. Or take international affairs. The United Nations, NATO, the European Union, Brexit. There's this mass loss of faith in the ability of people or nations to form groups that work for the benefit of everyone. Put another way, we seem to be living in an era defined by the principle

16:57that every man is an island. So I started thinking, maybe the best way to understand the world and the Staten Island problem bedeviling it is to speak to an authority on islands. What even is island studies? Okay, so, I mean, I'm in Malta. So Malta is itself an archipelago, right? It's actually the 10th smallest country in the world by land area.

17:24Godfrey Baldacchino, professor of island studies, which maybe should be called archipelago studies, and which took me down a deep but very necessary rabbit hole. Join me. Most islands are islands, plural. It is very rare that you find a single island. In fact, of the world's 48 island countries, only five are single islands. Wow. So we're talking in the plural, and therefore,

17:55in some of these configurations, there is a very interesting dynamic going on within the archipelago, right? Most archipelago states have a strict hierarchy, beginning with the mainland that dominates the other islands. New York City is an archipelago. And it turns out that the weird thing happening in New York in the 90s is actually entirely in line with weird things that happen on other archipelagos all the time. For instance, the Trash Island.

18:28When you have archipelagos, the tendency has been to export the waste from the mainland where the bulk of the population lives, where the bulk of the waste is produced, and you export it to another island in the archipelago. Sometimes you dedicate an island to waste. The classic example is in the Maldives. The Maldives is a fantastic tourism destination in the Indian Ocean, but it also has a waste island. Really? Just an entire island that's just trash? An entire island, yeah. Tilafusi is the name. But so what about when the waste island

18:59is inhabited, but by a political minority and a population minority? The temptation to use it to dump is massive. It's not necessarily municipal waste. It could be human waste. Convicts, for example. Prisons. Islands have tended to be associated with prisons, with quarantine stations, with leper stations. Right? Staten Island had all those things. Okay.

19:26There you are. Australia was Britain's prison island. Tasmania was Australia's prison island. And then, off of Tasmania, there were even smaller islands that were their prison island. It's all islands all the way down. Islands putting things they don't want on other islands, escaping to yet further islands. One of the ways to stop that island cascade is theoretically a bridge, like what Staten Island got. Bridges create what is called distance decay. Right?

19:57So the islands have become closer. The bridge was finally supposed to tie the islands of New York together. But this bridge became yet another problem for Staten Island. Not least of all, because of its toll. Wherever there are tolls, the argument goes, especially from the islanders' point of view, they're not crossing over to go on a holiday. They're not tourists. You know, sometimes they have to cross over for work, for school, visiting relatives. So this is not an adventure. This is a way of life.

20:28Yeah. So the toll becomes a mobility tax.

20:37Island theorists have a name for this. It's called the Tuvalu Effect. Named after a small Polynesian island, it's meant to describe the quote-unquote centrifugal tendency of islands and archipelago states to secede from each other. There's nothing worse than having two islands next to each other. We can't stand them. This psychology has also a habit of spilling over into politics. So the Tuvalu Effect

21:07is a way of trying to explain all this.

21:13Islands and archipelagos are almost always pulling apart from each other. Baldacchino's list went on and on. Aruba from the Dutch Antilles, Anguilla from St. Kitts Nevis, Nevis from St. Kitts Nevis, or at least they're trying to. Jamaica, then Trinidad and Tobago, then Barbados from the West Indies Federation. The island of Chuk from the Federated States of Micronesia. And why is Chuk trying to secede? Because it finds its, it claims to find itself discriminated.

21:44I mean, again, much of this is psychology. So the Tuvalu Effect has been both preceded and followed by similar examples. And there is no end in sight.

22:01When we talk about reactionary politics, the word insular comes up a lot. Insular comes from the Latin insula, which literally means island. The world is full of insular islands that are centrifugally spinning away from each other. And in the pantheon of reactionary communities, Staten Island is the definition. The place that feels at threat that has lost something. The trash island in the archipelago.

22:30I don't think people just said, well, we'll do North Staten Island. They never even thought about us. Brian Leyline has been editing the newspaper, the Staten Island Advance, since the 1990s. And for any Staten Islanders out there who think it's pronounced Advance, he told me it's Advance. Leyline grew up on the island. He's maybe the world expert on its version of the island psyche. Our house was right at the beach. So we used to go to the, you could see it from the street, the bridge, you know, the bridge being built.

23:00Robert Moses saw Staten Island as a gateway either if you were coming north from New Jersey and south to Long Island or Manhattan and the other way around. It's like the New York City equivalent of flyover country. Exactly. This is what caught my ear about Godfrey Baldacchino's island theory. It describes Staten Island, but it also describes places that are resentful because they feel remote, even if they're landlocked. It's the psychology of distance plus misunderstanding, which leads

23:31to resentment. I've always said that we have this dirty little secret on Staten Island. We pat ourselves in the back that we're this mom-and-pop community, no crime, great schools. Call it what you will. There's an intolerance here. You can say there's racism here. There's no doubt about that. And there is today the way it was then, and it has been my whole life. Weyline's deep understanding of Staten Island had given him an almost prophetic understanding of American politics today. I knew that

24:02Donald Trump was going to win the election in 16. I knew it. How'd you know it? Because I live on Staten Island, and Staten Island is much like middle America. It's not, this is not New York City here. We may be called part of New York City, but we are, the mood here is what the mood was in middle America. You know, this whole make America great thing. For who?

24:31And some of the same dynamics were in play with the election of Trump as they were for people voting for secession.

24:40I think the motives behind secession were good. I think that John Markey, state senator, I think he did it for the purest reasons of self-governance. I think the community of Staten Island looked at it another way. I've always felt that when the bridge was built, it gave people access to a community that was,

25:10it was like virgin territory. And they could come here and make a new life for themselves and escape whatever they wanted to escape. And they brought that attitude here with them. What they wanted to escape was often people of color and poor people. If New York City had always represented the dream of liberalism, this was the final chance to leave that dream behind. To be Staten Islanders, not New Yorkers.

25:41That identity ran deeper and stronger than David Dinkins' idea that the city was a mosaic. It was much more emotionally resonant than David Goldfarb's reasoning about the facts and figures. Or even everyone's complaints about the dump and the voting structure of New York City. And the word that expressed it best was secession.

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28:32On October 5th, 1993, the vote yes and the vote no people gathered at the Staten, the island's catering hall, for

Final Debate on Secession

28:41climactic debate. It was just weeks before the vote that would decide the fate of Staten Island and New York city. Welcome back to our forum on secession. It is an evening in which we're trying to get answers to the question whether or not Staten Island should secede from the city of New York.

29:05It was the big show now, broadcast live on Staten Island cable. And the city had sent one of its officials, a Staten Islander named Bob Federa, who argued that Staten Island should not secede. While some people may believe that secession represents a panacea that will cure all of Staten Island's problems, I do not believe it is the answer. There were questions from the audience. I'd like to, all right, yeah. A guy in tinted shades with slick

29:35back hair stands up. Whether it be true or not, secession can be viewed as racist by minorities. For those who live here and for those who don't. It will certainly add to the or look like white flight. Can somebody respond to that? Federa tries to respond. What I have heard within those groups is that they attach on to groups in the other boroughs because some of the island

30:06representatives will not even open the door to them. In many ways, the minority communities will lose that connection with the rest of the city. The connection in which they really see the source of their power. And secession ultimately would cut that power. This question seems like it should be a grand slam for Federa. But actually, he's in a very tight spot as a representative of the first black mayor of New York City. On the one hand, a lot of the Dinkins administration seemed to think that, yes,

30:37secession was racist. But on the other hand, they couldn't be seen to be playing the race card all the time. They were caught between a rock and a hard place.

30:47Meanwhile, Dan Singletary and the Vote Yes crew kept bringing the discussion back to how much better Staten Island would be without the big city looming over it. What will happen is that these regulations that fine small businesses when somebody drops a stick of gum or a gum wrapper, and five minutes later an inspector comes by and gives them a very large ticket, that will not happen in the new city of Staten Island. It didn't help that the anti-secessionists had tremendous narc energy. Frankly, if you drop a stick of gum wrapper on the sidewalk, I

31:18hope to give you a ticket worth about $1,000. The audience was starting to get frustrated with the vote no people. The things that we have to say are not necessarily popular things. Now, if castor oil is something that's unpleasant to take, sometimes it's necessary. And this was supposed to not be a popularity contest. This was supposed to be a frank and open exchange. So I'm asking you to, let's just get back to what this forum was supposed to originally be about.

31:49It was down to closing statements. From vote no. Are we going to believe that after we leave the city of New York, there's going to be a paradise here on Staten Island? And vote yes. Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors and the people in Staten Island? Or will you trust the people five miles overseas? The people overseas? It was facts and figures versus the Tuvalu effect. There was no chance. And now I would ask you

32:19to raise your hands. The moderator from Staten Island cable took a straw poll just to get a sneak peek of what was going to happen on the day of the vote, less than a month away. All of you who are in favor of seceding from the city of New York, would you please raise your hands. All of the hands you can see on the screen go up. Thank you. All those opposed to seceding from the city of New York, please

32:50raise your hands. The vote no guys raised their hands, and no one else. Larry, can I ask you a question? No, Mark.

33:01I hope that was definitive enough for you.

33:08It was definitive enough for someone else, too. Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari. He was a very canny politician, and yet he had not come out in favor of secession, which I think mattered. How real could all this have been if the borough president for Staten Island wasn't even behind it? The only one who was lukewarm was Guy Molinari. This is Bob Strenary. If you're keeping count, that's the third Bob in this episode. He was a Staten Island assemblyman at the time.

33:38For some reason, you know why it wasn't his issue? I mean, I'm telling you, it wasn't his issue. So he never really got behind it. Strenary and Molinari were not friends. At one point, Strenary left the island and started a hot dog business in Manhattan. When he tried to come back to run for office again, Molinari wasn't having it, as the New York Times reported. He never explained what it was that I ever did that made

34:09him so against me, personally and politically. The quote is, we threw him out of office and got him off of Staten Island and we don't want him back. Yeah, nice. There's a lot of Donald Trump and the guy, Molinari's style of politics. How so?

34:25They're very dominating and they're intolerant of people who disagree with them. Absolutely intolerant. Molinari saw where things were headed with secession and I think he saw it as an opportunity to get something else he wanted even more. Eight days after that forum, he finally issued a statement on his position. Quote, After 100 years of marriage to Manhattan,

34:55Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, the borough of Staten Island is seeking a divorce.

35:01We neither love, honor, nor care to obey the dictates of a city administration which treats us unfairly and remains unresponsive to our needs. I support secession wholeheartedly. End quote.

35:17It was a huge boost and the