The Staten Island Problem - Part 2: A New Map

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1:53Pushkin. Ben Nadefaffer 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. All right, let's get into the series.

2:34One 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. Do you realize 1986 a federal law was passed mandating every school system in the country provide safe school rooms 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 they are. There were many problems with keeping things the way they were. At least the Staten Islanders saw it.

4:06And 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. Dan 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. People 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.

5:35It 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, all 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.

6:13People who aren't famous at all become like celebrities in my mind. Here 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. Until 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.

7:02I 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.

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. Those feelings have reached a real boiling point in this country on all sides.

7:54And 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? This episode, the things that are meant to keep our politics together, and why some people want out.

8:18Episode 2, A New Map.

8:28When 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. I don't know if I ever even want to see them. You gotta, it's a, you must see the videos. 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.

9:06Because we were the losers. The Singletarys 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 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 and they were starting to make, and they were all Italian, they all made, you know, sausages and stuff.

9:42And 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 it 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. Of 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.

10:20And 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 people. And it impacted with the people from Staten Island. Staten 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?

11:04I said, can you find some other place? I said, I'm not against any of that stuff, but this is not the right place. The 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 aggressive in some way. And 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.

11:54It 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. Now it was on the secessionists to whip the votes. Our dining room table became the war room. Am I correct? Yeah. Singletary 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.

12:39And 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. 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. They 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've got to be kidding me.

13:20Put them in that corner. I'm sure they just sat there. They didn't think it could be done. 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. You'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.

14:21And 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 the 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.

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16:40In 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, let huge fires blaze up. So, in the 1890s, a wealthy group of Manhattanites came up with a plan.

17:20They 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 just 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.

18:06Regardless of what the population of each borough was, the borough president voted for the entire borough. He 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 Sipolla found himself attending meetings of the Board of Estimate for his boss.

18:46And 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.

19:15What was it like in there? It was brutal, Ben. Sometimes the meetings went till two or three 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, 50, 20 or 30 minutes. and then somebody from his cabinet, in several places, me, would have to sit there for the rest of the meeting.

19:57And 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 had 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.

20:38They 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 arrangement came to the attention of the Supreme Court, and all hell broke loose.

20:57We'll hear argument now on number 87-10-22, Board of Estimate of the City of New York v. Beverly Morris, number 87-11-12, Frank Ponterio v. 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 of 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.

21:42Do you think New York is going to disintegrate if you lose this lawsuit? You're really going to do it. Staten Island's going to secede? This thing was really all about Staten Island. The 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.

22:20There were three six to five votes recently. Were 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.

22:41In 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 this 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.

23:27That's after the break.

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