The Staten Island Problem - Part 2: A New Map

After the Supreme Court takes a close look at New York City government, Staten Island comes out the loser. A local artist begins organizing for secession. We take a deep dive into the psychology of the island, which has a lot to do with the largest garbage dump in the world. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:15Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 2:06Speaker 03

  Pushkin.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Ben, Matt, and 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 Plus. 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/plus. Use the code RH25 for 25% off an annual subscription. All right, let's get into the series. One day, I came across a box of tapes in the College of Staten Island Archives. They

• 2:52Speaker 03

  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 the tape, and I met Dan Singletary.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Do you realize 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.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  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. This intrigued me. And here he was, at a debate on secession, going off about the shoddy schools.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  And as I watched those tapes, it became clear to me that Dan Singletary was really the voice of this movement.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  It's gotta be Dan Singletary.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  Dan Singletary said, "If you're against secession, you're in favor of keeping things the way they are."

• 4:14Speaker 03

  There were many problems with keeping things the way they were. At least the Staten Islanders saw it.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  11,000 tons a day, six days a week. And that's expected to more than double soon to over 22,000 tons a day.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Dan Singletary would parade national reporters out to see the dump. Everyone wanted to see the dump. It was the symbol of Staten Island's 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.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Now, 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.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  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. It was unclear then if garbage juice was leaking out of the trash mountains and into the groundwater. The 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.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  We have an environmental disaster sitting on our shores. We all recognize that. We recognize the fact that outside of the Great Wall in China, it's the only thing you can see from outer space. It's a disaster.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  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. I found a number and I called.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  We were the smallest borough. Like on the face of it, it was a disaster. You know, they could walk all over us.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Singletary Lives. You're listening to Revisionist History. This is our mini-series, The Staten Island Problem. I'm Ben Nattif Heffery. 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.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  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? This episode, The Things That Are Meant to Keep Our Politics Together, and Why Some People Want Out. Episode Two, A New Map.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  I don't know if I even want to see the videos.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  You got it. You must see the videos. They are sort of fantastic.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  I don't look like I do now, do I?

• 9:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  Well, we had to do something one way or another because we were the losers.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  The Singletary's 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.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  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 into fresh kills and met the guys in the bar. You know, we came in, they were starting making, they were all Italian. They all made, you know, sausages and stuff. And I thought, this was great.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  All of a sudden, a barge full of trash showed up.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  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 says, "I'm sick to my stomach. I'm gonna go to hell home." I said, "I can't eat any lunch now." "Oh, come on, Danny," you know. I said, "No." But it was pretty, pretty incredible.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Of course, it wasn't just the dump that got under Staten Islander's 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.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  People decided that the ferry terminal was a great place to feed the people that needed food.

• 10:47Speaker 06

  The homeless, basically, yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  And it impacted with the people from Staten Island.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Staten Islanders would walk essentially through a soup kitchen to catch the ferry home from Lower Manhattan.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  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 says, can you find some other place? I said, I'm not against any of that stuff, but this is not the right place.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  The Singletarys kept using this word for what it felt like in New York City at the time: sandpapering.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  It was that constant sandpapering, you know, of sensitivities.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  What do you mean, sandpapering with sensitivities?

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Well, it's always being rubbed by something, you know, just around you saying, back off or, you know, it's.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. You feel like the environment is sort of like aggressive in some way.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  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. 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. Now it was on the secessionists to whip the votes.

• 12:28Speaker 06

  Our dining table became the war room. Am I correct?

• 12:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:47Speaker 07

  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 Alex's job was set 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 they had a great time.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Sounds like you got the short end of the stick.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  You're like, you had a great time checking the signatures.

• 13:15Speaker 06

  Go to work next day. Keep doing the same thing.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  They would have to collect several thousand signatures to make the secession party an electoral reality. And they did.

• 13:27Speaker 07

  When we took all those boxes into the Board of Elections, they said, you gotta be kidding me. Put them in that corner. I'm sure they just sat there.

• 13:35Speaker 06

  They didn't think it could be done. So the table was-

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Didn't think what could be done?

• 13:40Speaker 06

  To get that many signatures.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  I 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 US 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

• 14:28Speaker 03

  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, the longest suspension bridge ever built. It's off-screen, by design.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  After the break, the Supreme Court case that set all this in motion.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

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• 16:42Speaker 03

  In 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.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  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 just be dominated by Manhattan? The answer was an obscure legislative body known as the Board of Estimate.

• 17:54Speaker 07

  Well, the Board of Estimate, for all intents and purposes, was sort of designed like the US Senate.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Frank Sapola, who was the Assistant Press Secretary for the Staten Island Borough President about 40 years ago.

• 18:08Speaker 07

  Regardless of what the population of each borough was, the borough president voted for the entire borough. He was the mayor of that particular borough.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  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 Sapola found himself attending meetings of the Board of Estimate for his boss.

• 18:48Speaker 07

  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.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  What was it like in there?

• 19:18Speaker 07

  It 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.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:44Speaker 07

  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. And he'd say, "You're gonna vote no on this, yes on this, no on that, yes on this, no on that." Okay?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, even if the borough presidents were doing what they were supposed to be doing, they were 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 Estimant, 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.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Until this particular arrangement came to the attention of the Supreme Court. And all hell broke loose.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  We'll hear argument now on number 871022, Board of Estimant of the City of New York versus Beverly Morris. Number 871112, Frank Pontario versus Beverly Morris.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  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 Fourteenth 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 gonna fall apart.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  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- You think New York is gonna disintegrate if you lose this lawsuit? You really- Disintegrate? Staten Island's gonna secede?

• 21:51Speaker 03

  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 gotta get those guys from Staten Island to agree to it.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  Why not have total at-large elections and give every Staten Islander six votes? Every Brooklener one, every Queens two, every Bronx three, uh, Manhattan three, and Bronx four. Could we do that?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  The city's lawyer was arguing that Staten Island was holding the rest of New York back.

• 22:21Speaker 05

  There was three six-to-five votes recently where, were Staten Island weighted by virtue of population, those votes on a, on a incineration plant, on a, 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.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  In 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 gonna 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 wanna get their

• 23:21Speaker 03

  old votes back, but who wanted to get their old island back. That's after the break.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

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• 25:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:13Speaker 07

  My primary involvement with it was as a debater. There were a 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.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  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 Singletarys, Scamardella grew up on Staten Island. He remembered it from way back when.

• 25:50Speaker 07

  I mean, it was idyllic. I grew up in an area that was wooded right after 1990. 1964, 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 where I used to play was gone.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  The great irony of Staten Island's 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. The bridge was the last gambit. The writer Gaye Talis wrote his first book about the building of that bridge. He wrote, "The bridge had become the symbol of hope."

• 27:04Speaker 05

  For sparsely populated Staten Island, this is an hour, almost, of rediscovery. From the island through the tollgate rides the first vehicle, an estimated 12 million vehicles will follow in the first year.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:27Speaker 05

  Across the Narrows, the entrance to New York Harbor, the longest suspension bridge in the world. The Verazzano Narrows Bridge is the first fixed link between Staten Island and the city's four other boroughs.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Everything 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 tiki-tack suburban houses, white people fleeing the increasingly black-and-brown Brooklyn, and of course, the ever-expanding mountains of trash. To be from Staten Island is to have this sense that something grand has been buried under garbage and forgotten.

• 28:12Speaker 07

  But it wasn't the Board of Estim that-- Change that. It was the Verazano-Narrows Bridge. I changed that.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 07

  And so here we are.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Well, let's look at that because one person, one vote makes sense.

• 28:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  So, but then what is that? What is that missing that ruling?

• 28:29Speaker 07

  Staten Island was culturally and geographically different than the rest of the city of New York. And, and I'll go so far as to say physically, in the sense that Staten Island's an island out there. It just, it, it, it just is.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  In the New York Times, at the height of secession, one Staten Islander said, "The first thing an independent Staten Islander should do is, quote, 'tear down the Verazano-Narrows Bridge and let us go back to life the way it used to be.'"

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Talking to Scamardella, I felt like that was a big piece of it for him.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  How would you convince people? Make, pretend I'm, I'm a skeptic. Make the pitch.

• 29:20Speaker 07

  The bottom line is really, my position was to ask yourself, what cost freedom? What cost freedom? You have no say over what happens in your community. Virtually no say as far as your schools and your police department, your fire department and everything else. It's not right here. It's just not.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Was anyone opposed to it because they're like New York City, greatest city in the world and we're part of it? We're one of the five boroughs.

• 29:46Speaker 07

  We can't be pushed any further away from the big city. You want to go to Broadway, go to Broadway, right? Want a job on Wall Street, go get a job on Wall Street. None of that's going to change. None of it's going to change. Go to a Yankee game, go to a Yankee game. By seceding, what are you, what are you, what are you giving up? You can't say, "I live in the city of New York."

• 30:08Speaker 03

  This series is about the politics of resentment and alienation and how we handle them. And this was, for me, an interesting moment in the case study. There's a big difference between feeling you're treated poorly and feeling that you've lost something. The former might lead to a quest for justice. The latter leads to resentment. Secession wasn't just Dan Singletary's arguments about voting structures and the quality of life. It was, for a lot of Staten Islanders, the feeling that something had been taken away from them. Scamardella was that kind of secessionist.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Something powerful was taking shape on Staten Island. It was going to lead somewhere big. And so a group of people got together on the island to try and stop it. That's next week.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  It's a pipe dream. It's just not going to happen. You have just seen a perfect example, a classic example of what's being played out in what's called the politics of fear.

• 31:13Speaker 07

  There's nothing worse than having two islands next to each other. We can't stand them. All of you who are in favor of seceding from the city of New York, would you please raise your hands?

• 31:35Speaker 03

  The Staten Island Problem is written and reported by me, Ben Madoff Hafrin, it was produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Rusick. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski. Original music by Stellwagen Symphonette, Luis Scara and Jake Gorski. Special thanks to Todd Reynolds for his track, "The Solution," from the album Outer Borough, and to the College of Staten Island and the New York City Municipal Archives for all of the amazing tape. And to Daniel Immerwar for his book, How to Hide an Empire, which is where I learned about the logo map. And thanks, of course, to Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Ben Madoff Hafrin.

• 32:30Speaker 07

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