Park Hill, Staten Island

Clifton is a neighborhood on the North Shore of Staten Island in New York City, United States. It is an older waterfront neighborhood, facing Upper New York Bay on the east. It is bordered on the north by Stapleton, on the south by Rosebank, on the southwest by Concord, and on the west by Van Duzer Street.

History

The name "Clifton" for the area dates to 1817, when a town by the name, larger in area than the present neighborhood, was laid out along the waterfront. In its early history, much of the surrounding land was owned by the Vanderbilt family. As a young man, Cornelius Vanderbilt established ferry service from the waterfront to Manhattan at the foot of present Vanderbilt Avenue. Bayley Seton Hospital, north of Vanderbilt Avenue, was formerly the United States Public Health Service Hospital and housed the original headquarters of the National Institutes of Health (now located in Bethesda, Maryland).

In the 1840s, the Townsend family built a huge home that had turrets so it was called the Townsend Castle. It was located at what is now Townsend Avenue and Tompkins Avenue. In the 1870s, many roads and large homes were built near the water. The area has many Victorian houses left from the late 1800s in the area from Vanderbilt to Norwood Avenues.

In the 1880s, much of Staten Island was still very rural. Adjacent to the "village of Clifton," for example, was "a low range of grass hills" on which were pastured 438 goats by a Frenchman named Paul Chaulmier who provided goat's milk to wealthy New Yorkers.

In 1900, the Fox Hills Golf Club encompassed the entire area of where the Park Hill Apartments are now. There was a big clubhouse on Vanderbilt Avenue. Many tournaments were held there until 1935, when it closed. The land was taken over by the government and used for military barracks during World War II. By the 1950s, it evolved into a middle-class, multi-ethnic community of civil employees including firemen, teachers, and doctors.

The Park Hill Apartments, located on Vanderbilt Avenue and on Park Hill Avenue, were initially developed in the 1960s as a private apartment complex to which many people from the other boroughs of NYC moved after the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. By the late 1960s, however, people realized that it was relatively inexpensive to move to Staten Island and purchase a home or rent an apartment in smaller buildings, which resulted in a loss of the emerging middle-class population it initially attracted. Park Hill remained privately owned but became federally subsidized low-income housing complex, and became the site of steadily increasing crime and drug abuse beginning in the early-1970s.

By the late 1980s, it had gained the nickname of "Crack Hill" due to the many arrests for possession and/or sale of crack cocaine that were taking place in and around the development and the adjacent Fox Hills Apartments to the south. Crime in this area has dramatically decreased since the late 1990s. Community activists are addressing the ongoing conflict between Liberian and African-American youth, primarily between the ages of 10–14. The community organizations run after-school programs to help keep the youth occupied in a productive way. This helps curb gang and street violence. The community tension that occurs in Park Hill is based on poverty and unemployment.

In the 1990s, the neighborhood became the center for an immigrant community from Liberia and West Africa around Targee Street. The residences in the neighborhood are mostly one-family houses, but the last decade has seen the development of many attached homes and duplexes.

Community

Demographics

Park Hill has been a predominantly black neighborhood for a while. However, there is a growing Asian and Hispanic population in the area. Census tract 4 has seen the second-highest growth rate in the Asian population of any census tract on Staten Island (with the highest growth rate being tract 231 in Mariners' Harbor). East of Tompkins Avenue, the White population increases noticeably.

Over the years 2000–2003, Clifton's unemployment rate increased by 3.2 percentage points, and average wages declined by 8.7 percent, the only Staten Island zip code that experienced a decline. Hundreds of local jobs in the health care and social assistance fields were lost in the downsizing of Bayley Seton Hospital, which had been a major employer of neighborhood residents.

The bulk of the Park Hill neighborhood was built in the 1960s in keeping with New York City's plan for urban renewal projects. It consists of of 6-story brick apartment buildings. The individual apartments contained within are quite large, with many having 2 or three bedrooms. As ownership has passed into private hands, upkeep on the apartments has dwindled, leaving many of them in a state of disrepair.

The average price of a private house in Park Hill increased from 2002 ($159,254) to 2007 ($321,426). The Clifton neighborhood consists mostly of one-family houses; however, in the past decade many duplexes and attached houses have been developed on property previously zoned for commercial use.

Liberian community

Park Hill/Clifton (along with nearby Stapleton) has the largest Liberian population of any city outside Africa, with an estimated 6,000 – 8,000 strong community of direct immigrants in 2007.

History and context

Beginning in the late 1970s, a small number of Liberians, whose nation was founded by freed American slaves in the 1840s, settled in Staten Island. The First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997) led to a flight of Liberian immigrants, fleeing ethnic struggles between the Kru, Gola and Grebo communities, corrupt government, and political strife.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Liberian immigrants in huge number fled Liberia, mostly trapped in the limbo of refugee camps on the borders of Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire. The United States government, always highly involved in Liberian affairs, began to offer refugee status (Temporary Protected Status-TPS) to displaced Liberians, especially those who had family in the United States.

The Liberian community in Clifton has been involved in a string of government lobbying campaigns since the 1990s to extend the "deferred enforced departure" (DED) status, which since the Presidency of Bill Clinton has had to be deferred on a yearly basis by presidential order for immigrants who fled the Liberian war without immigration visas. Clifton-based community groups like the Staten Island Liberian Community Association (SILCA) have become politically active in defending the estimated 3,600 Liberians across the country who are on DED status.

This new wave of immigration settled near the first small handful of Staten Island Liberians in the Park Hill Projects (now private apartments). As the Liberian civil war intensified, more immigrants followed, creating a vibrant community with African restaurants and businesses, and others working and building businesses across the area, notably in the Nostrand Avenue area of Brooklyn. The wife of soccer star (and former Liberian presidential candidate) George Weah owns a business in Brooklyn and lives in Staten Island. In recent years, Liberian families have been settling in nearby New Jersey, with a large community in the Trenton, New Jersey

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