Clifton, Staten Island
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clifton is a neighborhood in northeastern Staten Island in New York City in the 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.
[edit] 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).
The Park Hill Apartments, a privately-owned but federally-subsidized low-income housing complex on Vanderbilt Avenue, became the site of steadily increasing crime and drug abuse beginning in the mid-1960s; 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. However, crime in this area has dramatically decreased since the late 1990's.
In the 1990s, the neighborhood became the center for an immigrant community from Liberia and West Africans 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 on formerly commercial property. The subdivion Celebration at Rainbow Hill located behind the Park Hill Apartments, contains single and two family attached homes occupied by primarily middle-class West Indians, Asians, and Hispanics.
The neighborhood is along the route of the Staten Island Railway, three stops from the ferry at St. George.
Many members and affiliates of the Wu Tang Clan originally hail from this neighborhood.
Actually "Clifton" is a group a neighborhoods which originally included Rosebank Stapleton Concord and Parkhill.
Clifton Ave is actually in Rosebank.
The Staten Island Advance, Staten Island's main newspaper, still reports stories as happening in the "Rosebank" section of Clifton or the "Park Hill" section of Clifton for example.
