What should we make of Staten Island?

For one year in graduate school (1998-1999) I made a weekly commute between Stony Brook, Long Island and Philadelphia. During that year I often drove through Staten Island. My trip along Interstate 278 took me past the Fresh Kills Landfill. I remember the open skies and the smell.

Check out James Bosco’s fascinating piece on the only New York City borough to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020:

Staten Island, the “forgotten borough,” has always stood apart from the rest of New York City, both geographically and politically. The only borough to vote for Donald Trump (in both 2016 and 2020), Staten Island has long been a red island in the blue sea, voting Republican in 11 of the last 14 presidential elections. “‘Staten Island’ has become New Yorker shorthand for an out-of-the-way, irrelevant place,” City Journal says. For many years it was infamously home to the world’s largest garbage dump, the Fresh Kills Landfill. (It has since been turned into a park.)

Staten Island’s political separateness has a long history. Phillip Papas, in That Ever Loyal Island, reports that when the American Revolution broke out, “99 percent of Staten Islanders remained loyal to the Crown by defying the colonial resistance movement and refusing to support American independence.” Staten Islanders clashed with others in the New York state government, and “the Staten Island delegates tried to thwart every measure that strengthened the colonial protest movement.”

Even Pete Davidson, who is from Staten Island and starred in The King of Staten Island, shits on Staten Island. “A bunch of Trump-supporting fucking jerk offs. Fuck them,” he told an interviewer. Additional comments Davidson has made on his home borough include “Hurricane Sandy should have finished the job,” “[it’s] the herpes of the five boroughs,” “a terrible borough, filled with horrible people.” “I know Staten Island isn’t all heroin and racist cops, you know,” he said. “It also has meth and racist firefighters.” (Despite all that, he still hangs out here a lot.) Staten Island may have given the world the Wu-Tang Clan, but not only did Staten Island vote for Trump, it gave him 82 percent of the vote in the 2016 Republican primary, the highest percentage of anywhere in the state.

And yet: Staten Island is complicated. In 2016, support for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton was far higher in Staten Island than Manhattan. Staten Island is the most union-dense borough in New York City and probably one of the most pro-union counties in America. (I’ve never been to another place where you might openly talk to strangers in a deli about unions as casually as you would a baseball game.) And in 2022, Staten Island was where Amazon warehouse workers finally defeated the Bezos machine in a union election, creating “one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation.” To see Staten Island as a nest of reactionary suburbanites is a mistake. When you look beneath the surface, Staten Island has its own unique history of popular struggle.

Read the rest here.