the case for:

Why move there? A massive Ferris wheel and hundreds of new apartments are coming—and Living in Stat en Island so are the Brooklynites. The scene on a Saturday at the Urby complex in Stapleton.

60 | september 5–18, 2016 Photograph by Tobias Hutzler septembermonth 0–00, 5–18, 2016 | new york 61 the case for 31

Is there an indie movie You Can Get theater? No, but Aquehonga Cinema, a pop- Really Drunk up film series, hosts There’s a Wonderfully screenings of independent (or Married) movies (like Orson Welles’s Strange Ship Graveyard F for Fake) at various venues on the Ferry like the Austen House by alexandra kleeman museum (2 Hylan Blvd.). The According to people UA Staten Island 16 cineplex who’ve done both. (2474 Forest Ave.) will, on occasion, screen independent hen i moved to Staten fossilized among collapsing house- movies like Florence Foster Island a couple years ago, it boats, gutted ferries still brightly Jenkins or Hell or High comforted me to see the orange in color, and the skeletal Water. W blackened stubs of old remains of massive ironclad ships Is there an art scene? pillars poking out of the harbor that sit eaten away by rust, jagged “When my partner and where the docks used to be, the outlines of their seafaring selves. I moved here in December from Bushwick, we had no overturned tree trunks and scrap Today, the ships that remain are idea what to expect. It became metal. I had lived in owned by a recycling Have an clear that amid the Sri After-Hours Party and Brook- 30 company that has Lankan community and the lyn for years, and on fenced off the best “It was like 1 a.m., and my middle-class African- Staten Island—where access points with friends and I, we didn’t want American community, there’s to go home. I had an idea. also this contingent of there’s less pressure to 12-foot-high sheets I went to the liquor store, creatives that got displaced in erase and replace— of steel—but there are bought tons of booze, then the gentrification push in went to a deli and got Park Slope in the early ’90s. oddities can linger and still ways in for visi- sandwiches. We got into Staten Island’s history of even flourish. There’s tors with waterproof a cab in Manhattan, and my receiving people who are no better example of boots and a sense of priced out of is not friends still didn’t know what new. But there’s also not this than the Staten adventure. Head away was going on. I asked the enough density to create Island boat graveyard, a wetland from the road, tramping through driver to take us to South a larger arts community area on the North Shore that was the high grasses and marshy turf Ferry. We mixed vodka into quite yet. It’s like when I lived Sprite bottles. You can bring in Bushwick after college in once home to hundreds of retired to find a strangely peaceful scene: whatever you want onto ’99—there’s this thing of ships, broken-down and rusting in egrets stepping through the shoal, the ferry, and they sell beer Silver Lake Park people living some place to shallow water—most of them as several dark, ravaged maritime and wine in a bar. Don’t go work there. And then the cafés beyond salvage, toxic from years of carcasses loom in the background, crazy. You will get in trouble and restaurants arrive, then if you’re being loud and the luxury hotels. Staten use. Here, old tugboats that have sinking deeper into the silt year obnoxious. Remember that Island just hasn’t hit that aged out of their occupations lie after year. some people are just, like, You Might As Well Be in the Catskills breaking point yet.” traveling home.” —Jen Liu, Tompkinsville, —Mark Rosenberg, 33, With all the lake fishing, hiking trails, and osprey sightings. artist Washington Heights

What’s the Seamless 32 Run a 10K Poillon Avenue