By David Allen

In the midst of the “Roaring ‘20’s,” the Café Lafayette, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was a world apart from Staten Island’s truck farms, ocean beaches, and sleepy villages — despite being just half an hour away by ferry. If anything connects the two places — and has memorialized them—it is the work of Dawn Powell.

Powell began publishing novels, stories, and plays soon after her arrival in New York City from Ohio in 1918—skewering the Manhattan-centric world of artists, writers, and socialites in witty, closely observed novels, including Turn Magic Wheel (1936), Angels on Toast (1940), The Locusts Have No King (1954), and The Wicked Pavilion (1956). Never achieving bestseller status, her work was nevertheless admired by literary heavyweights Ernest Hemmingway, Diana Trilling, John Dos Passos, and others. Gore Vidal, in a 1987 piece, posthumously anointed Powell “our best comic writer.” [1]

Dawn Powell (undated; Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library; used with permission)

Though published in 1956, the primary setting for The Wicked Pavilion is Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 30s. Its characters are drawn from the demimonde of artists, writers, socialites, and hangers-on that congregated around the Café Lafayette in the Lafayette Hotel on University Place — one of Powell’s haunts — renamed the Café Julien in the novel.

A secondary setting appears only much later in the story (though hinted at earlier). At the novel’s outset, we learn that Marius, one of a trio of ambitious but so far unsuccessful painters, has been missing for seven years. A rumor reaches his friends and fellow artists, Ben and Dalzell, that he has died, possibly in Mexico. Suddenly, some of Marius’ paintings appear on the market. With the cachet of the artist’s death, they sell briskly. It seems the paintings have been in the possession of Marius’ first wife, living in the furthest place possible from the bohemian center of New York City–that is, Staten Island.

The friends suspect that something’s amiss when, in an unlikely touch, an art dealer notices that one painting includes a bus that had only begun running along Hylan Boulevard two years earlier. That Marius is hiding out in Staten Island may not be all that surprising to them. As younger, more hopeful artists, the three had delighted in fooling friends (and creditors) by telling them they were off to Spain and then alighting for Staten Island. Once, when a socialite friend had come looking for their ship to bid them bon voyage, she couldn’t find it. Dalzell recalls with pleasure: “The name of the ship had been that of a Staten Island ferry and their Pyrenees had been the hills around Tottenville.” [2]

Ben and Dalzell decide to flush out their missing companion. “To the end of the world,” Ben declares as they set out for the long trip by ferry, train, and then on foot. When they reach Tottenville, on the Island’s far South Shore, Dalzell is wistful, remarking on how “the Island hereabouts had once offered them a healing vision of long ago to wipe out today.” For Ben, the bloom is off the rose: “I hate this island!” [3]

Dawn Powell emphatically did not. Her 1965 Esquire piece “Staten Island I Love You!” appeared in the October issue. Has Staten Island been so well treated, before or since, by a national publication? For this “pictured essay,” the magazine commissioned lavish artwork, including an opening page-and-half painting by Burton Silverman of the ferry approaching Staten Island (“about five minutes from the St. George Terminal”) and several pen and ink drawings, one by David Levine of an “old pensioner” glaring out from under a hat, another by Harvey Dinnerstein of a man and a woman leaning on the stern taffrail of the ferry, as if at a bar, gazing out at its wake.

The piece itself is surely one of the funniest and sharpest depictions of Staten Island. In it, Powell recounts her early adventures on the island in picaresque detail. She had first set foot there shortly after she arrived in New York City. Her coworker asked if she would “care to go walking Saturday on Staten Island. ‘I’ve always wanted to, [she] cried, never having heard of the place.” [4] She describes joyfully trekking across the Island’s hills and beaches and villages with Joseph Gousha, the man she would later marry. It would be the first of many day trips throughout her life.

As much as Powell loved the Island’s physical attractions, she relished the eccentricities of its inhabitants (she calls them “burgers”), not least for their seeming lack of a sense of direction: “Nobody can give directions because they don't know where they are themselves... Hunting for a map-starred beach somewhere in mid-island, we asked the only person we could find on the road where the ocean was: ‘I don't know,’ he said, ‘I just came out of the house.’” On another occasion, she and her companion encounter a man coming out of the St. George Theatre and asked him whether the Meurot Club around the corner really is the best place to eat in the neighborhood. “He looked around him cautiously as if he had been wrongly accused. ‘Listen folks,’ he said pleadingly, ‘I only been to The Black Lagoon,’ and away he scurried.” [5]

It was likely on one of her rambles that Powell came up with the idea of a struggling artist disappearing from the Village and hiding out on Staten Island as a way to make his name (and living). It wouldn’t be the first time Staten Island inspired Powell: In a diary entry from 1926 she describes coming up with the idea for a novel, “The Bad Girl. Very Bad,” while riding the ferry alone. The incident was likely the genesis for Dance Night, published in 1930. [6]

Powell did her homework on Staten Island’s history; she calls it “the finest hiding place in the country.” Her reason: “No one there pays attention to the world outside the Island; and no one outside the island pays any attention to it: You wouldn't, for instance, find James Bond heading for a five-cent ferry to track down an international spy holed up in Sailor's Snug Harbor, [7] even if all the clues pointed that way.’” [8]

For just the reasons Powell describes, some did take refuge there, including Giuseppe Garibaldi, who settled in Rosebank in 1851. “His neighbors knew him as an amiable candlemaker; his past and future plans as a revolutionary were of no interest to them, nor would they have understood the implications… Carlo Tresca, the anarchist leader held by the police, managed to slip away on the ferry to vacation with his friends on South Beach while the Manhattan detectives thrashed through less obvious territory." [9] Staten Island, it appears, was the place to disappear.

The timing of “Staten Island I Love You!” was not incidental. It appeared just a year after the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge [10] opened, connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island by car and bus for the first time. The impact was immediate and dramatic, changing the character of much of the island from semi-rural, dotted with villages, farms, and small industry, to largely suburban. Rows of nearly identical houses were soon occupied by residents from other boroughs, principally Brooklyn, who could now trade their apartments for a house, small yard, and driveway.

Powell ends the piece with a question: "Does the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge know the wonderland it is opening up or will, alas, the wonders vanish at the first breeze from the real world?" [11] Many Islanders shared Powell’s concerns. While the Bridge opened up Brooklyn and the rest of New York City to Staten Islanders, many feared the Bridge and attendant expressway would make the island a “turnpike between Long Island and New Jersey.” Others foresaw how rapid development would change the Island’s character. One opponent to the Bridge wrote: “Gone will be the woods, the green fields, the wildlife, and the brooks. Instead, up will go the multiple dwellings; up will go the taxes; down will go the trees, our streets will become congested with traffic. ” [12]

Long-serving Borough President Alberto Maniscalo expressed many Staten Islanders’ ambivalence about the bridge: “It’s like everything else. Sooner or later it had to come. It’s good to the extent that we will get additional things we normally wouldn’t get, but at the same time we have to watch out that it won’t engulf the island so that we will lose our rural communities. On the bridge, everyone has got their fingers crossed. They’re not against it, but they hate to see the old days go.” [13]

In fact, the transition from a largely rural island had already begun. From a high of more than 300 farms in the mid-nineteenth century, there were fewer than 50 small truck farms in 1930. While the Verrazzano was the first to connect Staten Island to New York City, three bridges had previously opened connecting it to New Jersey. By 1900, many new roads were laid throughout the island’s interior, setting the stage for more housing. [14] Nevertheless, the Verrazzano’s opening drastically accelerated the residential takeover. Staten Island’s population ballooned from 222,000 in 1960 to 352,000 in 1980. [15]

Some sixty years after the bridge’s ribbon cutting, Staten Island current and former residents, look back on life before the bridge nostalgically. One respondent to an online query about life on Staten Island before the bridge wrote: “[My family] moved to NJ a couple of years after the V-N was completed. Every time we'd go back to visit there'd be more development, usually thrown-together looking and architecturally undistinguished. The charm slowly disappeared from the SI that I knew as a kid.” [16]

Another ex-Islander, who moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island in 1962, while in high school, wrote: “I loved the fact that I could ride my bike and be in the country! When I look at Google today, and see all the new neighborhoods, I don't recognize the place. I also remember that Islanders did not like the newcomers. I really got tired of being called an ‘off islander’ at school. All that has changed. I think there are probably more ‘off islanders’ than original residents.” [17]

Have all of Staten Island’s wonders vanished? Decide for yourself by following in the footsteps of Dalzell, Ben, and Powell herself. Take the ferry, then walk or catch a bus to the St. George Theatre. Sadly, it won’t be playing The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but the interior of this ornate movie palace, which opened in 1929, has been recently restored and is well worth seeing, whether it’s for a Kenny Rogers concert, a Beatles tribute band, or a high school graduation. The Meurot Club was razed long ago. Now, next door to the theater is Enoteca Maria. Initially, the grandmother-chefs were all from Italy; now the roster includes “nonnas” from Egypt, Sri Lanka, Colombia, and other countries, reflecting the Island’s increasing diversity.

Or take a bus down Hylan Boulevard—the one in Marius’s painting has long since been retired—and stop for a hot dog at Skippy’s food truck. It has been a fixture there since 1962 (in one iteration or another). You’re sure to hear some comments from the ”burgers” of today about how “the Bridge” changed Staten Island and whether the island should secede from New York State to New Jersey, a recurring topic on the island.

Or take the Staten Island Railroad from the ferry to its final stop, Tottenville. From the platform you can gaze across the Arthur Kill to New Jersey, just as Ben and Dalzell did on their journey. The street leading from the station is no longer cobblestoned, but if you follow Arthur Kill Road to where it dead ends with tiny Tottenville Shore Park, you may still enjoy what Dalzell declared a “healing vision of long ago to wipe out today.”

David Allen is a Professor of Education at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He has published posts on the Gotham blog about Dorothy Day and Audre Lorde, and their experiences on Staten Island. He lives on Staten Island’s North Shore.

[1] Patricia E. Palermo, The Message of the City: Dawn Powell’s New York Novels 1925-1962 (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 2016).

[2] Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavilion, Hanover, NH: Zoland Books, 1996, 50.

[3] Powell (1996), 247.

[4] Dawn Powell, “Staten Island I Love You!” Esquire (October, 1965), 121.

[5] Dawn Powell, “Staten Island I Love You!” Esquire (October, 1965), 122.

[6] Dawn Powell. The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931-1965. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press. 1995, 7.

[7] Sailors’ Snug Harbor, on Staten Island’s North Shore, was founded in 1801 at the behest of shipping magnate Robert Richard Randall to house “aged, decrepit, and worn-out sailors.” (https://snug-harbor.org/about-us/history/) Today it functions as a park and cultural center. Powell may not have realized that her beloved Café Lafayette, model for the Café Julien in the novel, was owned by the Sailor’s Snug Harbor trust. It closed in 1949 when its proprietors could not obtain the lease they wanted from the trust. (New York Times: Auction Bidders Throng Lafayette, 27 April 1949.)

[8] Powell (1965), 124.

[9] Powell (1965), 124.

[10] Initially designated the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, in 2018 a second “z ” was added to Verrazzano in accordance with the name of the Italian explorer it honored: Giovanni da Verrazzano.

[11] Powell (1965), 124.

[12] Kenneth M. Gold, The Forgotten Borough: Staten Island and the Subway (New York, Columbia University Press, 2023), 212.[15] Mark Abramson qtd. in Collins, Sweet, 83 – 84.

[13] Daniel C. Kramer and Richard M. Flanagan, Staten Island: Conservative Bastion in a Liberal City (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012), 56.

[14] George R. Robinson, Mary E. Yurlina and Steven N. Handel, “A Century of Change in the Staten Island Flora: Ecological Correlates of Species Losses and Invasions,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, Vol. 121, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1994), pp. 119-129.

[15] Kramer and Flanagan, 53.

[16] City-Data.com: https://www.city-data.com/forum/new-york-city/2305588-what-like-live-staten-island-before.html.

[17] City-Data.com.

“Wonderland”: Dawn Powell on Staten Island