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theses

This dissertation explores the history behind the metropolitan relationship between Staten Island and Manhattan as it emerged in the maritime era of the first half of the 19th century. Between the 1790s and 1850s, I argue, a series of historical moments and the periods of Staten Island’s visibility they sparked helped lay the foundation, for the first time, of a New York metropolitan region that extended beyond the urban tip of Manhattan Island. Through the Island’s maritime institutions, the metropolitan real estate market, the Island’s landscape of highly improved farms, estates and cottages, and a web of elite personal and professional networks, New Yorkers, along with visitors and new arrivals to New York, engaged Staten Island with Manhattan in a dynamic transformation of metropolitan life, land and landscape, entwining the Island with the metropolis, yet defining it as a place distinct from the city itself. Using institutional records, government documents, personal memoirs and correspondence, newspapers and magazines, land records, local histories, maps, and other archival material, this project examines how people imagined, experienced and built Staten Island as part of a new regional New York that was more than just urban, more than just Manhattan. Exploring Staten Island in the first half of the nineteenth century complicates the distinction between “country” and “city,” revealing the complexities and contingencies of social, cultural, economic and political relationships that construct metropolitan regional geography.

ETD_5850

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Adam Zalma

doi:10.7282/T3BV7J8P

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.