The New York Borough Nobody Talks About Has Been Hiding Something Extraordinary

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Every New Yorker has heard the joke. Asked which borough they’d remove, most Manhattanites don’t hesitate. But after spending any real time on Staten Island, the question becomes: why did it take so long to get here?

Staten Island is the most misunderstood 58 square miles in America. It’s the borough without a subway line to Manhattan, the one that handled the city’s garbage for decades, the one that held a secession vote in 1993 and came surprisingly close to winning.

It’s also the borough with a free world-class ferry, a 3,000-acre forest, a Victorian cottage where America’s first female street photographer once lived, and a level of Italian-American culture that nowhere else in the country can match.

The Best Free View in New York That Nobody Is Talking About

The Staten Island Ferry departs from Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan every 30 minutes. It’s completely free. And for 25 minutes, you glide past the Statue of Liberty close enough to make out the detail on her torch.

Most visitors pay over $25 for a Statue of Liberty cruise. Staten Island residents do the same thing twice a day on their commute and don’t think twice about it.

The ferry arrives at St. George Terminal, a Beaux-Arts building that hasn’t changed dramatically since 1907. Step outside and something shifts immediately — the air is quieter, the pace slower, Manhattan glittering across the harbor like a stage set you’ve just walked away from.

If you’re looking for free things to do in NYC, the ferry alone is worth building a day around.

A Cultural Campus Most New Yorkers Have Never Visited

Walk twenty minutes from the terminal and you reach Snug Harbor Cultural Center. It’s an 83-acre complex of Greek Revival buildings set in sweeping grounds, dating back to 1833 when it was built as a home for retired sailors.

Today it holds a botanical garden, a children’s museum, a Chinese scholar’s garden that recreates a Ming Dynasty retreat, and a performing arts center — all within easy walking distance of each other.

Most New Yorkers have never visited. On a weekday afternoon you can wander the peony garden in near-complete silence, past colonnades that would look at home in Athens. It feels less like a borough of New York and more like a small New England college that lost its students and never noticed.

The Photographer Who Documented New York Before Anyone Else

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On the southern edge of Staten Island, perched above the Narrows with a clear view across the harbor, sits Alice Austen House — a small Victorian cottage that is easy to overlook and impossible to forget once you know the story behind it.

Alice Austen was born here in 1866. From her twenties onward she roamed the docks and streets of Staten Island and Lower Manhattan with a camera, photographing immigrant arrivals, street vendors, garbage collectors, and the everyday life of working-class New York with a frankness that professional male photographers of the era rarely attempted.

She wasn’t paid for it. She didn’t seek fame. She simply photographed everything around her with curiosity and care. Over 8,000 of her glass-plate negatives survived. They are among the most important documentary photographs of 19th-century American life ever taken.

The house is a National Historic Landmark. Admission is pay-what-you-can. On a clear day the view from the garden, looking out across the water to Brooklyn, makes the trip worthwhile even without knowing any of the history.

3,000 Acres of Forest in the Middle of New York City

The Staten Island Greenbelt is 3,000 acres of unbroken woodland threading through the center of the borough. It has 35 miles of hiking trails, populations of red foxes and white-tailed deer, and stretches long enough that you can walk for an hour without seeing a building.

It is one of the largest urban forest preserves in the eastern United States, and almost nobody outside the borough knows it’s there.

Most visitors picture Staten Island as the place you reach after the bridge on the expressway. They don’t know about the forest growing behind it — or the silence inside it on a Tuesday morning, when the deer cross the trail ahead of you and don’t bother to run.

The Most Italian-American Place in the United States

More than 35 percent of Staten Island residents claim Italian ancestry. That’s the highest concentration of any county in the United States — and it shows in ways that Manhattan’s tourist-facing Little Italy, shrunk now to a few souvenir blocks, can no longer offer.

This is actual community. Bakeries opened by grandparents who arrived from Naples and Palermo and never left. Social clubs that have gathered in the same building for 70 years. The kind of cultural continuity that doesn’t survive in Manhattan, where every decade brings a new wave of replacement.

The North Shore carries different layers — the island’s West African and Caribbean communities, the factory workers and dock laborers who built the borough’s working-class character long before the suburbs arrived. Staten Island is, in this way, five boroughs compressed into one: every kind of New York story running alongside each other, mostly without the attention of the other four.

For the hidden New York that most tourists never find, Staten Island is as good a place to start as any.

The Vote That Almost Changed New York Forever

In 1993, Staten Island held a referendum on secession. Sixty-five percent voted to leave New York City entirely — to become the 51st state, or perhaps simply their own city, free from a relationship they’d always felt was unequal.

The New York State Assembly refused to let it happen. But the vote captured something true: Staten Island had always been treated as the place that absorbs the things the other boroughs don’t want. The landfill. The expressway. The outer-borough jokes.

Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill in the world, closed in 2001. It is now being transformed into a park that will eventually cover more land than Central Park. The transformation is ongoing and unhurried, exactly the way Staten Island tends to do everything — on its own timeline, largely without asking for applause.

Frequently Asked Questions About Visiting Staten Island

Is Staten Island worth visiting as a tourist?

Absolutely — especially for the free ferry, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, and Alice Austen House. Staten Island offers a completely different pace from Manhattan, with almost none of the crowds and admission costs.

How do you get to Staten Island from Manhattan?

The Staten Island Ferry departs from Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan every 30 minutes, takes about 25 minutes, and is completely free in both directions. It’s one of the great free experiences in New York City.

What is the best neighborhood to explore in Staten Island?

St. George, near the ferry terminal, is the easiest starting point — walkable, with cafés and easy access to Snug Harbor Cultural Center. For history and community character, the North Shore neighborhoods around St. George and New Brighton reward slower exploration.

When is the best time to visit Staten Island?

Spring and early fall are ideal — the Snug Harbor gardens are in bloom, the ferry ride is pleasant in daylight, and the Greenbelt trails are at their best. Summer works too, but bring water for the Greenbelt hikes.

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Plan Your New York Trip

Combining Staten Island with Manhattan? Our 5-day New York City itinerary includes the best of all five boroughs, with practical tips on timing and transit.

Staten Island rewards the visitor who arrives without an agenda. Take the ferry in the morning, walk to Snug Harbor, find a bench in the botanical garden, and let the afternoon sort itself out. That’s the pace this borough operates at — and it’s the pace New York City itself used to move before it became a destination.