Yesterday was St. George’s Day, a European holiday devoted to the legend of St. George slaying a dragon.
So the Staten Island neighborhood of St. George decided to join in on the fun and hold an art and music fair in a local park.
Bands performed in Tompkinsville Square, a short walk from the Staten Island Ferry. Artists displayed paintings and photographs, kids did arts & crafts, tree-huggers dressed as fairies and distributed seed bombs to promote Earth Day.
All this in a park once, and intermittently still, populated by drunks, crackheads, methadone patients, and welfare recipients from the food stamp office right across the street.
Like most of New York City, crime has decreased since the Giuliani administration, and the area is relatively safer than it once was.
The St. George neighborhood, home to the Staten Island Ferry, is the Island’s northernmost point, the progressive shore: an artist enclave, a commuter haven, a place which stands as Staten Island’s best opportunity to become a vibrant and dynamic piece of New York City, instead of the insulated Jersey Shore mall-culture.
This locale, close to Manhattan and Brooklyn, is the previous city council district of now-Congressman Mike McMahon and represents a more Manhattan-centric liberalism than the rest of the boro.
The North Shore is also the home to Staten Island’s first African-American elected official as well as the first openly gay pol.
Another local politician, State Senator Diane Savino (D – SI and Brooklyn), made a passionate plea advocating gay marriage in the New York State last year.
But, again, Sen. Savino represents the North Shore, and this is the exception to the norm on the Island.
The South Shore is conservative in nature and not particularly welcome to outsiders. They would not exactly embrace the idea of an openly gay person in theory, never mind as an elected official. And if they tolerate African-Americans, they certainly don’t want them living in their gated community.
In a Slate.com piece, Jonah Weiner (a former St, George resident) tried to explain the Island’s intransigence toward the rest of the city.
Weiner likened the New York Harbor, which separates the aforementioned boroughs, to a moat that protects a majestic land from the miscreants.
What side that majestic land is on, however, depends on whom you ask, according to Weiner.
I would argue that an Islanders perception of the moat depends more upon where they live.
The North Shore is a diverse environment, a place where once-Councilmen McMahon could practice his centrist democratic ideals with apparent impunity from the Island’s more conservative, moat-friendly areas. Here, the castle is a ferry ride away.
To the Islanders on the Southern shores, in their heavily-fortified McMansions, St. George the neighborhood, like the patron saint himself, is their protective barricade against the potential ‘dragons’ that may lurk on the other side of the harbor in the dirty, graffiti-infested streets they left in the ’70s to join the kingdom of Richmond County.