St George, Staten Island

The Italian North Shore

Staten Island's development as an Italian-American settlement began with the construction labour boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The same Sicilian and Neapolitan migrants who built Manhattan's water tunnels, sewer systems, and elevated railways settled on Staten Island because its land was cheap, its air was clean by comparison with the Lower East Side, and the ferry connected it to Manhattan employment in under an hour.

The St George waterfront — the area around the ferry terminal — was the first Italian settlement zone. The proximity to the terminal meant that men who worked in Manhattan could commute, and the ferry crossing became part of the rhythm of Italian-Staten Island working life in a way that it has never quite lost. The Staten Island Ferry is still the most Italian commute in New York City, in the sense that the boarding crowd at St George on a weekday morning remains disproportionately Italian-American in its demographic character.

The Sicilian communities of the North Shore — centred in St George, Tompkinsville, and New Brighton — arrived primarily from the western provinces of Sicily: Palermo, Trapani, and the agricultural interior of Agrigento. The pattern of village-specific settlement was as precise here as anywhere in New York: specific streets on specific blocks were occupied by families from the same Sicilian village, maintaining the social structure of the community of origin in the new environment.

The Ferry, the Church, and Community Life

St Peter's Roman Catholic Church — Staten Island's oldest Catholic parish — served as the anchor institution for the Italian-American community of the North Shore. The parish's history stretches back to 1839, well before the Italian immigration wave, but it absorbed the Italian community from the 1890s onward and became thoroughly Italian in character through the 20th century.

The festa culture of Sicilian and Neapolitan immigrants — the street processions, the patron saint celebrations, the elaborate public rituals of Catholic devotion that seem extravagant by Irish-American Catholic standards — found space on Staten Island that it could not always find in Manhattan. The island's lower density, the presence of land and the possibility of outdoor celebration, and the Italian community's numerical dominance in certain North Shore streets allowed the feast day culture to flourish in ways that shaped the neighbourhood's calendar and character.

The construction trades, as elsewhere in New York, were central to the Italian-American economic story. Italian bricklayers, masons, and plasterers worked across all five boroughs, but many of them lived on Staten Island because the combination of cheap land and ferry access made it an economically rational choice. The Staten Island construction trades were Italian-dominated for most of the 20th century, and the union structures that governed them were organised in ways that reflected the ethnic composition of the workforce.

Staten Island Italian Today

Staten Island is today the most Italian-American of New York City's five boroughs, with approximately 35% of the population claiming Italian descent — a share that makes it demographically unlike any other borough. This Italian character is not a historical remnant but a living demographic reality, concentrated on the North Shore and in the island's more suburban southern reaches where Italian-American families moved from the 1960s onward.

The Italian-American cultural institutions of Staten Island — the clubs, the associations, the parish networks, the traditions of food and celebration — continue to function in ways that have become rarer in Brooklyn and Queens. The Italian-American identity of Staten Island is therefore both a genealogical resource and a living culture: researchers tracing Island Italian ancestors will find records, but they will also find communities that remember.

For genealogists, the records of Staten Island's Italian community are held in several repositories. The Archdiocese of New York Archives holds St Peter's and other North Shore parish records. The Staten Island Museum holds local history collections including business records and community organisation archives. The US Census records (1900–1940) capture the Italian settlement in detail, and naturalization records at the National Archives cover arrivals from the great Sicilian immigration wave.

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