Francesca Maria Lorenzini

A vast stretch of greenery on Staten Island is home to soccer and baseball games, Boys and Girls Scout camps and New Dorp High School. Very few people who gather there know, however, the history of the land beneath them.

The site near the borough’s Lower Bay started off as one of the nation’s first children’s hospitals in the 1800s, at a time when very few medical facilities exclusively treated women and newborns. Later, the building transitioned into a World War II hospital, where soldiers received treatment until 1951.  

A nursing home then replaced it but Robert Moses, the iconic New York City urban planner, had other plans. He decided the burgeoning Staten Island population needed a major highway. The building that once housed historic hospitals was demolished, along with its long history.

Now, 72 years after New York City seized the land by eminent domain, the highway Moses proposed is nowhere to be found, and Miller Field sits in its place. But a few Staten Islanders remember the land’s history.

Robert Straniere, 82, recalls bits and pieces about the soldiers’ hospital. A World War II-era photo he carries around with him helps: a picture of his smiling father in his military uniform hugging his mother, with 3-year-old Straniere in the middle.

In the army during the war, Nicholas Straniere worked in a post office in Manhattan, returning home to Staten Island every night. But he got pneumonia and wound up at the Staten Island Area Station Hospital in the New Dorp neighborhood.

Robert Straniere’s memories of that time are vague, but he does remember playing “June Is Busting Out All Over,” from the 1945 Broadway musical “Carousel” by Rodgers and Hammerstein, on a jukebox there. He also remembers the joy of visiting his father as he recuperated and taking long walks with him along New Dorp Beach on the island’s eastern shore, when he was allowed to leave the hospital, and going to an amusement park nearby.
“Some things you remember even when you’re very young,” he said.

The hospital’s beginnings are traced to 1866, one year after the Civil War, when St. John’s Guild Trinity Church founded The Floating Hospital to treat New York City’s poorest children, regardless of their race. It started as a ship since that was less expensive than buying land and building a new facility.

St. John’s Guild established its first on land site at New Dorp in 1881 to provide a supportive medical environment away from the city for infants and mothers after delivery. It was incorporated as a hospital in 1887, and in 1899 officially became The Seaside Nursery and Hospital. According to a New York Times report at the time, it cared for 255 newborns.

The hospital’s success encouraged large donations from wealthy families such as the Vanderbilts, and new buildings appeared on the grounds.

“It was such a thriving community,” said Carlotta DeFillo, librarian at the Staten Island Historical Society. The Cedar Grove Beach Club, composed of 41 bungalows built between 1920 and 1940, became a major gathering place in New Dorp.

During World War II, Seaside was converted into a military hospital, the one that lives on in Straniere’s memories. German prisoners of war and American soldiers were treated there, and wooden barracks and bunk beds were added to house the growing number of patients. But there is no record of how many patients were treated there.

According to DeFillo, after the hospital closed in 1951 and became the Seaside Nursing Home, 48 remaining patients were transferred to the Seaview Hospital in Staten Island.

The nursing home was demolished in 1963 to make way for Moses’ plan, the Shore Front Drive. Initially proposed by the New York City Planning Department in 1941, the highway wasn’t seriously considered until 1962. The road would have carried traffic all the way from Montauk on the tip of Long Island to the Outerbridge crossing in New Jersey.   

The road would have cut through Miller Field, where the Seaside was located. As the project would have crossed through private property, New York City used eminent domain to seize the land. According to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, an affiliated agency of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Shore Front Drive was expected to be completed in 1972.

Jessica Phillips, executive director at the Staten Island Historical Society, said residents opposed the Shore’s construction since it would have passed across the Greenbelt area, a 2,800-acre system of wooded areas and contiguous public parkland.

Straniere, who was part of the Assembly Environment Committee at the time, worked with other elected officials to be sure that the Shore was never built. But it was the subsequent New York’s fiscal crisis that definitively halted Moses’ plan.

With the 1972 establishment of the Gateway National Recreation Area, a park that extends from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to Queens, the Shore Front Drive never saw the light. Straniere, for one, was delighted, and he believes many others were too. “I remember all the excitement in that this was gonna be a park,” he said.

The land where Straniere used to visit his father in the military hospital is completely different today. His children, three sons and a daughter, played soccer there on Saturday mornings. Nicholas Straniere would come and buy everybody hotdogs after the games.

“I will bet you very few people remember that it was a hospital,” Straniere concluded.

*This story was written for the course “Write Stories that Should Not Be Forgotten” at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.