As I stepped off the S74 onto the side of a wet, dreary road in the middle of Staten Island, my bus driver told me, “Enjoy your colonial experience.” He was mistaken. Historic Richmond Town, my destination that day, is a “living history museum” that memorializes not only the colonial period, but the entire rural history of Staten Island up to the end of the nineteenth century. His response points to how little the agricultural past of this region figures into New Yorkers’ memories. New York is not only a city, but the City. It conceals even its urban past, so that we must compress its long rural past within the confines of this single place, Richmond Town.
Perhaps only Staten Island, the vast and least densely populated borough, has the space for a historical village of twenty–seven buildings. These buildings, and the reenactors who work in and around them, occupy arund twenty–five acres of land eight miles southwest of the ferry stop. The two–hour subway, boat, and bus trip from Columbia gave me time to consider the doubts and preconceptions I held toward the concept of “living history.” By the end of the journey, I felt prepared for, and even welcomed, the idea of a physical refuge for the past.
My first lesson was not historical: on rainy Saturdays in October, Richmond Town is quite dead. I shuffled past a couple shuttered doors before seeing the smoke emerging from the chimney of the cooper’s shop. The bespectacled, mustachioed woodworker had a ten–year old apprentice to aid him with his cutting and carving instruments in making a wooden spoon. He spoke freely with me, not as a cooper, but as a historian of the cooper. Among a number of craft–related tidbits, the cooper delivered a sociological analysis: after the Civil War, with the advent of the Sears–Roebuck catalogue (the very same Sears department store which exists today), the American farmer started to purchase goods based upon want, rather than need. Thus ended austerity, and began consumerism.
I left the cooper’s and continued to the visitors’ center, a Greek revival courthouse at the top of a gently sloping hill. Even before reaching the front door, I heard the disconcerting sound of the “Cha Cha Slide” on the building’s second floor. The music’s source was likely no more sinister than a child’s birthday party, but the anachronism still jarred me. The woman at the gift shop inside asked if I wanted to pay for a tour, but with the hour–and–a–half until the next one, and the sounds of dance music overhead, I decided to search for Richmond Town’s ethos on my own.
In the room across from the gift store, a 15–minute film on the village played on loop, and I walked in just as the opening credits began. The narrator called Richmond Town “a community of people, living and working together.” As a City–dweller, I bristled: did he mean to imply that New York is no longer such a community? Perhaps we late moderns experience less connection with our labor, but as the cooper was quick to tell me, agricultural life was a lonely one. The family, not the community, was the main unit of living and working, even at a crossroads like Richmond Town.
The video detailed not only the history of Richmond Town, but also the history of Historic Richmond Town. The town had a “sleepy quality” by the end of the 1800s, when Staten Island was incorporated as a borough. In the 1930s, a group known as the Staten Island Historical Society began the preservation effort. The video made special note that Richmond’s project began during the Great Depression. Amid the ruins of a system based in their own city—a system that had promised prosperity and happiness through individualism only a decade before—these passionate amateur historians engaged in a collective project to commemorate the idea of community. Over the next decades, and with help from the City of New York, the preservationists brought buildings from all over the island to the site of the old village, and by 1958, it transformed into the living museum that stands in Richmond Town today.
After the movie ended, I returned to the rain to see what else I could learn. Unfortunately, a small museum was the only other open building, and two colonially–garbed women informed me that admittance came with the ticket for the tour. Instead, I wandered through the village, peering into the smudged windows of the various homes and shops, but found nothing besides some shadow–covered relics: furniture, tinsmith tools, a printing press.
Richmond Town is an amalgamation of these disconnected fragments. It represents a yearning for us—the pace of cultural and societal change ever increases, and the past tempts us as an anchor with which to weigh ourselves down against transformation, a means of providing an unbroken chain to the present. Yet someone looking for a coherent story about New York’s history in Richmond Town will leave disappointed. It is broken up, with roads crisscrossing the land upon which it rests, with dance music blaring in its center, with booths and fence parts from festivals of summers past piled up beside its darkened buildings. It reminds us that what has come before gradually disappears, and that even admirable rescue attempts cannot escape the contemporary. On a gray autumn day, Richmond Town feels haunted not only by the farming people it seeks to immortalize, but by those who wanted to create a place of memory and have themselves passed away.
I stopped in the Olde Village Market, now a restaurant, for a cup of coffee before heading back to Manhattan. All the customers and employees were in their later years, and the woman serving me looked happy to see a young face. When I stepped up to leave, she told me to walk between the raindrops.
The weather only got worse, and my jacket began to soak through. As I waited at the bus stop, a woman wearing a bonnet and a prairie dress strolled across the road—the passing cars slowed for her, but she barely seemed to notice them. She held her head down and moved deliberately and gracefully to the other side of the street, disappearing up an unpaved path. I would have sworn she was a ghost. But the raindrops hit her, too.
Above: Members of Richmond Town’s historical society perform for visitors.
NICK SERPE is is a Columbia College Junior majoring in Philosophy and Political Science. He can be reached at nick.serpe@gmail.com.