In 1948 my parents bought a house on the South Shore of Staten Island. The house on Rossville Avenue had been empty for a number of years and was in very sad shape. It was merely a shell of a house. They paid $3,000 for it.

My father, my grandfather and my two uncles who were carpenters, literally "rebuilt" the house themselves. It took a long time and I remember we lived in the attic of my grandparents house while they were rebuilding it.

Underneath the house was crawl space. My father dug out the whole thing and constructed a foundation to make a stand up basement. It had no heating system, no kitchen, no bathroom or plumbing….no electric…but, it had charm.

I remember hearing Whippoorwills and loving how they sounded, as if they were saying their name. It was a very quiet little town and everyone knew everyone else. There were paths everywhere…to ride horses,to walk to the golf course…to get to somebody’s house. A pond in the woods for ice skating and a safe street to walk on, since there were no sidewalks.

The size of the property was about 178 X 200 feet. My father built a garage on the back of the house and a bedroom on top of that. He dug out a horseshoe shaped driveway and suffered heat stroke while he was doing it. He took a little sapling of a chestnut tree from his mother's yard and planted it in the center of the horseshoe driveway. It grew to be at least 60 or more feet tall. It was a majestic site to see! He planted beautiful evergreens and every year made a wonderful vegetable garden. He worked so very hard to make it a nice place for us to live. It was a wonderful place to grow up.

He built a small barn in the back and we had a horse. His name was Albert...but Albert is long gone and so are all the other horses in Rossville.

This is Albert and me.

We had wonderful neighbors who had horses, 13 at one time. My sister and I used to clean their stalls! I think there were more horses than people.

This is a picture of my sister Janet and me. I am on the right.

Across the street and down from my father's house are 10 little houses called the "Ten Commandments" that were Army barracks many years ago. They are still there, but many have been renovated beyond recognition from what they once looked like and many of them still look the same as when I lived there.

There was a candy store on the corner of Poplar Street and Rossville Ave. (a friend told me the name of it was Jerry’s) and then a little luncheonette just across the street on the corner of Morris St and Rossville Avenue. I think the name of that was Tony’s. I remember going into the little candy store to buy penny candies. If I thought about it long enough, I probably would remember the names of the people who owned the store.

Rossville was very small town. Hardly anyone even knew it existed and when you said you were from Rossville, they would ask, "where the heck is that?" Probably the only time Rossville was ever mentioned in the Staten Island Advance was the year of the fire.

If a car went up or down the street, we would wonder who was getting company. The bus ran for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. There were two bars…"Coopers" and the "Whitehouse". Coopers was on the left just as you came up Rossville Ave from Arthur Kill Road and the Whitehouse was on the corner of Rossville Avenue and Barry St. Further on up was PS6, which was then converted into a factory called Marimac…They made artificial flowers, kind of glass like. Up from Marimac was what we called the "City Yard". I guess it was used by the city to keep tractors and things to repair the streets with. Across from this was a baseball field. At the end of a driveway alongside the baseball field was a beautiful old Victorian home. There were many old and beautiful homes along Rossville Avenue.

In April of 1963 we experienced the most devastating fire. My father worked in Shell Oil in New Jersey. I was asleep that morning and the phone woke me up. It was my dad asking me what was going on over there…he said it looked like Staten Island was on fire. I looked out the back window and sure enough all I could see was smoke!!! He said he would be right home. Well he tried, but he could not get into Rossville. He had to park the car somewhere in Prince’s Bay and walk into Rossville as best he could. The fires just surrounded the whole town.

To make a very long story short...a fireman knocked at our door and told me to get everything out of the house that I wanted to save because the house was sure to go up in flames. He felt the walls and they were actually hot to the touch. The house on one side of us was up in flames already…no one was home but there were puppies in the first floor apartment that died. Our back yard and our barn was burning. There had been about 13 horses in the barn next door to us on the other side and they all had to be taken to safety.

Our whole side of the street was in flames. I stood looking at the other side of the street that was complete clear….then, all of sudden….that whole side of the street was up in flames too. It was unbelievable. It was like the fire came up out of the ground!

There was virtually no water anywhere. It would only drip out of the faucets and a hose produced a very small stream. The fireman that had knocked on my door stood on the side of my father’s house with a hose and kept the roof cooled down… he saved my father's house!!

Pictures were in the advance the next day with my father's house and the fireman standing there with the hose with hardly any water coming out of it.

Thirty years later….the anniversary of the fire….I was sitting at my desk in work…part of my job was to clip out articles from the Advance. I opened the paper that day and to my surprise and horror I saw a picture of my father kneeling down over a piece of furniture that had been in the house next door that burned down. There was a whole article about everything that had happened that awful day. It was a very traumatic thing seeing that all over again at that time in my life. My father passed away in March of 1988.

My father sold the house and moved to Florida in the early 70's. He sold it for about $30,000 to a lady who was a teacher I think and she had a horse. She lived in that house all those years and it looked exactly the way my father had left it.

She sold it to builders in 1997. I had been visiting a friend who I grew up with in Rossville (she still lives there) and she told me that she thought my father's house was going to be torn down. I was so upset….I wanted to go there and see. I got a camera and film and we drove up the horseshoe driveway. The front storm door was open to the porch. It was the weirdest feeling to be walking up those stairs again. I had not been there since he had sold it. I walked around the property crying and wishing that it could be the way it used to be. The barn had already been torn down (Dad had rebuilt it after the fire). There were big ruts from bull dozers that had been back there. The trees were so beautiful and the whole property was shady and cool. My head was flooding with memories of my childhood there. I walked around trying to see through my tears. The thought of them tearing down this beautiful house that my father built with his heart, pride and sweat, was just too much to bear.

I still get choked up when I think about it.

On the side of the house was kind of a carport that my father had built attached to the house. It had a canvas accordion door covering. It was closed. When he built it he put a mirror on the wall so he could see himself driving in! The mirror was still hanging there! There were little signs of him everywhere. Over the doorbell he had put a little metal plate that said "go away". My father had a sense of humor like nobody else!! There was a horseshoe nailed above the doorframe and the numbers 7 5 and 4. I took those as mementos. I also took a couple of plants. I dug up a sapling from the Chestnut Tree in the horseshoe driveway and planted it in my yard however it did not make it. I was so disappointed.

I just had to go inside. We couldn't get the doors open….they were nailed shut. So...we broke a window.

This is a picture of the old living room...same blinds were up...I climbed through the window and my friend Barbara is playing chickie!!

I felt like a criminal in a way and I know we were trespassing, but yet I just felt like I belonged there and that I wasn't really doing anything wrong. I went inside and walked slowly around each room. Nothing much had been changed. I went up to what was my room and the same linoleum was still on the floor, all black around the edges and just a little bit of pattern remained in the center of the floor. Walls were the same paneling that my father had put there. Light fixture too. The bathroom had the same tub etc. There was a very little room off the bathroom that was made into a pantry like closet. We had used it for my sister's room when she wanted to be by herself. The dining room chandelier was the same one my mother had picked out. The master bedroom on the first floor that my father built was exactly the same except for a picture that the lady had left behind of a black dog. The kitchen had the same stove, cabinets etc. I could not believe that the woman did not do anything to the house. I could even swear it was the same curtains in the kitchen! I felt like I was home and that I should see somebody….but not even a ghost…

This is a picture of me sitting on the steps feeling like I had done this so long ago.

I hated to leave knowing that the next time I went back to Rossville Avenue that my father's house would be gone. After, I heard that the price the lady was asking for my father's house was 250,000, but I don't know that for a fact. The property was just short of an acre.

What once was a beautiful country setting with hundreds of trees and bushes, not to mention squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, chipmunks and other wild animals that lived in Rossville , is now just big overpriced boxes that resemble houses with only a front...as they say in the construction world "Hollywooded!! There is no more charm, privacy, honesty, or calmness left in Rossville or near anywhere else on Staten Island for that matter. I don't believe there are many other towns left here that will stay that way for much longer either. I am sure by the time my grandchildren and their children are grown that Staten Island will be a borough as crowded with people and traffic as Brooklyn is.

You can barely see me sitting on the steps between the trees.

They didn't leave one tree on a whole acre of property.

It seems that wherever there is the smallest little section of property, they stick house on top of house. I knew a family on Fisher Avenue in Tottenville. The house was sold and there were 10 or 12 condos or townhouses or whatever they are built where there was just one home!! Staten Island politicians should never let this happen and should be ashamed of themselves. They keep building houses but do not keep up with any of the things that people need. Schools, roads, traffic is just awful. Hylan Boulevard is like a parking lot most of the time.

I resent the fact that builders get away with building multiple family dwellings where there was only one family. AND, that there are no trees left on the property.

As far as I know, at least two of these houses have been built on the property so far.

The quality of life on Staten Island has been ripped away from us with no alternative other than to put up with the way it has become or move. My wonderful family is here, three sons and 7 grandchildren, so I will not leave them. I understand that progress is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t progress any more now. Staten Island is very over-populated and unfortunately it isn’t over yet.

Staten Island people were and still are taken advantage of and left in the dark about their rights to protect their property...we trusted our politicians to do that for us.

I happen to be a very bitter Staten Island person in that I think greed has given way to preserving our precious way of living, our quality of life… the way it was, here on Staten Island and it will never be the same again.

Since starting this story quite a while back now, the two families, Quinn and Matthes, who lived in Rossville all their lives and raised their families there, have sold their homes and moved away. Their older homes had been surrounded by new houses and they were being forced out. I was told there will be at least 20 or more 4 family houses built where there were the two homes.

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Please visit my other pages listed below...
"In Memory of Shannon"
"Her Last Will"
"One Little Rose for Rosie"
"Until We Meet Again"
My Little Jodi"