East Shore, Staten Island

The term East Shore is frequently used to classify a series of neighborhoods in New York City's borough of Staten Island.

Precise parameters vary, but the most commonly-used definition of the East Shore is that is stretches from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Staten Island Expressway, or some point slightly south of this, on the north, to the southern property lines of the Staten Island Unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area (formerly known as Great Kills Park) and United Hebrew Cemetery on the south, and from the Lower New York Bay on the east to the western boundaries of zip codes 10304, 10305 and 10306, on the west. This definition places such Staten Island neighborhoods as Arrochar, South Beach, Grasmere, Dongan Hills, Grant City, Midland Beach, New Dorp, Oakwood, Richmondtown, and Bay Terrace, along with a portion of Todt Hill, within the East Shore.

Like all of Staten Island except for the North Shore, the East Shore was mostly farmland until residential home construction burgeoned after World War II. Many small, one-family homes sprung up on the East Shore in the 1950s, with new home construction accelerating rapidly after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which linked Staten Island with Brooklyn, opened in November 1964. The opening of the bridge brought a wave of transplants from Brooklyn, especially from neighborhoods such as Flatbush, which white (especially Italian-American) families sought to leave because many African-Americans were relocating there from the Southern States. As a result, the East Shore became the most politically conservative — and to its detractors, the most racist — section of Staten Island, and indeed, all of New York City.

The commercial core of the East Shore can be found in New Dorp, which also happens to be at the region's geographic center. Points of interest located on the East Shore include Historic Richmond Town, the nearby Tibetan Museum on Lighthouse Hill, Moravian Cemetery (where members of the Vanderbilt family are buried) and a significant portion of the Staten island Greenbelt.