A visit to West New Brighton
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited West New Brighton on Staten Island’s North Shore.
It was the first Staten Island neighborhood I ever visited, thanks to the former Mandolin Brothers, the legendary vintage instrument shop that drew Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Neil Young to Staten Island. Joni Mitchell bought a mandocello there in 1976 and later wrote “Song for Sharon” about the trip home on the ferry.
The neighborhood’s old name was Factoryville, and Charles Goodyear operated a rubber factory there in 1836. When that didn’t take off, he and his family ended up moving into the factory itself, surviving on fish caught in the Kill Van Kull.
Goodyear's former factory ca. 1880s. Staten Island Historical Society.
The neighborhood was also home to former First Lady and pro-slavery advocate Julia Gardiner Tyler, widow of President John Tyler. She moved north during the Civil War but kept championing the South, much to the chagrin of her neighbors, who broke into her house to tear down a Confederate flag on the night Lincoln was shot. Her old house is still standing.
Today, the neighborhood’s most-visited landmark is the Staten Island Zoo, home to Staten Island Chuck, the groundhog NOAA ranked America’s most accurate in 2025. Chuck once bit Michael Bloomberg, prompting the mayor to declare at a press conference that Chuck was “clearly a terrorist rodent who could very well have been trained by Al Qaeda.” More tragic was the 2014 Groundhog Day ceremony, when then-Mayor Bill de Blasio accidentally dropped Chuck’s replacement, Charlotte, onto her head in front of a crowd of “shocked schoolchildren.” A week later, she was dead.
If you want to read the whole piece—which is not a definitive history of West New Brighton, just the things I found interesting enough to write about—you can check it out here
Posted Jul 11, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC