The Staten Island Problem - Part 2: A New Map

Summary

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Revisionist History: The Staten Island Problem – Part 2: A New Map

Host: Ben Naddif-Haffrey (Pushkin Industries)
Original Air Date: July 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

In the second installment of Revisionist History’s miniseries "The Staten Island Problem," host Ben Naddif-Haffrey explores the rise and deep roots of the Staten Island secession movement in the turbulent early 1990s. This episode, titled "A New Map," dives into why Staten Islanders felt so alienated from New York City, how their unique local politics and geography fostered resentment, and the pivotal legal and physical maps that shaped their sense of identity. Through archival audio, interviews, and vivid storytelling, Ben interrogates what happens when a marginalized group tries to remake the boundaries of democracy.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Meeting the Voice of Secession: Dan Singletary

Timestamps: 02:06–06:26

• Introduction to Dan Singletary: Rediscovered via archival tapes, Ben finds Singletary—the cowboy-hatted artist and folk hero—leading the secession campaign.
• Singletary’s Rationale: He describes chronic neglect:

  “Do you realize 1986 a federal law was passed mandating every school system in the country provide safe schoolrooms free of asbestos? The only school district in the entire country that did not comply. You know it. New York City.” (02:06, Dan Singletary)

• The Symbol of the Dump: The Fresh Kills landfill epitomized Staten Island’s burden—NYC’s trash literalized their role as the city’s dumping ground.

  “By the year 2000, some of the piles could be over 500 feet above sea level, which will make them...the tallest mountains on the entire eastern shore.” (04:07, Dan Singletary)

2. Resentment in Daily Life: Sandpapering and Isolation

Timestamps: 06:26–11:29

• A Sense of Losing Control: Ben describes meeting Dan and Alice Singletary on their upstate farm, reflecting on Staten Island’s "loser" status and the recurring irritations (“sandpapering”) of living in the outer borough.
• Personal Stories:
  • The horror of eating lunch at the dump with rats fleeing barges of trash. (08:36–09:22)
  • The discomfort of commuting home through a ferry terminal that doubled as a soup kitchen:

    “They worked all day long...and they got all these, you know, all these bums are all around and it smells like urine...absolutely terrible.” (09:58, Dan Singletary)

• The "War Room": The Singletarys organized at their dining room table, gathering thousands of signatures for the secessionist party, making the movement an electoral reality.

  “When we took all those boxes into the board of elections, they said, you got to be kidding me. Put them in that corner...They didn't think it could be done.” (12:26, Dan Singletary)

3. Maps, Power, and Exclusion: The 'Logo Map' Concept

Timestamps: 12:45–15:39

• The Psychological Map: Ben introduces the "logo map"—the simplified representations that mentally and literally leave places like Staten Island and Puerto Rico off the center stage.
• Staten Island as a Forgotten Place:

  “The dump became the metaphor for New York City's relationship to Staten Island, the place they put the things they don't want.” (14:36, Ben Naddif-Haffrey)

• Secession as Remapping: The movement is reframed as a bid to create “a whole new map” for themselves.

4. Origins of Greater New York & Loss of Power

Timestamps: 15:39–20:29

• The Board of Estimate: Formed to give equality among boroughs (modeled on the U.S. Senate); each got an equal vote regardless of population.

  “Regardless of what the population of each borough was, the borough president voted for the entire borough. He was the mayor of that particular borough.” (15:53, Frank Cipolla)

• Staten Island’s Leverage: This structure gave disproportionate power to Staten Island (0.35M residents = 1 vote; Brooklyn’s 2.2M = 1 vote).
• Supreme Court Intervention: In the 1980s, Board of Estimate v. Morris rules this system unconstitutional (one person, one vote), stripping Staten Island of its influence.

  City lawyer: “New York is going to disintegrate. Staten Island's going to secede.” (19:21, NYC lawyer)

5. Sense of Loss & the Symbolism of the Bridge

Timestamps: 21:40–26:13

• Interview with Bobby Scamardella: Born and bred on Staten Island, now a local attorney, he traces resentment to the 1964 Verrazzano Bridge opening—transforming the borough overnight from idyllic woods to suburban sprawl for white flight from Brooklyn and Queens.

  “It was idyllic... I'll remember the day I died waking up and this huge wooded area where I used to play was gone.” (22:17, Bobby Scamardella)

• Nostalgia and Alienation: Residents fantasize about tearing down the bridge to return to an idealized past.
• Cultural and Geographic Difference:

  “Staten Island was culturally and geographically different than the rest of the city of New York. Physically...it just is.” (24:56, Scamardella)

• Pitch for Secession:

  “You have no say over what happens in your community...as far as your schools and your police department, your fire department and everything else. It's not run here.” (25:47, Scamardella)

6. Themes: Resentment vs. Justice, Feeling vs. Fact

Timestamps: 26:35–27:28

• Politics of Resentment: Ben distinguishes between feeling wronged (which might lead to advocacy) and feeling something precious has been stolen (which leads to resentment and desire to break away).
• Emotional Foundation of Secession: The feeling of being forgotten and dumped upon drives the movement more than technicalities of representation.

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Notable Quotes by Timestamp

• Dan Singletary on Staten Island’s burden:

  “There is no way in the world that statno would be able to allow that. None whatsoever.” (02:46)

• On Fresh Kills landfill:

  “Outside of the Great Wall of China, it's the only thing you can see from outer space.” (05:10)

• On daily alienation ("sandpapering"):

  “It's always being rubbed by something, you know, just around you, saying, back off.” (10:39, Dan Singletary)

• Bobby Scamardella on lost paradise:

  “Pre Bridge. It was a kind of paradise. Bucolic farmland, rolling hills, shoals of oysters rimming the island. Post Bridge. It was all ticky tack suburban houses, white people fleeing the increasingly black and brown Brooklyn, and of course, the ever expanding mountains of trash.” (24:06, Ben Naddif-Haffrey, paraphrasing Scamardella)

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Memorable Moments

• Campaign organizing as a family and social event:
  The Singletary kitchen table becomes the war room, signatures sorted over beer and coffee. (11:29–12:19)
• “Logo map” and mental exclusion:
  The idea that Staten Island is so off-the-map it gets literally boxed out of subway maps—mirroring the city’s neglect. (12:45–14:36)
• Secession as nostalgia:
  Residents wishing to "tear down the Verrazzano Bridge and let us go back to life the way it used to be." (25:21, paraphrased)
• Resentment as a driver:

  “There's a big difference between feeling you're treated poorly and feeling that you've lost something. The former might lead to a quest for justice. The latter leads to resentment.” (26:35, Ben Naddif-Haffrey)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• 02:06 – Introduction of Dan Singletary and the dump as the movement’s symbol
• 07:51 – Ben meets Dan and Alice Singletary in rural NY
• 10:24 – “Sandpapering” and frustration with city policies
• 12:45 – The “logo map” and mental erasure of Staten Island
• 15:39 – Greater New York’s creation, Board of Estimate structure
• 18:56 – Supreme Court arguments: “one person, one vote”
• 22:01 – Bobby Scamardella on bridge, nostalgia, and change
• 24:43 – Staten Island’s unique situation (“it just is”)
• 25:47 – The core argument for secession: loss of local control
• 26:35 – Summary of resentment vs. justice, setting stage for next episode

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Tone & Language

The episode is rich in local color, wit, and melancholy—marked by Ben’s empathetic narration, Singletary’s blue-collar authenticity, and Scamardella’s mixture of nostalgia and frustration. The language is direct, often laced with dry humor and vivid descriptions:

“It was all ticky tack suburban houses, white people fleeing the increasingly black and brown Brooklyn, and of course, the ever expanding mountains of trash.” (24:06)

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Conclusion

"A New Map" unpacks the tangible and psychological rifts that made Staten Island ripe for secession in the 1990s. Through archival voices and present-day interviews, the episode paints secession as both a rational response to disenfranchisement and a deep yearning for lost community and control. It ends with the movement reaching a boiling point, setting up the next episode’s confrontation over the future of the borough—and the city.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Pushkin. Ben Madif Haffer here. Before we get into this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can hear all episodes of Revisionist, the Staten Island Problem ad free right now. By signing up for Pushkin plus, you'll also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks and other binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors. Plus, your support helps independent shows like us continue making the stories you love. Sign up and save on the Revisionist History show page, on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin FM. Plus, use the code RH25 for 25% off an annual subscription. Alright, let's get into the series. One day I came across a box of tapes in the College of Staten island archives. They were these mostly unmarked VHS tapes jammed in no particular order, into a cardboard box. The extremely helpful archivist set me up with an old vcr, I popped in a tape and I met Dan Singletary.

[C]

Do you realize 1986 a federal law was passed mandating every school system in the country provide safe schoolrooms free of asbestos? The only school district in the entire country that did not comply. You know it. New York City.

[B]

This guy, Dan Singletary, he looked like a cowboy. Big mustache, lanky. I remembered seeing his name all over newspapers from the time. Usually described vaguely as an artist who wanted Staten island to secede, but no one ever said what exactly his art was. This intrigued me. And here he was at a debate on secession, going off about the shoddy schools.

[C]

Why? Because of Mismanagement because of ineptitude. There is no way in the world that statno would be able to allow that. None whatsoever.

[B]

And as I watched those tapes, it became clear to me that Dan singletary was really the voice of this movement.

[C]

Well, if there's a son of secession,

[D]

it's gotta be Dan singletary.

[C]

Dan singletary said, if you're against secession, you're in favor of keeping things the way they are.

[B]

There were many problems with keeping things the way they were, at least as staten islanders saw it. And nothing was talked about more than the dump. Fresh kills. It was so remarkable that ripley's believe it or not featured it. The scale of it could not be believed.

[C]

11,000 tons a day, six days a week, and that's expected to more than double soon to over 22,000 tons a day.

[B]

Dan singletary would parade national reporters out to see the dump. Everyone wanted to see the dump. It was the symbol of staten island secession. Over 7 million people lived in New York City in the 1980s. Every day, they threw stuff out. Most of that stuff wound up at the fresh kills landfill. The sight of it alone was enough to stop visitors in their tracks.

[C]

Now, the garbage here is piled pretty deep or pretty high, depending on how you look at it. By the year 2000, some of the piles could be over 500ft above sea level, which will make them, believe it or not, the tallest mountains on the entire eastern shore.

[B]

People said you could see the dump from outer space. Ornithologists wanted to study it because supposedly it was the east coast's largest collection of seagulls. Staten islanders, meanwhile, rolled up their windows when they passed it. It was next to the mall, and when you went to the mall, you'd cover your mouth and nose and sprint from the car to the front door. It was unclear then if garbage juice was leaking out of the trash mountains and into the groundwater, but people were looking into it. Spoiler alert. It was. And rather than coming up with alternatives, all the ingenuity in Manhattan seemed to go towards dumping more faster on staten island. And Dan singletary was paying very close attention to this.

[C]

We have an environmental disaster sitting on our shores. We all recognize that. We recognize the fact that outside of the great wall in China, it's the only thing you can see from outer space. It's a disaster.

[B]

A weird thing happens to me when I work on stories like this. People who aren't famous at all become like celebrities in my mind. Here was a man on a misfit island ranting about a mountain of trash 30 years ago, and because I've turned my bizarre fixations into a career over the course of a year, I had read so many articles about Dan Singletary and watched so many videos of him arguing about Staten island secession that he became a kind of folk hero to me, wandering around the island, doing art, looking like a cowboy with his huge mustache. I wanted to track him down to understand the mind of a secessionist. But I kept striking out. Until one day, in an article in Rural Heritage magazine about American milking Devon cows, I came across a reference to a farmer named Dan Singletary. I found a number and I called.

[D]

We were the smallest borough. Like, on the face of it, it was a disaster. You know, they could walk all over us.

[B]

Singletary lives. You're listening to revisionist history. This is our miniseries, the Staten Island Problem. I'm Ben Naddif Haffrey. Everyone has a problem with the place they live. This year, I paid a lot of taxes to a government waging a war I have no interest in supporting. Maybe you think the schools in your neighborhood suck. Maybe you hate the police. Maybe there's a methadone clinic down the block and you can't stand it. Maybe you think the things your neighbor believes are fundamentally evil and he thinks the same about you. Those feelings have reached a real boiling point in this country on all sides. And this is a story about a place with a lot of those kinds of problems saying, you know what? Screw it, we're out. What does that look like? Who chooses to do that and why? This episode, the things that are meant to keep our politics together, and why some people want out. Episode 2 A new map. When I finally did meet Dan Singletary, he was living on a farm with his wife Alice, way out in rural upstate New York. I had brought the old videos I'd found with me.

[D]

I don't know if I even want to see the video.

[B]

Got it.

[E]

It's a.

[B]

You must see the videos.

[D]

They are.

[B]

They're sort of fantastic.

[D]

I don't look like I do now, do I?

[B]

You're recognizable. He still looked like a cowboy to me. So far, working on the project, I'd only heard the New York City view of secession. I wanted to hear the Staten island one. We sat down at their kitchen table and started to talk.

[D]

Well, we had to do something one way or another, because we were the losers.

[B]

The Singletarys had moved to Staten island because they had two kids and wanted a pleasant place to live, and they liked what they found there. Alice worked in the schools. Eventually, as a Principal. It was a nice community, except, of course, for the dump.

[D]

And I had a friend that lived around the corner that worked out there, and he said, hey, Danny, come on out here and have lunch with us. So I came out, went out one day and the Fresh Kills and met the guys in the bar. You know, we came in, they were starting making. They were all Italian. They all made, you know, sausages and stuff. And I thought this was great.

[B]

All of a sudden, a barge full of trash showed up, and the rats

[D]

are jumping off and they're kicking the rats in the water. You've never seen anything more disgusting in all your life. And it had, you know, mostly done. And I said, where are you going? I said, I'm sick to my stomach. I'm going to go the hell home. I said, I can't eat any lunch now. Oh, come on, Danny. You know. I said, no. But it was pretty. Pretty incredible.

[B]

Of course, it wasn't just the dump that got under Staten Islander's skin. There were developers cramming the island with crummy houses, poor sewers, the constant disrespect, and also the reality of living in a city with a lot of homelessness.

[D]

People decided that the ferry terminal was a great place to feed the people that needed food.

[F]

The homeless people.

[D]

The homeless people. And it impacted with the people from Staten Island.

[B]

Staten Islanders would walk essentially through a soup kitchen to catch the ferry home from lower Manhattan.

[D]

They worked all day long. They wanted to come home and, you know, wait for their kids or do whatever. And they got all these, you know, all these bums are all around and it smells like urine, and, you know, it's just absolutely terrible. So I went in twice to meetings of the community board, and I said, guys, what can we do? I says, can you find some other place? I. I said, I'm not against any of that stuff, but this is not the right place.

[B]

The singletaries kept using this word for what it felt like in New York City at the time. Sandpapering.

[D]

It was that constant sandpapering, you know, of sensitivities.

[B]

What do you mean sandpapering with sensitivities?

[D]

Well, it's always being rubbed by something, you know, just around you, saying, back off, or, you know, it's.

[B]

Yeah. You feel like the environment is sort of, like, aggressive in some way.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And around that time, Singletary learned that there might be a way to fix all this. A beloved lawmaker on the island named John Markey had come up with a plan, a pathway to secede. It had two Parts first, Staten Islanders would be allowed to vote on whether or not to study secession and make a charter for a new city. Then, in 1993, they'd vote on that plan. Against all the odds, the state approved this proposal. Now it was on the secessionists to whip the votes.

[D]

Our dining room table became the war room. Am I correct? Yeah.

[B]

Singletary began to organize an official secession party. If they got enough signatures, they could get politicians on their party line on the ballot and raised the profile of the issue.

[D]

I was out almost every night for months, and we had other people and other people, and we collected them all and brought them back. And Alex's job was sit with these other ladies to go through and make sure everything was signed correctly and dotted and, you know, all the rest of that stuff. And they were drinking, you know, had a beer and coffee and chatting it up, and we had a great time.

[B]

Sounds like you got the short end of the stick. You're like, you had a great time checking the signatures, go to work the

[D]

next day, keep doing the same thing.

[B]

They would have to collect several thousand signatures to make the secession party an electoral reality, and they did.

[D]

When we took all those boxes into the board of elections, they said, you got to be kidding me. Put them in that corner. I'm sure they just sat there. They didn't think it would could be done. So the table was.

[B]

Didn't think what could be done to

[D]

get that many signatures.

[B]

I once read about this political science concept called the logo map. The idea is that when we make a map of a place, we show a simplified picture that leaves out a lot of the actual territory. Think of a map of the United States. What's on it? The continental contiguous United States. Not American Samoa, not the US Virgin Islands, not Puerto Rico. Alaska gets put in a little box. So does Hawaii. And Guam is nowhere to be found. Now, picture New York City. You're probably imagining the long tall island of Manhattan. Maybe you're seeing Brooklyn and Queens and part of the Bronx, but you're almost certainly not seeing Staten island on the local map of New York unless it's been included in a tiny box in the bottom left corner like on the old subway maps. And even then, never at scale. The logo map reflects the psychological reality for most New Yorkers when it comes to Staten Island. It's that place miles out to sea, reachable only by ship in what was, in its day, the longest suspension bridge ever built. It's off screen by design. Because the whole point of throwing things out is you don't Want to see them anymore. The dump became the metaphor for New York City's relationship to Staten island, the place they put the things they don't want. Secession was about making a whole new map. After the break, the Supreme Court case that set all this in motion. In the 1890s, New York City did not exist, at least not like it does today. Brooklyn and Manhattan were separate cities. Queens, Staten island and the Bronx had little to do with each other. Everyone competed for the same resources. Nobody really coordinated how. And this was a big problem. The harbor was polluted. Epidemics and crime waves didn't care that these were different cities. They spread wherever they pleased. The competing areas would bicker about water supply, which when it ran short, would let huge fires blaze up. So in the 1890s, a wealthy group of Manhattanites came up with a plan. They would convince these five disparate places to join into one gigantic city. This was called consolidation. In 1898, the Greater New York City was born. But just like when the United States came together, there was a concern. How could the new boroughs be sure that they wouldn't just be dominated by Manhattan? The answer was an obscure legislative body known as the Board of Estimate.

[E]

Well, the Board of Estimate, for all intents and purposes was sort of designed like the U.S. senate.

[B]

Frank Cipolla, who was the assistant press secretary for the Staten island borough president, apparently about 40 years ago.

[E]

Regardless of what the population of each borough was, the borough president voted for the entire borough. He was the mayor of that particular borough.

[B]

The deal that was struck at the dawn of the city was that each borough president would have an equal vote on the board, right alongside the mayor, the comptroller and the city council president. And to be clear, these weren't just some perfunctory meetings. The compromise was that the Board of Estimate held all the real power in the city. The city's budget, the city's land, the city's operations. And Seppola found himself attending meetings of the Board of Estimate for his boss.

[E]

And you'd sit there as busloads of New Yorkers would show up and spend hours trashing you hours just talking about how your decisions are so short sighted.

[B]

Citizens could weigh in on the important issues of the day as the borough presidents deliberated in real time. It was the pinnacle of democracy. What was it like in there?

[E]

It was brutal, Ben. Sometimes the meetings went till 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning. I remember once there was a guy just, he had fallen asleep on one of the chairs, just fell asleep.

[B]

The whole thing Was kind of a sham. Frank wasn't the borough president. He was just the assistant press guy. And yet he was sitting up there because early in the meeting, the borough presidents would all just disappear.

[E]

He'd show up, he'd sit there for about 20, 50, 20 or 30 minutes, and then somebody from his cabinet, in several cases, me, would have to sit there for the rest of the meeting. And he'd say, you're going to vote no on this? Yes on this, no on that. Yes on this, no on that. Okay.

[B]

Meanwhile, even if the borough presidents were doing what they were supposed to be doing, there was still a big problem because the boroughs they represented were not at all the same size. At the time, Brooklyn had 2.2 million people. Staten island had 352,000. And yet the borough presidents each had the same one vote on the board of estimate, which seemed pretty unfair because Staten island had way more power than it should have given its size. They'd weigh in on city wide issues and managed to use their power to say no to a lot of things. They were the only county in New York City that didn't have a jail, for instance, and, and don't ask them about homeless shelters. All this worked fine enough until this particular arrangement came to the attention of the supreme court and all hell broke loose.

[C]

We'll hear our argument now on number 87. 1022, Board of Estimate of the City of New York vs Beverly Morris. Number 8, 711 12, Frank Ponterio vs Beverly Morris.

[B]

In the early 1980s, the New York Civil Liberties union brought a lawsuit against the board that said that the fact that Staten island got the same vote as Brooklyn violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. One person, one vote. The case wound its way up to the supreme court. The lawyer for New York City begged the court to leave it alone. He said, if you strike this down, the city's gonna fall apart.

[C]

Everyone has said that this structure is the glue that has kept the city of New York and don't change it. And all I'm saying, I think New York is going to disintegrate. If you lose this lawsuit, you really disintegrate. Staten Island's going to secede.

[B]

This thing was really all about Staten Island. The lawyer from the Civil liberties union countered. Every time a big citywide initiative comes up for debate, we got to get those guys from Staten island to agree to it.

[C]

Why not have total at large elections and give Every Staten Islander 6 votes, every Brookliner 1, every Queens 2, every Manhattan 3 and Bronx 4?

[B]

Could we do that the city's lawyer was arguing that Staten island was holding the rest of New York back.

[C]

There were three, six to five votes recently. Where were Staten island weighted by virtue of population? Those votes on an incineration plant, on homeless shelters, and on middle income housing in the Bronx, all would have gone the other way. They all would have been the opposite result.

[B]

In the end, the court agreed. They ruled that the structure of New York City government was unconstitutional because ultimately the population of a place should determine the representation it gets. The entire system of government in New York City was being redrawn. And one thing was certain, Staten island was going to lose a whole lot of power. That's when secession kicked into gear. But the reason this movement took off wasn't because everyone was intricately following this new voting system. It had to do with something a whole lot deeper, with people who didn't just want to get their old votes back, but who wanted to get their old island back. That's after the break. One day on the island, in my attempt to understand the secessionist mind, I sat down with a local attorney named Bobby Scamardella. I'd seen Scammardella in those videotapes alongside Dan Singletary.

[F]

My primary involvement with it was as a debater. There were a series of debates conducted by all sorts of civic organizations on Staten island where they would invite a pro secessionist and an anti secessionist to come before these civic groups.

[B]

He was an absolute bruiser on the debate stage arguing for secession. I met him in his law office which had these LED lights on the ceiling that changed color as we spoke. Unlike the Singletarys, Scammardella grew up on Staten Island. He remembered it from way back when.

[F]

I mean, it was idyllic. I grew up in an area was wooded right after 1964 when the bridge was built. It was culture shock even for, I guess at the time, a 14 year old boy. I lived in an area called Sunnyside and the Staten Island Expressway, which was built along with the bridge. It just went through this huge wooded area that I used to play in. I'll remember the day I died Waking up in this huge wooded area where I used to play was gone.

[B]

The great irony of Staten island secession is that back when the city consolidated, no borough had been more enthusiastic about joining. But they regretted that decision almost immediately. There were a series of attempts to fix that problem, to make this distant place feel like it was part of the city, but they all failed. There was the train tunnel to Staten island, which the city even broke Ground on and then never finished. The bridge was the last gambit. The writer Gay Talese wrote his first book about the building of that bridge. He wrote the bridge had become the symbol of hope

[C]

for sparsely populated Staten Island. This is an hour, almost a rediscovery. From the island through the toll gate rides the first vehicle. An estimated 12 million vehicles will follow.

[B]

In the first year, this bridge was a big deal. And for the rest of New York, it was like it had opened up a portal to a whole new world. Here's a newsreel from 1964, when the

[C]

bridge first opened across the Narrows, the entrance to New York Harbor. The longest suspension bridge in the world, the Verrazzano Narrows bridge is the first fixed link between Staten island and the city's four other boroughs.

[B]

Everything on the island is Pre or Post Bridge. Pre Bridge. It was a kind of paradise. Bucolic farmland, rolling hills, shoals of oysters rimming the island. Post Bridge. It was all ticky tack suburban houses, white people fleeing the increasingly black and brown Brooklyn, and of course, the ever expanding mountains of trash. To be from Staten island is to have this sense that something grand has been buried under garbage and forgotten.

[F]

But it wasn't the board of estimate that changed that. It was the Verrazano Narrows Bridge that changed that.

[B]

Yeah.

[F]

And so here we are.

[B]

Well, let's look at that. Because one person, one vote makes sense.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So, but then what is that? What is that missing? That ruling

[F]

Staten island was culturally and geographically different than the rest of the city of New York. And I'll go so far as to say physically in the sense that Staten Island's an island out there. It just. It just is.

[B]

In the New York Times, at the height of secession, one Staten Islander said the first thing an independent Staten island should do is, quote, tear down the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and let us go back to life the way it used to be. Talking to Scammardella, I felt like that was a big piece of it for him. How would you convince people? Pretend I'm a skeptic. Make the pitch.

[F]

The bottom line is really my position was to ask yourself, what caused freedom? What caused freedom? You have no say over what happens in your community. Virtually no say as far as your schools and your police department, your fire department and everything else. It's not run here.

[B]

Just not was anyone opposed to it. Because they're like New York City, greatest city in the world, and we're part of it. We're one of the five boroughs.

[F]

We can't be pushed Any further away from the big city. You want to go to Broadway, go to Broadway, right? Want a job on Wall street, go get a job on Wall Street. None of that's going to change. None of it's going to change. You want to go to a Yankee game, go to a Yankee game. By seceding, what are you giving up? You can't say. I live in the city of New York.

[B]

This series is about the politics of resentment and alienation and how we handle them. And this was, for me, an interesting moment in the case study. There's a big difference between feeling you're treated poorly and feeling that you've lost something. The former might lead to a quest for justice. The latter leads to resentment. Secession wasn't just Dan Singletary's arguments about voting structures and the quality of life. It was for a lot of Staten Islanders, the feeling that something had been taken away from them. Scamardella was that kind of secessionist. Something powerful was taking shape on Staten Island. It was going to lead somewhere big. And so a group of people got together on the island to try and stop it. That's next week.

[C]

It's a pipe dream.

[D]

It's just not going to happen.

[C]

You have just seen a perfect example, a classic example of what's being played out in what's called the politics of fear.

[D]

There's nothing worse than having two islands next to each other. We can't stand them.

[C]

All of you who are in favor of seceding from the city of New York, would you please raise your hands?

[B]

The Staten island problem is written and reported by me, Ben Nadifafry, who is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Russick. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski. Original music by Stellwagen Symphonette, Luis Guerra and Jake Gorski. Special thanks to Todd Reynolds for his track the Solution from the album Outer Borough. And to the college of Staten island and the New York City municipal archives for all of the amazing tape. And to Daniel Immerwar for his book how to hide an Empire, which is where I learned about the logo map. And thanks, of course, to Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Ben Nadifry.