New Brighton, Staten Island
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New Brighton is a neighborhood, formerly an independent village, located on the North Shore of Staten Island in New York City, USA. The neighborhood comprises an older industrial and residential harborfront area along the Kill Van Kull west of St. George.
The village of New Brighton was incorporated in 1866 out of six wards of the town of Castleton. It originally stretched for four miles (6.4 km) long and was two miles (3.2 km) wide, encompassing the entire northeast tip of the island from Tompkinsville to Snug Harbor. The current neighborhood includes Hamilton Park, an enclave of Victorian homes built before the American Civil War. The neighborhood includes several older churches, including St. Peter's Church, the oldest Roman Catholic church on Staten Island. Its main thoroughfare is Jersey Street, which in the 1970s became an island-wide synonym of sorts for "ghetto," as the vast majority of the residents of the area around the street were by that time (and continue to be) African-American and mostly poor. More recently, however, other Staten Island neighborhoods, such as the Park Hill section of Clifton, have acquired an even more unsavory reputation than the Jersey Street corridor, and so the label has largely faded.
The original village hall, constructed in 1871 on present Fillmore Street, was demolished in 2004.