The largest dump in the world, the Fresh Kills landfill, used to sit on Staten Island, the least populated borough of New York City, from 1948 to 2001. Each day, rubbish from the other four boroughs was collected and ferried to the island’s western shore, through a marshy inlet—a bit like the island’s armpit—where it was unloaded, compacted, arranged in layers, and left to rot. The piles were taller than the Great Sphinx in Egypt; the smell floated across highways and through house windows. Vito Fossella, who was born on the island in the sixties, remembered how the odor would hit him like a wall. When he went to the mall as a child, Fossella would sprint from the car to get inside and escape the air. “Every day, it was a stench,” he said. “There were seagulls flying everywhere.”
It made a few people bitter. “We had five per cent of the city’s population and we got a hundred per cent of the garbage,” Fossella, who is now the Staten Island borough president, told me recently. “Staten Island was dumped on, literally and figuratively, and the rest of the city said, ‘Too bad.’ ” The dump was eventually closed in 2001 under Rudy Giuliani, who had narrowly won the 1993 mayoral election against David Dinkins, a vote largely swung by Staten Islanders. (Giuliani also made the Staten Island ferry free.) That same year, the island’s residents also considered, in a nonbinding plebiscite, whether they even wanted to be a part of New York City anymore. Sixty-five per cent voted no.
Lately, the fever to secede has descended again. Shortly before Christmas, Sam Pirozzolo, a Republican state assemblyman who represents parts of western and central Staten Island, wrote a declaration of independence for the island—modelled after the national one—and read it out loud at the former site of a tavern where, in 1776, British soldiers first heard the original. Andrew Lanza, a Republican state senator, has also drafted legislation that would make secession possible.
Notionally, this push was prompted by the election of Zohran Mamdani, whom Pirozzolo has said epitomizes the way that New York City doesn’t reflect Staten Island’s values. But the discontent runs deeper. Staten Islanders have tried to secede from the rest of the city at least a half-dozen times. In 1900, two years after the modern City of New York was consolidated, two hundred Staten Islanders gathered at a public hearing to say they were “ready to cede.” (Staten Island, one man told the New York bureau of the Chicago Tribune, “is the Ireland of Greater New York. We want home rule.”)
The island is richer, more suburban, more conservative, more car-dependent, less dense, and cut off from the rest of the city by the deep water of New York Harbor. There is a sense on the island that the rest of the city doesn’t listen to them, and that they pay for city initiatives they don’t want.
In 2024, the island voted for Donald Trump by thirty points. And, in recent years, Staten Islanders have protested the opening of a migrant shelter, speed cameras, marijuana dispensaries, and the placement of a battery-storage site too close to homes, all of which they say have been foisted on them by the city. (Worst of all, Fossella told me an anecdote about an ugly metal fence that suddenly appeared on a “beautiful” stone wall in Clove Lakes Park, because the Department of Transportation claimed that it was near a waterway. “If Staten Island were a separate city, that would never have happened.”) Another indignity? “Staten Island is the only borough in the city without a high school for performing arts,” Fossella said. “It’s almost like that movie—they’re just not into us anymore. They keep doing things that we don’t support.” In the nineties, the city clung to the island through a legal principle known as home rule, which would require the mayor and City Council to sign off on Staten Island leaving.
Giuliani never did. The reaction veered to extremes. In 1995, an angry resident of Oakwood, in the borough’s southwest, wrote to the Staten Island Advance, “We no longer are in a mutually agreed upon union with the other four boroughs. It is now more reminiscent of the Anschluss that joined Austria to Germany in 1938, with some overtones of the later occupation of Czechoslovakia.” Pirozolo told me, “If we vote to leave, keeping us would be indentured servitude or slavery. You pick.”
Do the secessionists have a point? Recently, I spoke to Howard Husock, an academic at the American Enterprise Institute who studies secession movements. There’s a strong theoretical basis to secession, he told me. “Geographically, it’s really part of New Jersey.” As he described it, the reason to leave is less about Mamdani and more about local control. If Staten Island were to part ways, the proposal is that it would become an independent city within New York State. It would determine its own zoning and oversee its own school boards, meaning residents could control the curriculum, something Husock said Staten Islanders would probably value.
Other nearby cities and counties that orbit New York City—such as Montclair and Bergen, in New Jersey; or Manhasset, on Long Island; or Westchester, above the Bronx—are demographically similar to Staten Island, and run themselves. “They look out over the water and see them,” Husock said. “They see the suburban Montclairs of the world, and they say, ‘Wait a minute, they get to call the shots in their own communities, and we don’t.’ ”
But what would actually happen? If the City of Staten Island were created tomorrow, it would immediately become the second-largest city in New York State. (Population: nearly half a million.) It would keep a lot of its bus routes, because the M.T.A. is managed by the state, and Staten Island still falls in the Metropolitan Transit District. (“They’re not seceding from that,” Husock said.) The ferry, though, is operated by New York City. It would probably still run, but it may not be free.
It’s possible that Staten Islanders would individually pay more taxes, but they might like that. The voters of an independent Staten, Husock said, could choose to pay more for the bundle of services that they want. A report from the Independent Budget Office, from 2024, estimated that secessionists would need to fill a budget gap of at least a hundred and seventy million dollars. It also warned that the island would lose out on New York’s economies of scale. Staten Island would, for example, have to renegotiate its deal with Spectrum and Verizon.
In addition to handling schools, Staten Island would have to run its own fire department, trash collection, hospitals, and snow removal. But so do other cities. “Buffalo is a city!” Fosella said. “It’s smaller than Staten Island. So clearly it can be done. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”
The police would be a big sticking point. On an independent Staten Island, the politics of policing seem to flip. Paul Costello, a lifelong resident, who was one of the field leads for Staten Island for the Mamdani campaign, told me that the Republicans who are pushing to secede would miss the N.Y.P.D. “As a person who is hypercritical of the N.Y.P.D., it is the best-funded police force probably on the planet,” he said. The department’s annual budget last year was $5.8 billion. “For a pro-police person, they have everything they want right now,” he said. “They’re basically saying they want to kneecap them, which, hey, I’m all for. But it doesn’t really make sense.”
There’s a utopian model for what Staten Island could be, and it’s Yonkers. Yonkers, Husock explained, is a predominantly white, working-class community, of two hundred thousand people, connected to New York City by the Metro-North and buses, and governed by center-right Democrats. It runs its own police, fire, and schools. “I think they have Yonkers envy,” Husock said. “They’re not going to become Scarsdale, obviously, but they would become Yonkers.”
Not everybody agrees. “It’s not a good idea,” Costello told me. Being a part of New York City, he said, means that “we get literally the best services available to anyone in the country.” “It’s an old feeling,” he said, of secession, “but it’s not founded in financial literacy.”
Costello, who is thirty-one, grew up on Staten Island’s north shore, went to high school and college on the island, and now lives in St. George, near the ferry. “I love Staten Island with all my heart,” he said. But every time secession rolls around it can feel like living through the Civil War. “It’s like I’m a guy on the border between the Union and the Confederacy. And I’m like, ‘No, I’m part of the fringe that lives here that actually agrees with the North.’ ”
I asked Husock, the advocate of local control, why every borough couldn’t make the same argument as Staten Island. “I would make that argument for every neighborhood,” he said. “The logical policy extension of Staten Island secession is deconsolidation of New York City.” Even the boroughs could be sliced further into smaller neighborhoods, Husock said. “In my ideal configuration, it would be a patchwork of smaller municipalities that had certain shared metropolitan services. It’s really a thought experiment,” he added. “But Staten Island is forcing the thought experiment.”
At one point, much of Brooklyn didn’t want to be a part of New York City, either. In the nineteenth century, Brooklyn and Manhattan were independent, competing cities that often squabbled over shipping lanes in the East River. Consolidation was put to a popular vote in 1894. In Brooklyn, it passed by only about two hundred and fifty votes, and then a consortium of politicians from the borough went to Albany and filibustered it for years. In that same election, Staten Island voted for consolidation by a huge margin—seventy-eight per cent said yes. (Yonkers voted no, while Queens voted sixty-two per cent to join and the Bronx had already been fully annexed in 1895.)
Who would win the breakup—Staten Island or New York? Nobody really knows. The 2024 report from the I.B.O. relied mostly on studies from the nineties. Fossella, the borough president, announced in 2023 that he was commissioning his own economic report, but there has been no progress. “We’ve put out feelers for entities that could do it,” he said. “They have to get back to us.”
The other day, I met Pirozzolo, the drafter of the Staten Island declaration of independence, in a quiet room with shag carpets in the archive of the College of Staten Island. He wore a blue suit and a snazzy tie patterned with green and blue diamonds. A stack of boxes was wheeled in by James Kaser, a soft-spoken librarian in glasses, a blue polo, and green slacks. The college is home to one of the largest collections of documents—financials, committee reports, white papers—from the 1993 secession push. “We typically go one box at a time,” Kaser said.
Pirozzolo was focussed. “I’m looking for something that says, ‘New York City Police Department. Costs a million dollars, and that includes ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D,’ ” he said. His chief of staff, Nick Robbins, who was wearing a bright-blue New York Giants jersey, pulled out an overstuffed folder of files. Records included “Staten Island Secession: The Price of Independence” and the original secession bill. “Bingo!” Pirozzolo said. In another trove, they found a table that listed city budgets in 1991 from across the country—Atlanta, Austin, Denver. “This one is awesome,” Pirozzolo said. Another page had an itemized list of Staten Island’s on-island expenditures, in the nineties, from various departments: education, health, the library, sanitation—everything that a stand-alone city would need. Pirozzolo traced his hand down the page, quietly reading them out. “Mental health, parks. This is gold,” he said.
Kaser came in, balancing a new pile of booklets. “Now that I know what you’re looking for, there are stacks of this,” he said. “That looks like ancient stuff!” Pirozzolo said. “I don’t know if I want to touch it.” Kaser said, “It’s not ancient. It’s from the nineties.” Pirozzolo waggled “The Price of Independence.” “Can I slip this in a briefcase or something?”
A spokesman for the Fiscal Policy Institute told me that it was unlikely that Staten Island gives more money to the city than the city gives it. He estimated that the island contributes 3.4 per cent of the city’s revenue and receives 5.2 per cent of its spending.
Despite his digging, Pirozzolo is still nowhere closer to knowing what the price of independence, in modern terms, would be. But, he told me, “Now when I go to the city budget, and I say, ‘I need these numbers,’ at least I know what I’m asking for.”
Until 1975, the official name of Staten Island was Richmond, after the title of the youngest illegitimate son of King Charles II. (He had at least twelve.) The sense of estrangement has lingered. “There’s always been the forgotten-borough trope,” Costello, the Mamdani campaigner, told me.
During the final debate of the mayoral primary, in June of last year, the various Democratic candidates were asked which borough they had spent the least time in. In succession, Adrienne Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, and Whitney Tilson all answered—to escalating laughs—“Staten Island.” Costello was watching the debate at a bar with friends. I asked how it made him feel. “I would have been surprised if any of them answered differently,” he said. “It’s kind of expected. But, of course, it takes a little hit. You’re, like, ‘Ah, come on.’ ”
When Costello was growing up, his high school was right next to the dump. As he got off the school bus and walked to class, he could see it in the background. But he also saw it changing. For the past twenty years, the dump has been slowly beautified, rewilded, and converted into parkland. Now known as Freshkills Park, it will be one of the biggest stretches of nature in the five boroughs—nearly three times the size of Central Park—when it’s completed in 2036. One of Costello’s friends works there as a field educator and gives guided tours. Birds have started returning. Maybe because of this, Costello doesn’t feel the burn of the metaphor like older residents do. “If anything, it’s funny that I went to high school next to a dump,” he said. “As they fixed it, it was kind of pretty.”
Since the campaign, Mamdani has stopped by the island more often: he ate at a local soul-food restaurant, Shaw-naé’s House, and attended evening prayer at a mosque in Dongan Hills during Ramadan. In early March, he made a major child-care announcement, about the expansion of 3-K, at a pre-K center on the island’s north shore. (Staten Island had been excluded from an earlier 2-K announcement.) That same month, a new Democratic candidate, Allison Ziogas said that she would challenge the island’s sitting Republican congresswoman, Nicole Malliotakis, from a pro-labor, economic-populist angle. Generations of Democrats and Republicans, Ziogas said, in her campaign launch, had failed in representing the island. “People talk about Staten Island like we have nothing to offer,” she said. Ziogas, who is originally from Connecticut, added, “I like to say that I’m a Staten Islander by love.”
“I’m one of the biggest evangelists for the island,” Costello told me. “There are some amazing restaurants, some amazing people, and the most parks anywhere in the city.” (Staten Island has some of New York’s best Sri Lankan food.) The only way he’d abandon the island is if the rest of its residents actually quit New York City. “It takes a lot to think about leaving,” he said. “The reason I would ever leave here is because of how many other people don’t want to be here. It’s not because it isn’t a good place to live.” ♦