On the North Shore of Staten Island, there is the neighborhood of Graniteville. This neighborhood received its name from the quarry of granite that ran through the area. Between the mid-to-late 1800s, the granite was quarried for the building of roads and walls on Staten Island. It was not until years later that it was found that the quarry was actually made up of diabase, and not granite.
After the quarry was closed, excess dirt from where new houses were being built was filled into the quarry and it turned into a vacant lot. In the mid-1970s, Dr. Alan Benim
off, a current professor at the College of Staten Island, was surveying the land and found a rare stone within the diabase. This stone is called trondhjemite and is only known to be found in Wales…
On the South Shore of Staten Island, in the neighborhood of Eltingville, one of the housing communities that was built after the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was Atlantic Village. This community is located right off of Arden Avenue and has nice views of the Raritan Bay, being that the houses are across the street from it. This housing community was built between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s.
