Staten Island harbors some cool surprises

[Iberia Airlines]

 

“That Staten Island Ferry is our front door,” a disappointed Staten Islander told me. "But too many people take it right back to Manhattan. We want them to stay here and see what we’ve got." And though "what we've got" is far more than most visitors suspect, New York City's fifth borough across the harbour does find itself almost always far from the minds of those who come to the Big Apple - partly because it's a bit isolated (the ferry is the main way over here; there's no connecting subway; and the Verranzano Narrows Bridge connects not from Manhattan but far more indirectly, from Brooklyn) and getting around the borough is a bit of a patchwork. Furthermore, local authorities up till recently have done little to promote Staten Island; in fact, a tourism kiosk at the St. George Ferry Terminal wasn't even opened till early 2018, and until fairly recently, Visit Staten Island didn't have all that much of a social media presence.

But these days, things finally are changing and more visitors learning about the 20-some cool things there are to see and do (several quite unexpected!) in NYC's "forgotten borough" - its smallest at 265 square kilometres (103 sq. miles); home to some 500,000 New Yorkers; and with all its open space, very much against the clichéd view of the Big Apple. Here are seven of the most prominent:

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