Clifton, Staten Island
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Clifton is a neighborhood in northeastern Staten Island in New York City in the United States. It is an older waterfront neighborhood, facing Upper New York Bay on the east. It is bordered on the north by Stapleton, on the south by Rosebank, on the southwest by Concord, and on the west by Van Duzer Street.
History
The name "Clifton" for the area dates to 1817, when a town by the name, larger in area than the present neighborhood, was laid out along the waterfront. In its early history, much of the surrounding land was owned by the Vanderbilt family. As a young man, Cornelius Vanderbilt established ferry service from the waterfront to Manhattan at the foot of present Vanderbilt Avenue. Bayley Seton Hospital, north of Vanderbilt Avenue, was formerly the United States Public Health Service Hospital and housed the original headquarters of the National Institutes of Health (now located in Bethesda, Maryland).
The Park Hill Apartments, a privately-owned but federally-subsidized low-income housing complex on Vanderbilt Avenue, became the site of steadily increasing crime and drug abuse beginning in the mid-1960s; by the late 1980s it had gained the nickname of "Crack Hill" due to the many arrests for possession and/or sale of crack cocaine that were taking place in and around the development and the adjacent Fox Hills Apartments to the south.
In the 1990s, the neighborhood became the center for an immigrant community from Liberia and other West Africans centered around Targee Street. The residences in the neighborhood are mostly one-family houses, but the last decade has seen the development of many attached homes and duplexes on formerly commercial property.
The neighborhood is along the route of the Staten Island Railway, three stops from the ferry at St. George.