These staircases provide access from the Staten Island Railway's abandoned North Shore branch up to the front entrance of the former Sailors' Snug Harbor, a longtime home for retired seamen whose beautiful buildings and grounds have become today's Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden.

to Karl Reina Jr.

of an elaborate homemade mountain bike course whose wooden structures used to run 150 yards or so alongside the abandoned North Shore branch of the Staten Island Railway (whose rusty rails are visible above), hidden in this thin strip of woods separating Richmond Terrace from the Kill van Kull. The course was still intact just a few years ago; here's a shot I took back in 2008.

The plaque on the porch from the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission states that this house was built around 1770 and is "one of the few large Pre-Revolutionary War houses still standing in New York City", but a local historian who has researched the building says it was actually constructed in 1783. For a period in the 1800s, it served as a tavern called "The Old Stone Jug".

The guy who owned the house from 1995 until his death in 2011 worked as a guide at Historic Richmond Town, and he restored the house to the look and feel of an earlier era. His only sources of heat were a fireplace and a 19th-century kitchen stove, and he had an 18th-century reflector oven and a spider pan that he used on occasion to cook meals in his fireplace. The current owner was seriously injured when she fell through a rotting floorboard into an old cistern shortly after buying the place in 2012; I'm not sure how she's fared since then.

Opened in 1905, Liedy's is Staten Island's oldest bar "in uninterrupted operation by the same family". You can see photos of the interior here.

Erected in 1835, this is the last remnant of Temple Row, a series of "early 19th-century Greek Revival mansions built by wealthy New Yorkers and Southern planters along Richmond Terrace when the view across the Kill Van Kull was more pastoral." Until fairly recently, the building was being used as a catering hall named Pavilion on the Terrace. It was run by a Czech immigrant who installed, much to the chagrin of preservationists, a "remarkable sinuous, petaled fence" (photo) along the front of the property, and decorated the ballroom with "a large mural of the Milky Way, busts of Nefertiti, a large canvas backdrop painted to look like a Parisian cafe, and similar touches."

Roughly in the center of the photo, on the New Jersey side of the Kill van Kull, hovering up above the big cylindrical tanks that occupy much of southeastern Bayonne, there's what looks to be a lighthouse. (You can see it more clearly if you zoom in.) I first noticed it a few years ago and just assumed it was a lighthouse, but I never remembered to sit down at my computer and find out for sure.

As impossible as it seems, especially from this angle, it's actually the clubhouse of the $100 million-plus Bayonne Golf Club, a 130-acre Scottish links-style course built atop "a 38-acre municipal landfill and a tract formerly owned by PSE&G that was once considered for a nuclear power plant." (You can see some great shots of the place in this stupid promotional video.) Sited on the waters of Upper New York Bay, amid the industrial landscape of eastern Bayonne (satellite view; bird's-eye view) but only five miles from Wall Street, it's one of the most expensive golf courses ever built, constructed out of 700,000 cubic yards of harbor dredgings, along with "mountains of construction debris and topsoil". Membership in the club is by invitation only, with an initiation fee somewhere around $200,000.

(About two miles farther north along the Hudson County waterfront, even closer to Manhattan, is Liberty National Golf Course, another ultra-exclusive course built on a brownfield. Liberty National opened in 2006, the same year as Bayonne; it was even more expensive to build and costs even more to join.)

Standing on Staten Island's North Shore Esplanade, you can see, from left to right, the skylines of Jersey City, Midtown Manhattan (farther away and kind of hazy), Lower Manhattan, and Downtown Brooklyn.

atop New Creek

by Scott LoBaido, this one on the side of the rebuilt Toto's restaurant. The painted water level denotes the height of floodwaters during Hurricane Sandy. (The mural is well above ground level; I had to climb up a bit to take this shot over the surrounding railing.)