East Shore, Staten Island

The term East Shore is frequently applied to a series of neighborhoods along the Lower New York Bay and the Raritan Bay and within New York City's borough of Staten Island.

Precise parameters vary, but the most commonly used definition of the East Shore is that it stretches from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Staten Island Expressway, or some line slightly south of this, on the north, to the southern property lines of the Staten Island Unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area (formerly known as Great Kills Park) and United Hebrew Cemetery on the south, and from the Lower New York Bay on the east to the western boundaries of ZIP Codes 10304, 10305 and 10306, on the west. Not only the term "East Shore," but the entire concept itself, is often attributed to New York Telephone's East Shore Central Office (now officially known as the East Staten Island Central Office), which has served this part of the island since the 1920s (the northern boundary of this office's territory is situated, on average, about ¾ mile south of the Staten Island Expressway, which was not built until the early 1960s). Such Staten Island neighborhoods as Arrochar, South Beach, Grasmere, Dongan Hills, Grant City, Midland Beach, New Dorp, Oakwood, Old Town, Richmondtown, and Bay Terrace, along with part of Todt Hill, are usually reckoned as belonging to the East Shore, although all of Arrochar and most of South Beach and Grasmere do not qualify using the telephone company's criteria....
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