Drive Hylan Boulevard until the road simply stops, and you arrive at the bottom of New York. Past the one-family houses with their fig trees wrapped in burlap for winter, past the delis with trays of stuffed peppers in the window, the asphalt gives out at Ward’s Point and the city dissolves into the Raritan Bay. This is Tottenville, the southernmost neighbourhood in New York City and New York State, and it is also, improbably, one of the most thoroughly Italian places left in the five boroughs. The Italians in Tottenville did not arrive in a single great wave. They came in two, a century apart, and the second wave is the reason this quiet corner feels the way it does.
The Place
Tottenville sits at the far southern tip of Staten Island, a roughly 1.7 square mile point of land hemmed by the Arthur Kill to the west and the open water of the New York Bight to the south. It is the kind of neighbourhood where you can smell salt air from the front porch and where the housing is overwhelmingly detached homes on real lots, a rarity in a city of towers.
The streets carry the names of an older, stranger history: Bentley, Billop, Amboy, Page. For most of the nineteenth century this was an oyster town, and the rhythms of that trade shaped everything before the Italians ever arrived.
Today it is a place of Catholic parishes, corner pork stores, and Sunday gravy, the southern anchor of what Staten Islanders simply call the South Shore.
How It Became Italian
Before the Italians: oysters and terra cotta
Tottenville began life under a different name. The land was originally part of Bentley Manor, the estate of Captain Christopher Billopp, who came to America in 1674 and was granted a patent of more than 900 acres on the southernmost tip of the island. The neighbourhood took its modern name in 1869, honouring the locally prominent Totten family.
For decades the economy turned on oysters. The beds of the Arthur Kill and Raritan Bay supported a thriving harvesting and shipping trade through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until pollution shut the beds down in 1916. Alongside the watermen, the Atlantic Terra Cotta Works grew into one of the most prestigious firms of its kind in the country, employing close to 500 men and supplying architectural ornament to buildings across America.
It was into this working town, full of jobs at the waterfront and the factory, that the first Italians came.
The first wave: Sicilians after 1880
Soon after 1880, as the big farms and estates of southern Staten Island were carved into smaller building lots, Italian immigrants began settling the area. Many came directly from Sicily, sailing from the ports of Palermo and Castellammare del Golfo, the same Castellammare from which so many South Shore families still trace their line.
These early arrivals were modest in number compared with the Italian colonies of Manhattan and Brooklyn. They built churches, planted gardens, and laid down the parish life that would later receive their cousins. In 1890 a small mission of St. Joseph’s in Rossville was opened in Tottenville, and in 1898 it became an independent parish: Our Lady Help of Christians.
The bridge that changed everything
The transformation that made Tottenville and the whole South Shore so emphatically Italian came in 1964, when the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge opened and connected Staten Island to Brooklyn for the first time by car.
What followed was one of the largest internal migrations in the city’s history. Italian American families who had built dense, walk-up lives in Brooklyn neighbourhoods like the Italian colony of Bensonhurst now found themselves a short drive from open land, cheaper houses, and yards. They came across the new bridge by the tens of thousands, and they kept moving south, down the island, until they reached its end.
By the time the migration settled, the numbers were astonishing. Staten Island today holds the highest proportion of Italian Americans of any county in the United States, a story told across the whole borough in our piece on the Italians of Staten Island. The concentration deepens as you go south. On the South Shore, a large majority of residents report Italian ancestry, and in several of the southernmost pockets the figure climbs past 90 percent.
A town remade
Tottenville itself is the gentler end of that statistic. Here roughly four in ten residents identify as Italian, the single largest ancestry by a wide margin. The bridge generation raised children here, sent them to Tottenville High School and to the parish schools, and built the network of pork stores, pizzerias, and social clubs that still defines the place. The same outward push sent other families to Italian enclaves like Howard Beach in Queens and the Westchester suburb of Pelham, but Tottenville was the end of the line, the place with nowhere further south to go.
The old oyster town quietly became a Sicilian and southern Italian suburb, the last stop on a journey that had begun in a Sicilian fishing port and passed through a Brooklyn tenement before arriving, at last, at the edge of the sea.
The Landmarks
Our Lady Help of Christians Church, 7396 Amboy Road. The spiritual heart of Italian Tottenville. Founded in 1890 as a mission and made a parish in 1898, the original church burned in 1985 and was rebuilt in 1990. Its parish school ran from 1904 until 2019, educating generations of the neighbourhood’s children. In a footnote that has grown larger with time, the social activist Dorothy Day, now a candidate for sainthood, was received into the Catholic Church here in 1927.
St. Joseph’s Church, 16 Poplar Avenue, Pleasant Plains. Just up the road in the adjoining South Shore village, St. Joseph’s was established in 1848 and is the oldest surviving Roman Catholic church on Staten Island. Now joined with St. Thomas as a single parish, it began for an Irish congregation but long ago became a centre of Italian devotion. An Italian-language Mass is still offered each year on the Feast of St. Joseph.
St. Thomas Church, 6097 Amboy Road. The other half of the combined parish, St. Thomas anchors Pleasant Plains and serves the steady flow of South Shore families for whom the Amboy Road parishes are as much a map of belonging as of worship.
Conference House, Conference House Park. The stone manor built by Captain Christopher Billopp before 1680 sits at Ward’s Point, the southernmost point in New York State. On 11 September 1776 it hosted the unsuccessful Staten Island Peace Conference, where Lord Howe met John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Rutledge to try to end the Revolution. The 265-acre park around it gives Tottenville families their waterfront, their hiking trails, and their view across the bay to New Jersey.
Angelina’s Ristorante, 399 Ellis Street. Housed in a restored Victorian on the water, Angelina’s has been the South Shore’s special-occasion Italian restaurant for more than two decades, the place where communions, anniversaries, and engagement dinners are held. Its seafood and Sicilian-leaning kitchen reflect exactly the heritage of the families who fill its dining rooms.
Tottenville High School. The original campus stood in the neighbourhood until 1971, when the school moved north to a sprawling site in Huguenot. It remains one of the largest high schools in the city and the institution that has carried the Tottenville name and its overwhelmingly Italian American student body for generations.
Amboy Road. Not a single building but the spine of the whole community. The pork stores, delis, and pizzerias strung along Amboy and its side streets are where fresh mozzarella is pulled, soppressata is sliced, and the daily life of an Italian neighbourhood quietly continues.
Where They Came From
The deep roots of Italian Tottenville run to Sicily. The South Shore’s families came in large numbers from the western Sicilian coast, and Castellammare del Golfo recurs again and again in the family histories, a town that was both a fishing port and one of the great embarkation points for the New World.
From Sicilian ports the liners sailed several times a month toward New York. In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, more than a million Sicilians emigrated, the overwhelming majority bound for the United States, as the history of Sicilian America records. A small but significant stream of them found their way to the southern end of Staten Island, joining the same Sicilian diaspora that shaped older Italian Brooklyn enclaves like Carroll Gardens.
The bridge generation of 1964 added a second layer: families of largely southern Italian and Sicilian descent who had already spent a generation in Brooklyn before crossing the Verrazzano. Their origins were the same Mezzogiorno villages, refracted through a few decades of New York life. The result is a community whose accent is unmistakably outer-borough but whose Sunday table is unmistakably Sicilian.
Tottenville Today
Tottenville remains, by the standards of New York City, remarkably stable. It is a neighbourhood of homeowners, of families who have stayed for three and four generations, of streets where the same surnames recur on the mailboxes and the storefronts.
The 2020 census recorded just over 16,000 residents, the area still overwhelmingly white and, by ancestry, still emphatically Italian. The income is comfortable rather than grand, the houses well-kept, the lawns mowed. It is not a place that draws tourists, and the people here seem to like it that way.
Change comes slowly. The parish school has closed and the Italian-language Mass is now an annual occasion rather than a weekly one, signs of a community whose grandchildren are more American than Sicilian. But the pork stores still pull mozzarella, the fig trees still go under burlap each November, and at the very bottom of the city, where the road runs out at the water, the Italians of Tottenville remain at the end of their long journey south.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Tottenville?
The Italians in Tottenville arrived in two waves. A first group of mostly Sicilian immigrants settled the area after 1880, and a far larger wave of Italian American families moved down from Brooklyn after the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964. The South Shore offered land and houses, and families kept moving south until they reached Tottenville at the island’s tip.
What percentage of Tottenville is Italian?
Roughly four in ten Tottenville residents identify their ancestry as Italian, the single largest group by a wide margin. The concentration is even higher across the broader South Shore of Staten Island, where the majority of residents report Italian ancestry and some neighbourhoods exceed 90 percent.
Where did Tottenville’s Italian families come from in Italy?
Most came from Sicily, with the western Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo appearing repeatedly in local family histories. Castellammare and Palermo were major emigration ports, and the South Shore’s Sicilian roots remain visible in its food and its parish traditions.
What is the main Italian Catholic church in Tottenville?
Our Lady Help of Christians at 7396 Amboy Road, founded in 1890 and made an independent parish in 1898, is the longtime spiritual centre of the Italians in Tottenville. Nearby St. Joseph’s in Pleasant Plains, the oldest Catholic church on Staten Island, still offers an Italian-language Mass on the Feast of St. Joseph.
What was Tottenville before it became Italian?
It was an oyster town. Originally part of Captain Christopher Billopp’s Bentley Manor, the area was renamed Tottenville in 1869 and thrived on oyster harvesting until pollution closed the beds in 1916. The Atlantic Terra Cotta Works also employed hundreds before the Italian community took hold.
What is there to see in Tottenville?
The highlight is Conference House Park, a 265-acre waterfront park at the southernmost point of New York State, anchored by the seventeenth-century Conference House where a 1776 peace conference brought together John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The Amboy Road parishes and Italian pork stores round out the neighbourhood’s character.
If your family’s story passed through Tottenville, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a fishing port on the Sicilian coast, to a Brooklyn tenement, to a one-family house at the very bottom of New York, to wherever you are now.