On a Saturday afternoon in summer, the smell of jollof drifts down Park Hill Avenue. Goat pepper soup, fried plantain, and rice bread pile up on plastic plates outside basement apartments. A grandmother in a lappa speaks Liberian English to her grandson, and the boy answers in Staten Island English, and neither of them notices the seam. This is Park Hill, on the north shore of Staten Island, and for the last forty years it has been called Little Liberia.
Liberians in Park Hill, Staten Island, built one of the largest Liberian communities anywhere outside West Africa. Most of them did not choose this hillside. War chose it for them.
Park Hill, The Place
Park Hill sits above the harbour on Staten Island’s north shore, wedged between Clifton and Stapleton, a short walk from the Staten Island Railway and the Stapleton ferry route into Lower Manhattan. The neighbourhood climbs from Vanderbilt Avenue up toward Richmond Road, and Park Hill Avenue is its spine.
The housing tells the story. Six-storey brick towers from the early 1960s, a few NYCHA blocks, and the privately owned Park Hill Apartments complex that fills most of one slope. The original sales pitch was modern garden living for families crossing the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which opened in 1964. Today the same buildings look out over Upper New York Bay and a community that arrived from the other side of an ocean.
How Park Hill Became Liberian
Before the Liberians
The slope above Vanderbilt Avenue was farmland for most of its life. In the 1800s wealthy Manhattan merchants put up summer estates along Richmond Road, drawn by the breezes off the Narrows. By 1900 the Fox Hills Golf Club covered the ground where the Park Hill Apartments now stand. Tournaments were played there until the course closed in 1935.
The bulk of what people now call Park Hill was built in the early 1960s as part of New York City’s urban renewal push. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge had just changed the geography of Staten Island, and developers expected families from Brooklyn to fill the new towers. Some did. Then white flight emptied them out again, and by the late 1970s the complex had become one of the few places on Staten Island where a working-class African or African-American family could rent without a fight.
The Liberians Arrive
Liberia and the United States are bound together by a strange piece of history. In 1822 the American Colonization Society, a group of white Americans who could not imagine free Black people remaining in the United States, began settling formerly enslaved African-Americans on a stretch of West African coast. The settlers founded Monrovia, named for President James Monroe. In 1847 their descendants declared the Republic of Liberia, the first independent Black republic in Africa.
For more than a century the ruling Americo-Liberian minority kept a tight grip on the country. In 1980 a young master sergeant named Samuel Doe led a coup that killed President William Tolbert and ended one hundred and thirty-three years of True Whig Party rule. A trickle of Liberians began leaving for the United States. A handful landed in Park Hill in the late 1970s and early 1980s, drawn by cheap rents in the brick towers above the ferry line.
The trickle became a flood when Charles Taylor crossed from Cote d’Ivoire on Christmas Eve 1989 and launched the First Liberian Civil War. Over the next seven years roughly two hundred thousand Liberians were killed and close to a million were displaced. Refugees made it to the camps on the borders of Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire. Some kept going.
The United States granted Temporary Protected Status to displaced Liberians, especially those with family already in the country. Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee began resettling cases. Many of those cases had a cousin or an aunt in the Park Hill Apartments, and chain migration did the rest. By the mid-1990s the buildings on Park Hill Avenue were filling with families from Monrovia, Buchanan, Gbarnga, and Harper.
Park Hill at Its Peak
The Second Liberian Civil War, from 1999 to 2003, sent a fresh wave. By the mid-2000s Park Hill held an estimated six thousand to eight thousand Liberian immigrants, and community leaders including African Refuge’s Jacob Massaquoi put the wider Staten Island figure closer to ten thousand. It was, by almost any measure, the largest concentration of Liberians anywhere outside Liberia itself.
Daily life in those years was loud and visible. Liberian English carried out of stairwells. Pepper soup simmered in tiny kitchens. Children walked to PS 57 and IS 49 carrying schoolbooks and a separate vocabulary for home. On Saturdays the basement of one Park Hill building doubled as African Refuge, a community group founded in 2003 by Jacob Massaquoi, a torture survivor from the war, and the Columbia psychologist Jack Saul. African Refuge ran trauma counselling, after-school programmes, and immigration clinics out of a single low-ceilinged room.
The Staten Island Liberian Community Association, known locally as SILCA, ran the parallel civic life. SILCA organised Liberian Independence Day on July 26, the date in 1847 when Joseph Jenkins Roberts declared the republic. The parade ran along Park Hill Avenue. Lappa-wrapped elders, drummers, kids in red, white and blue Liberian colours, and a sound system loud enough to carry to the ferry terminal.
The Change
Charles Taylor resigned and fled to Nigeria in August 2003. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa’s first elected female head of state in 2005. Liberia, at last, had a fragile peace.
The Park Hill community kept arriving for another decade, partly because Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure protections kept being extended, partly because the families already here kept sponsoring relatives. But the emergency was over. Some Liberians began moving out to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Minnesota suburbs, where rents were lower and schools were quieter. Others stayed and bought into the neighbourhood.
In 2019 the corner of Sobel Court and Park Hill Avenue was co-named Little Liberia Way. Deacon Telle Brown of the Little Liberia Advocacy group cut the ribbon. The street sign is small. The fact that the City of New York agreed to put it up is not.
The Landmarks of Liberian Park Hill
The Park Hill Apartments (140-260 Park Hill Avenue). Six-storey brick towers built in the early 1960s as private rental housing. From the late 1970s on, these buildings became the geographic centre of Liberian Staten Island. African Refuge has operated out of one of the basement units since 2003.
African Refuge (160 Park Hill Avenue, basement). Founded in 2003 by Jacob Massaquoi and Jack Saul as a trauma-counselling programme out of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. It grew into the closest thing Little Liberia has to a town hall. Immigration help, youth programmes, food distribution, public-health outreach during the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa.
Little Liberia Way (Sobel Court and Park Hill Avenue). The honorary street sign approved by the New York City Council and unveiled in 2019. A small piece of public recognition that took decades of advocacy.
Bridge’s Kitchen (76 Canal Street, Clifton). A Liberian food truck on the edge of the neighbourhood serving palm butter, jollof rice, kala, pepper sauce, and rice bread, Thursday through Monday. The closest thing Little Liberia has to a Liberian restaurant on wheels.
Targee Street and the Park Hill commercial strip. In the 1990s the stretch around Targee Street and Park Hill Avenue became the working centre for Liberian and other West African businesses: hair-braiding salons, money-transfer storefronts, small groceries stocking palm oil, dried fish, and bouillon cubes. Many have come and gone. The corridor is still where Liberian Park Hill does its weekly shopping.
Liberian Independence Day on Park Hill Avenue (July 26). SILCA’s annual parade and street festival commemorates the 1847 declaration of independence. Drums, lappa dresses, Liberian flags, and food stalls fill the avenue. It is the loudest, most visible day of the Park Hill year.
PS 57 and the local schools. Generations of Liberian-American children passed through the elementary and middle schools of Staten Island District 31. Many of them are now the doctors, nurses, social workers, and civil servants the community quietly produced.
Where the Park Hill Liberians Came From
Liberia is small, roughly the size of Tennessee, but ethnically dense. The 2008 national census counted sixteen indigenous groups speaking sixteen languages, plus the Americo-Liberian descendants of the 1822 settlers and the Congo People who arrived later from the Caribbean and recaptured slave ships.
The largest Park Hill home cities are Monrovia, the capital on the Atlantic coast, and the smaller port of Buchanan on Grand Bassa County, the upcountry market town of Gbarnga in Bong County, and the southeastern port of Harper in Maryland County. Many Park Hill families come from Nimba County, the inland province at the centre of the worst fighting of the First Civil War.
Ethnically the Park Hill community mirrors Liberia itself. Kpelle, the largest single group at roughly twenty percent of the country, are well represented. So are Bassa from the central coast, Gio and Mano from Nimba County, Krahn from the southeast, Vai from the western coast near Sierra Leone, Grebo from Maryland County, and Americo-Liberians from the older settler families. The languages of home include Liberian English, Liberian Kreyol or Kolokwa, and the indigenous languages: Bassa, Kpelle, Vai with its own native script, Mano, Gio, Krahn, and Grebo among them.
Religion in Park Hill follows the country it left. The 2008 Liberian census recorded 85.6 percent Christian and 12.2 percent Muslim, and the Park Hill mix runs along the same lines. Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, AME, and Pentecostal congregations all draw Liberian worshippers from the towers. A smaller Mandingo and Vai Muslim community prays in apartment-floor mosques and at the nearby Masjid Al-Noor.
Park Hill Today
The peak years are behind Park Hill, but the neighbourhood is still recognisably Liberian. The food truck still rolls out. The independence day parade still runs. Children of the first refugee wave are now in their thirties and forties, working as nurses at Staten Island University Hospital, as teachers in the public schools, as case managers and small-business owners. A second generation is graduating from CUNY and SUNY and coming back to the neighbourhood for Sunday dinners.
The 2020 census recorded only seventy-eight people in the entire borough claiming Liberian ancestry, which says more about the census than about Park Hill. Many Liberian-Americans, especially the children of refugees, write themselves down as Black or African-American on the form. Community estimates still put the Liberian-descended population of Staten Island in the low thousands and the wider New York metro figure above fifteen thousand.
The neighbourhood faces the usual pressures. Park Hill Apartments has cycled through ownership changes and HUD renovations. Some longtime residents have moved out to New Jersey or to the suburbs of Minneapolis, where the Liberian community has its own twin centre of gravity. But the families who stayed have raised American children with Liberian names, and Park Hill Avenue still answers when you call it Little Liberia. The story did not end with the war. It moved here, and it kept going.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Liberian refugees settle in Park Hill?
A small group of Liberians had already settled in the Park Hill Apartments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, drawn by relatively affordable rents in the brick towers above the Stapleton ferry line. When the First Liberian Civil War broke out in 1989, the United States granted Temporary Protected Status to displaced Liberians, and Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee resettled many new arrivals with relatives already living in Park Hill. Chain migration did the rest, and within a decade Park Hill held one of the largest Liberian populations outside Liberia.
Is Park Hill still Liberian today?
Yes, although smaller than at its 2000s peak. The neighbourhood still holds the annual Liberian Independence Day parade on July 26, African Refuge still operates out of a Park Hill Avenue basement, and the corner of Sobel Court and Park Hill Avenue was officially co-named Little Liberia Way in 2019. A second generation of Liberian-Americans now lives, works, and raises children in the same towers their parents arrived at as refugees.
What are the most famous Liberian landmarks in Park Hill?
The key landmarks of Liberians in Park Hill, Staten Island are the Park Hill Apartments on Park Hill Avenue, the African Refuge community centre in the basement at 160 Park Hill Avenue, the honorary Little Liberia Way street sign at Sobel Court, Bridge’s Kitchen Liberian food truck on Canal Street, the Targee Street commercial strip, and the annual Liberian Independence Day parade along Park Hill Avenue every July 26.
Where in Liberia did the Park Hill Liberians come from?
Park Hill draws from across Liberia, with the largest contingents from the capital Monrovia, the coastal port of Buchanan, the upcountry market town of Gbarnga, and the southeastern port of Harper. Ethnically the community includes Kpelle, Bassa, Gio, Mano, Krahn, Vai, Grebo, and Americo-Liberian descendants of the 1822 settlers, mirroring the wider ethnic mix of Liberia itself.
When did Liberians first arrive in Park Hill?
The first Liberians settled in Park Hill in the late 1970s, with arrivals accelerating after the 1980 coup that ended one hundred and thirty-three years of Americo-Liberian True Whig Party rule. The defining waves came during the First Liberian Civil War from 1989 to 1996 and the Second Liberian Civil War from 1999 to 2003, when Park Hill became one of the largest refugee resettlement destinations for displaced Liberians in the United States.
If your family’s story passed through Park Hill, or through Monrovia, Buchanan, Gbarnga, Harper, or any of the places the Liberian people made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the 1822 coast to the towers above the Narrows, to wherever you are now.