On a wet evening in late May, a wooden chopping board lands on the steel pass at Lakruwana and the kothu starts. Two cleavers, four-four time, godhamba roti shredded into ribbons with curry leaves, chilli, egg, mutton. The sound carries out the open door and onto Bay Street, where Vesak lanterns are strung from the lampposts in honour of the Buddha’s birth.
A few blocks up the hill on Victory Boulevard, the lights are on at New Asha, and a queue of regulars is waiting on the curry counter. This is Tompkinsville. New York has decided, officially, to call it Little Sri Lanka.
Tompkinsville, The Place
Tompkinsville sits on the north shore of Staten Island, fifteen minutes on foot from the St. George ferry terminal. The neighbourhood is built on a hill, with Bay Street running along the harbour at the bottom and Victory Boulevard climbing inland toward the centre of the borough.
The housing is unexpectedly handsome for a place most New Yorkers have never visited. Italianate row houses and Victorian frame houses sit between brick walk-ups, the legacy of a nineteenth-century resort suburb that the city eventually swallowed.
The R-train Manhattanite stereotype does not apply here. There is no subway. The Staten Island Ferry is the connection to the rest of the city, and most of Little Sri Lanka’s restaurants and shops are clustered within a short walk of where Victory Boulevard meets Bay Street.
How Staten Island Became Sri Lankan
Before the Sri Lankans
Tompkinsville is named for Daniel D. Tompkins, a former vice president and New York governor who built a steam ferry dock at the foot of present-day Victory Boulevard in 1817. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the neighbourhood was Irish and Italian, a working-class extension of the docks and breweries that once lined the north shore.
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge changed all that. When it opened in 1964, families with money drove south to the bigger lots of mid-island, leaving behind a stock of cheap apartments above shopfronts and a transit link to Manhattan that was still cheap, still slow, and still wholly underused.
That, more than anything, is why the Sri Lankans came.
The Sri Lankans Arrive
The first known Sri Lankan to settle on Staten Island arrived in 1967. His name was Leslie Gunaratne, an accountant, and he came with his family. For more than a decade, his household was effectively the whole community.
What turned a household into a neighbourhood was the war. In July 1983, anti-Tamil pogroms in Colombo set off twenty-six years of civil war between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The fighting drove Tamil families out of the north and east, and the economic wreckage that followed drove Sinhalese, Burgher and Moor families out of the south.
New York was the obvious landing point on the East Coast, and within New York, Staten Island made a particular kind of sense. Rents on Victory Boulevard in the late 1980s were a fraction of Queens or Brooklyn. The ferry ran around the clock to a Manhattan that was hiring porters, drivers, restaurant workers, certified nursing assistants. There was already, just barely, a Sri Lankan address to write home about.
Of the 488 Sri Lankans who legally migrated to New York City between 1990 and 1994, almost a quarter chose Staten Island, according to the City Planning Department’s Newest New Yorkers survey. By the time the war ended in 2009, Sinhalese and Tamil neighbours were sharing the same stairwells along Bay Street, the political grievances of the homeland softened, slightly, by the geography of exile.
Little Sri Lanka at Its Peak
The 1995 to 2010 stretch was the build-out. Lakruwana Wijesinghe, who had emigrated from Kiribathgoda outside Colombo in 1975, opened the first Sri Lankan restaurant in New York City in 1995, on West 44th Street in Hell’s Kitchen. After a fire destroyed it in 2004, he moved the operation home to Staten Island, first to Corson Avenue and then, in 2010, to its current address at 668 Bay Street.
He shipped chairs, carved doorways and pink stone wall panels from Sri Lanka in a forty-foot container. The point was never just to feed people. The point was to put a piece of the country inside the restaurant.
New Asha opened at 322 Victory Boulevard in the mid-1990s as a grocery store and curry counter rolled into one, run by a Sri Lankan family whose home cooking quickly drew crowds. Sanrasa followed. So did Lemilanka, San Rasa’s various incarnations, and a small constellation of bakeries selling pol roti, kokis and milk toffee.
The American Sri Lanka Buddhist Association inaugurated the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara on 11 July 1999, ending an era when Sri Lankan Buddhists on the island had to spend up to three hours each way getting to the Queens temple. The vihara, in the Theravada tradition, became the spiritual centre for the Sinhalese majority of the community. Catholic Sri Lankans found their parishes among the existing Italian and Irish churches of the north shore. Tamil Hindu families travelled to temples in Queens.
The Change
By the mid-2000s, City Hall had noticed. In May 2009, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC & Company announced the Nine in ’09 campaign, a list of nine overlooked New York neighbourhoods to visit without leaving the city. Tompkinsville’s Little Sri Lanka was on it, and the following month Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Councilman Kenneth Mitchell took a public tasting tour of Bay Street.
It was not a designation in any legal sense, more a piece of municipal stagecraft. But it shifted how the neighbourhood saw itself. The community was no longer an open secret.
By 2000, around 700 Sri Lankans lived on Staten Island. Estimates today run from 5,000 to nearly 7,000, with some community advocates citing higher numbers when extended family is counted. The result is the largest Sri Lankan community on the United States East Coast, and the second largest in North America after Toronto.
Some of the early arrivals have since dispersed. Children who grew up above Victory Boulevard shops have bought houses in Edison and Woodbridge, New Jersey, or in the Sri Lankan pockets of Long Island. Tompkinsville is the anchor, not the whole map.
The Landmarks of Sri Lankan Tompkinsville
Lakruwana, 668 Bay Street. The anchor. Founded in Manhattan in 1995, rebuilt on Staten Island after a fire, settled into its Bay Street home in 2010. Lakruwana Wijesinghe’s restaurant has appeared on The New York Times‘s list of the 100 best restaurants in New York in 2023, 2024 and 2025. The Sunday buffet is the introduction most non-Sri Lankans get to the food: hoppers from a row of bowl-shaped pans, kothu roti from the cleavers at the pass, fish ambul thiyal, lamprais wrapped in banana leaf.
New Asha, 322 Victory Boulevard. The opposite of fine dining and the soul of the strip. Half grocery and half steam-table canteen, opened in the mid-1990s by Vijayakumari Devadas, known to everyone as Viji. You point at curries behind glass, you eat off a paper plate, you talk to whoever sits beside you. Locals call it the most honest Sri Lankan kitchen in New York.
Sri Lankan Art and Cultural Museum, 61 Canal Street. Opened by Julia Wijesinghe, daughter of Lakruwana’s owners, when she was eighteen years old in 2017. It began in a former karaoke room in the restaurant’s basement and grew into a dedicated space around the corner. It is the first museum of Sri Lankan culture anywhere outside the country, holding pottery, currency, musical instruments and sculptures of Buddhist and Hindu deities.
Staten Island Buddhist Vihara, 115 John Street. Inaugurated 11 July 1999 by the American Sri Lanka Buddhist Association, in the Theravada tradition. The first Sri Lankan Buddhist temple on the island, founded so that the community would not have to spend half a day on the subway for a Sunday dharma talk. Venerable H. Kondanna, trained in Colombo and educated at Fordham, has led it for years.
San Rasa, 19 Corson Avenue. One of the older sit-down restaurants, known for an all-you-can-eat Sunday buffet and for cooking with spices imported directly from Sri Lanka. The kottu, the lamprais and the string hoppers are textbook.
Lemilanka and the Bay Street bakeries. Smaller, less written about, more local. This is where you go for short eats at five in the afternoon, for fish patties and ulundu vadai, for cardamom-heavy milk toffee wrapped in waxed paper.
The Bay Street and Victory Boulevard intersection. Not a building but a corner. Stand at the foot of Victory Boulevard, look up the hill, and almost every Sri Lankan business on Staten Island is within a five-minute walk. It is the commercial spine of the community and the place where, in May, Vesak lanterns turn the streetlights into a string of paper moons.
Where the Staten Island Sri Lankans Came From
The community is, in miniature, the country. The majority are Sinhalese, predominantly Theravada Buddhist, with origins in Colombo, the surrounding Gampaha district, Kandy in the central highlands and Galle on the southern coast. Lakruwana Wijesinghe himself comes from Kiribathgoda, a suburb of Colombo. The strongest single thread is metropolitan and Sinhalese.
Tamil Sri Lankans are a smaller but significant presence, drawn from Jaffna in the north and from the eastern coastal districts hardest hit by the civil war. Burgher families, descended from intermarriage between Portuguese and Dutch colonists and Sri Lankans, came mainly from Colombo. Sri Lankan Moors, the Muslim minority, came from the west coast cities of Colombo, Galle, Negombo and Kandy where their families have lived for centuries.
What pushed them out was the same set of forces in different proportions. The civil war from 1983 to 2009. The economic collapse the war caused. The Boxing Day tsunami in December 2004, which killed more than 35,000 people in Sri Lanka and erased entire stretches of the southern and eastern coasts. The slow, grinding aftermath of all three.
Staten Island Today
Walk Victory Boulevard on a Saturday in 2026 and Little Sri Lanka is busy but mixed. The Sri Lankan shopfronts share the strip with West African hair salons, Mexican taquerias and the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center at 307 Victory Boulevard. Tompkinsville is no longer a single-ethnicity neighbourhood in the way that Irish South Boston or Italian Bensonhurst once were. It probably never was.
Some of the second generation has moved out. The Sri Lankan footprint now stretches across Staten Island and into New Jersey, particularly Edison and Woodbridge. Long Island has its own pockets. The community is bigger than the neighbourhood, and it has been for some years.
What remains in Tompkinsville is the anchor and the institutions. The vihara. The museum. The restaurants and the grocery counters. The Vesak lanterns each May. The smell of curry leaf and cinnamon and toasted coconut drifting out of New Asha’s open door. The young woman setting up a tour at the Sri Lankan Art and Cultural Museum on a Saturday morning. None of it is performance. All of it is somebody’s Tuesday.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Sri Lankans settle in Staten Island?
Sri Lankans settled in Staten Island for a combination of cheap rents along Victory Boulevard, a fast ferry to jobs in Manhattan, and a small existing Sri Lankan presence that pulled new arrivals into the same blocks. The first wave came during the civil war that began in 1983, and chain migration did the rest.
Is Tompkinsville still Sri Lankan today?
Tompkinsville is still the heart of Sri Lankan New York, with restaurants, a Buddhist temple, a cultural museum and grocery counters all clustered around Bay Street and Victory Boulevard. The neighbourhood is more mixed than it was at its peak, and many families have moved to New Jersey or Long Island, but Little Sri Lanka remains the commercial and cultural anchor of the community in the United States East Coast.
What are the most famous Sri Lankan landmarks in Staten Island?
The signature landmarks are Lakruwana restaurant at 668 Bay Street, New Asha at 322 Victory Boulevard, the Sri Lankan Art and Cultural Museum at 61 Canal Street, and the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara at 115 John Street. Together they cover food, culture and religion within a fifteen-minute walk of the ferry.
Where in Sri Lanka did the Staten Island Sri Lankans come from?
Most came from Colombo and its Gampaha suburbs, from Kandy in the central highlands and from Galle on the southern coast, with a smaller Tamil presence from Jaffna in the north and the eastern coastal districts. Sinhalese Buddhists are the majority, with Tamil Hindu, Sri Lankan Catholic and Moor Muslim families also represented.
When did Sri Lankans first arrive in Staten Island?
The accountant Leslie Gunaratne settled on Staten Island with his family in 1967, the first known Sri Lankan household on the borough. Real community-scale migration began in the mid-1980s during the Sri Lankan civil war and built through the 1990s and 2000s.
If your family’s story passed through Tompkinsville, or any of the places the Sri Lankan diaspora made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Colombo, Jaffna, Kandy and Galle to Victory Boulevard, to wherever you are now.