218

A NEW PLAYGROUND

THE NOVEL EXPERIMENT UNDER WAY ON STATEN ISLAND.

An Island of Resort for Daytime and Night-Circuses In the Open Air and Al Fresco Theatrical Spectacles-A Paralytle Place Cared by [?] William's Touch.

[Copyright, ?]

Of late Staten Island has forced itself to be included early in the list of the summer resorts of the Atlantic Coast by reason of its growing interest and importance to New Yorkers especially, though it attracts thousands of visitors to the city as well as residents, for the entertainments that are daily given on it are among the most prominent of the city's spectacles. It was there that Buffalo Bill, who showed to from 10,000 to 15,000 persons a day, was launched upon the tide of amazing success that has since carried him with [word?] to Europe. It was there, also, that some of the most important of last year's matches at baseball, cricket and lacrosse were played upon the Staten Island Amusement Company's grounds at St. George, the most beautiful and admirably situated exhibition field in the country, [justling?] into the cool and breezy harbor and backed by a pretty tree-clad and villa-decked hill. The same playground is being put to the same use this year--in the daytime--while at night it is the scene of the famous spectacle of "The Fall of Babylon," a show of the purely spectacular kind, but one more gorgeous than had ever been attempted before for the [word?] of a New York audience. It was not here, but at the other end of the island, at a place called [Erastian?], that Buffalo Bill presented his show last year and that Adam Porepaugh has opened the summer season with his circus this year.

These two places, Erastian and St. George, are features of the revolution worked in the island by Mr. Eratus Wiman in the short time that has elapsed since he wrested the control of the [means?] of communication between New York and the island from the [Vanderbites?]. Staten Island used to be a sort of Vanderbilt barony. There the founder of the family fortunes was born and began his business career, and although it would have paid him and his descendants to have improved their little principality and opened it up to the overflow of the metropolis, they had greater interests to absorb their attention, and so the island remained a forbidden ground to all except those to whom time is getting to and fro was no object. Ferryboats ran in the old-fashioned way on either side of the island during the day and early evening, and the place was always more dead than alive. Mr. Wiman, a Canadian, but a man whose restless energy makes him seem to out-Yankee the Yankees, saw the immense advantages that could be taken of a locality so close to the metropolis and so rich in room for cheap homes, for elegant villa plots, for factory sites and for pleasure grounds for the masses. The island is sixteen miles long by eight miles wide, and is shaped like a leaf. He established a ferry-house at the [word?] of it nearest New York--only fifteen minutes' sailing distance from the Battery--and having next built a double-tracked railroad along the edge of either side of the leaf, abolished the old boat system and carried the people by rail from the central and single ferry slip. This permitted a service of thirty-nine trips a day by the same boats that were only able to make fifteen before.

His was like the touch of a magician's wand to that sleepy isle. It was like the discovery of nearly sixty square miles of room for growth to crowded New York. New houses are springing up all over the island, factories are building there, summer resorts are coming into prominence there after having languished half a century, and the two new pleasure grounds that Mr. Winan has established are daily visited by crowds that make the island a formidable rival of more distant and unhandy Coney Island. Coney Island is a bare sand need: this is a luxuriant hill of farmland, forest, dell and meadow, Erastian was a revelation to the city folks, who had never dreamed of being able to attend a circus under an awning and amid a genre of forest trees. St. George was an equal novelty and delight, for here athletic sports were witnessed for the first time at a waterside place, only a few minutes from the heart of town and in the care of a company that spared no expense to surround the spectators with all the comforts obtainable in a theatre even while they were in the open air and surrounded on two sides by the moving panorama of life and commerce and scenic beauty of the grandest and most picturesque harbor on the continent. This year the presentation of the "Fall of Babylon" has added to this at fresco amphitheatre the still more novel character of an out-of-door playhouse, brilliantly lighted by electric lamps, arched by the starlit sky and framed by the ocean's breezes. The green award of the ball-ground is surrounded on three sides by the grand stand and the tiers of cheaper seats, while the fourth side is taken up by the stage and gorgeous scenery of the ancient spectacle. The stage is 428 feet in length or far longer than any other upon which performances have ever before been given in this country. Upon this colossal platform no less than a thousand performers appear, all in the magnificent costumes of the [word?] of [?]hazzar's court, the dazzling robes of Childean priests, the lustrous armor of Babylonian or Persian soldiers, the chromatic [?] of the peasantry of the country or the showy dresses of the enormous corps of over 200 dancing girls. The wall of the city serves for a curtain while one is needed, and the spectators seem, as they sit with the green award between them and the contending armies, the performing athletes and the [word?] of the king's horsemen, to be sitting in American and looking over a plain upon the exterior of a strange city and its still more strange population. Later, the greater part of the bewildering mass of performers sweeps out of the now wall-less city and passes out upon the plain under the eyes of people in the seats. The destruction of the city by fire ends the spectacle, which is the most gorgeous and impressive one ever presented in New York.

Staten Island is almost certain soon to be the New York terminal of the Baltimore and Ohio's great railroad system, which will reach the island by means of a bridge across the Kill Von Jull, the narrow strait which divides the island from the State of New Jersey, to which is geographically and geologically belongs The possibilities--now more than probabilities--offered to capital and enterprise by this introduction of a great trunk-line railroad into this near suburb of New York are almost revolutionary in their importance. New York needs nothing so badly as cheap and commodious storage and warehouse room. If it were to be had upon Manhattan Island it would not be available, and where it might be obtained--in Brooklyn--it is still less serviceable. But Staten Island offers ten miles of sites for the necessary building--not only sufficient for but directly accessible to the trains that will bring the produce of the West and the buttons that will fetch the tonnage of the world.

Among Mr. Wiman's plans for developing the usefulness of the island is a very humane one for providing persons of moderate incomes with homes of their own by an original plan. The tenant is to pay for his house while paying a fair rental for it, but in case he dies before the house is paid for, a deed of the property is at once made out to the widow. This plan will be made possible by the insurance of the tenant's life by the building company for the sum needed to purchase the house. The natural economy is building many houses at once, and is insuring many lives at ages within the period when the risk of death is slight, and in insuring them for a short term of years, enters largely into the practicability of the scheme. But this is mainly philanthropic; there will be no need to offer special inducements for the building of Staten Island. The place must grow rapidly. It is high ground, surrounded by water and by the noblest scenery in the East. Its surface is rolling and no part of it is far from the railway system that is to open it up and carry the people to and from the city for fifteen cents a day. The factories that are to be established will find natural sites on the strip of land between the railroad and the water's edge, so that the interior and main body of the park-like island will be scared to the homes that will soon cover it as with a great, yet mainly cottage-built, city. Instead of there being less pleasure resorts, there are certain to be more; for certain parts of the beach--particularly facing the gateway to the ocean--have advantages as future watering places that will shame many now famous resorts when they come to be developed. It will not be without a [word?] that the [word?] will see the score of picturesque little fishing club headquarters disappear from this beach, for they are among the most unique and poetical outgrowths of metropolitan life; "their room will be worth more than their company," as the old saying goes, in time[word?] not far away. Very quaint little club-houses are these. They are former cottages or farm-houses that have been leased or bought by small associations, mainly of workingmen, who have fitted their upper rooms with beaks so as to accommodate a great many sleepers in a very little room, and [word?] downstairs with the choicest collections of fishing rods upon which, as is often the case, the owners have lavished more money than they ever put out upon any other objects or possessions. In front of each house there is apt to be a liberty pole for displaying the colors of the club and in front of that a little cluster of sail and rowboats. Here the members spend their vacations and their Sundays--the calmest and happiest of sportsmen in the loveliest of seaside nooks.

JULIAN RALPH