Staten Island Historian Earns NY Senate Award for Championing Overlooked Communities

Honouring a steward of Staten Island’s overlooked histories points to the value—and challenges—of preserving local heritage in urban America.

Staten Island is often considered New York City’s quietest borough, but its past is anything but muted. On a warm April morning, amid the city’s clatter and commotion, an adjunct professor at the College of Staten Island was presented with the New York State Senate’s highest civic accolade. Debbie-Ann Paige, a historian, genealogist, and pillar of the Sandy Ground Historical Society, was recognised not for gold-plated philanthropy or headline-worthy heroics, but for decades spent safeguarding stories others have consigned to oblivion.

The Senate’s Liberty Award, bestowed this year on Ms Paige, signals more than personal achievement. Her work—meticulous, often solitary, and rarely lucrative—has centred on the preservation of Sandy Ground, America’s oldest continuously inhabited free Black settlement. Where developers might see decaying bungalows, Paige sees a vital American saga. Her research has mapped kinships, archived oral histories, and rescued fragile records that otherwise might have languished in basement filing cabinets or, worse still, landfill.

At first blush, such recognition could seem symbolic—pleasant, but of little consequence for a city that prefers to inhabit the present tense. Yet in a metropolis driven by cycles of erasure and renewal, efforts like Paige’s have a utility that is far from trivial. They seed a sense of belonging for communities that have long been consigned to the margins. The tale of Sandy Ground, for instance, predates not only modern Staten Island but much of the archetypal urban American experience, entwining the stories of Black oystersmen, abolitionists, and families who braved exclusion to build a place of their own.

Her work thus achieves a dual public service. First, it stitches isolated recollections into a coherent civic memory—an antidote to New York’s notorious historical amnesia. Second, it equips the next generation, local schoolchildren among them, with evidence that their neighbourhoods were shaped as much by strivers and freedom-seekers as by absentee landlords and transport czars. The utility is practical, not merely poetic: communities with a greater sense of rootedness tend to be more socially resilient, less prone to the anomie that sometimes afflicts cities of shifting populations.

The broader effect percolates in subtler ways. As New York’s property market grinds on—a juggernaut rarely slowed for sentiment—Paige’s advocacy has complicated, even if only incrementally, the calculus for redevelopment. Historically Black and immigrant enclaves across the five boroughs have been bulldozed in service of progress, much of it dubiously defined. A living, accessible accounting of Sandy Ground’s past gives proponents of preservation a stronger hand.

Politically, such awards are not without calculation. State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton’s sponsorship of the honour reflects a growing official appetite for nods to diversity. Yet there are signals that this is more than empty gesture. City agencies have taken greater pains in recent years to support local museums and societies (though the sums remain paltry: the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs’ 2023-24 budget allots less than 0.02% of total city spending for small heritage nonprofits). Still, the state’s recognition, however modest, confers an imprimatur that community historians can wield for future funding bids.

Across the economic spectrum, the ripples of such remembrance matter. Booker T. Washington’s dictum—that “those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history”—rings true, particularly as social mobility stutters. Involvement in communal, rather than atomised, identity-building activities correlates with more robust civic engagement—a net positive, however muted, for New York’s fractious democracy.

Recognition in a city of forgetting

Around the country, local historians face similar headwinds. Urban America belly-flops into its future by razing inconvenient relics, from Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn to Chicago’s former Black Belt. Where other nations—Japan with its machiya rowhouses, the UK with its blue plaques—have institutionalised the celebration of neighbourhood histories, the United States often leans toward oblivion. Staten Island’s choice to uplift its own chronicler bucks this national trend, though the scale of commemoration remains decidedly boutique.

For New York, which fancies itself a city apart, such gestures could portend a mild shift. The borough’s preservation battles—whether over Harlem brownstones or the warrenlike streets of Chinatown—are rarely decided in favour of sentiment or the hapless amateur historian. Yet we reckon that the quieter tide of grassroots recognition, multiplied across hundreds of comparable neighbourhoods, might slowly engender a countervailing force to heedless development.

Of course, lauding one individual leaves the larger crisis untouched. Most of New York’s volunteer scholars and genealogists must contend with tepid public interest, meagre funding, and the perennial lure of real-estate gold. Nor does a single award dissolve the tensions between property rights, economic dynamism, and cultural preservation. Yet there is logic in celebrating the tenacious few who attempt to square that triangle—however Sisyphean the effort.

In the end, the value of Ms Paige’s labours may be less in the information preserved than in the principle asserted: that no group’s past is too inconspicuous to matter, no record too slight to merit rescue. New York, garrulous metropolis that it is, rarely pauses long enough to absorb such lessons. But every so often, it nods to the keepers of memory—a habit we would encourage it to cultivate further. ■