BOROUGH OF RICHMOND
(STATEN ISLAND)
Staten Island is
a triangular territory embraced by the waters of the Arthur Kill on the
west, the channel of the Kill van Kull, New York Harbor, on the north,
and the ocean and Raritan Bay on the east and south. It contains about
seventy-seven square miles, is ten and a half miles long in its extreme
axis, and at its widest part attains a width of seven and three-quarter
miles.
It
consists essentially of a northeast and southwest range of low
serpentine hills (from 300 to 380 feet in elevation) resting upon or
within crystalline schists, similar, in all probability, with those we
have reviewed, so conspicuously shown on Manhattan Island. An evidence
of these was formerly visible before the old Nautilus Hall at
Tompkinsville. Here was exposed a broad vein of granite, eighty feet
wide and fifty feet long.
Again,
when in August, 1905, it was found necessary to blast the rock under
water at the site of the new ferry slip at St. George (the northeastern
point of Staten Island), mica schist containing garnet, and
unmistakably homologous with the Manhattan phases, was brought to the
surface. Near at hand in the Robin Reef rock, connecting by a low
submerged (at high water) ridge with Ellis and Bedlow's (Liberty)
Islands, similar or identical formations are discovered, and while it
is probable that underneath Staten Island, as generally west of the
Hudson River channel, these schists dip steeply and pitch below the
mesozoic basins, they constitute for the Borough of Richmond, as for
all the other boroughs of the Greater City, the fundamental
lithological substructure as an ultimate reference.
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