STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Dodge the disgust caused by traffic, endless horn-honking and wretched smells by disappearing to this isolated paradise.
Yes, Staten Island has the key to ditching the madness of New York City. And it's right in the heart of the borough, within the Greenbelt.
We could thank New Yorker writer Eben Pindyck for finding it, but he wouldn't have discovered this hideaway if it wasn't for a pair of ecologists who sought the quietest, remotest sections of each of the 50 states.
The criteria was simple: Find the spot farthest from a road. Pindyck visited Staten Island in early September, he wrote. Having been told by the ecologists that the remotest spot was near the Greenbelt Nature Center, he started at the Rockland Avenue point:
For an hour or so, I followed my phone down well-maintained trails. There were no high-rises in sight--barely any human infrastructure at all, in fact, unless you count the La Tourette Golf Course. Eventually, sweating and exasperated after a few false turns, I left the trail, bottoming out in a grove of hardwoods. There, to my surprise, amid a tangle of young oaks with their pliable trunks, was a doe, about forty feet away.
You can read about his visit here via the link above. Pindyck notes the ecologists, Rebecca and Ryan Means, have not provided their exact coordinates.
Neither has he. That said, knowledgable Staten Islanders can probably come close to finding a hub of serenity within the Greenbelt, just like Pindyck did.
"If this place isn't wild, I don't know what is," he wrote.
A map included on the New Yorker story show parts of Staten Island that fall under "remote" status: A portion of Freshkills Park, and Great Kills Park, which each have portions of their greenspaces off-limits to the public. The Freshkills site is near Arden Avenue, where the World Trade Center remains are buried.
If you could add tranquil, remote spots to map, where would they be? Which part of Staten Island is your favorite escape?