St. George Coast Guard Station, or the Staten Island Coast Guard Station, located adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry St. George Terminal, is a complex of 22 historic buildings and was best known for the invention and manufacturing of lighthouse equipment. The Office Building and U.S. Light-House Depot Complex, designed by Alfred B. Mullet and completed in 1865, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and comprise an official New York City Landmark.
In the late 1990s, New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) took over the site and created a public plaza; a public fishing pier (Pier 1); a fully functioning building that was supposed to house a gift shop for the National Lighthouse Museum. EDC also stabilized the building adjacent to the gift shop for the purpose of housing the museum's artifacts. In 2015 the National Lighthouse Museum opened within the complex. The Lighthouse Point development is also being constructed next to the historic building complex.
The site has views of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, Brooklyn's Shore Parkway, Governors Island, and Manhattan. During the summer months, concerts and events sponsored by local organizations such as Staten Island Community Board 1 and the Downtown Staten Island Council attract tourists from the ferry as well as local residents.
Complex
The Office Building and U.S. Light-House Depot Complex, also known as the Old Administration Building for the Third District U.S. Coast Guard, is a historic office building and light house repair depot complex. The complex consists of four buildings: the three-story brick and sandstone office building in the Second Empire style; two brick warehouses; and a small one-story brick building formerly used as a laboratory. The office building was designed by the Office of the Supervising Architect under Alfred B. Mullett in 1869. The warehouses were built about 1845 and in 1868. The older warehouse is in the Greek Revival style.
United States Lighthouse Board
The office building was constructed during the time that U.S. lighthouses were administered by the United States Lighthouse Board, which had been founded in 1851 to improve lighthouse technology and management practices. The board divided the nation into 12 districts, each served by a depot where supplies for the district's lighthouses were stored, particularly the flammable fuels in use at that time, which required specialized handling. The depot in St. George, Staten Island served the Third Lighthouse District, which stretched from Maine to Delaware and thus included many of the best known and historic lights on the Eastern Seaboard, including Sandy Hook Light, Montauk Light, and Barnegat Light. Vaults for fuel storage remain on the depot property, and other supplies were stored in the warehouses. The laboratory building was used to research improved materials and techniques for use in U.S. lighthouses.
The functions of the Lighthouse Board were transferred to other U.S. government agencies starting in 1903, and ultimately to the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939.
History
Site
The present site of the St. George Coast Guard Station was the location of the New York Marine Hospital, also known as the Quarantine, which opened in 1799 or 1800. Long before the construction of the immigrant processing center on the Battery, and later Ellis Island, immigrants found to be in poor or questionable health were segregated from other immigrants and from the local population in the hospital. The Quarantine was New York City’s first line of defense against immigrant-borne infectious diseases like Smallpox, Cholera, Typhus and Yellow fever. As many as 1,500 individuals could have been accommodated there at one time. After a series of epidemics in the 1850s, a riotous mob of locals burned the twenty buildings of the hospital complex to the ground in the Staten Island Quarantine War of 1858.
Founding and heyday
The Staten Island Lighthouse Depot was constructed on the former hospital site in 1862 by the United States Lighthouse Service (USLHS). It was the key manufacturing, storage, supply and maintenance center for the USLHS’s 3rd District.