Sailors’ Snug Harbor: Buildings A-E

STATUS Designated Individual Landmark

914-1000 Richmond Terrace

CLIENT: Sailors' Snug Harbor

ARCHITECT: Richard P. Smith, Minard Lafever

DATE: 1879

STYLE: Dormitory

Dormitory New Brighton Staten Island

Designated 10/14/1965

Sailors’ Snug Harbor was founded with an 1801 bequest from New York merchant Robert Randall to care for aging sailors.

Built in 1879-80 as the terminal phase of the complex, buildings A and E are identical. Designed by Richard P. Smyth, their dormitories are identified by their hexastyle Ionic porticoes. They are two stores about a raised basement with a three-bay facade.

Buildings B and D are identical and were built in 1840 as dormitories to accommodate the growing population of Snug Harbor. Rising two stories above a high basement, each has a three-bay facade dominated by a broad, shallow pediment. These dormitories connect with Building C by four hyphens that Minard Lafever designed in anticipation of such an expansion.

Completed in 1833, building C was the first building at Snug Harbor, and was the administration building for the complex. While the body of the two-story building is brick, its main facade is sheathed in Westchester marble quarried by inmates at Sing Sing Prison. This, Minard Lafever’s earliest extant work, is his only surviving essay in the Greek Revival vocabulary.

STATUS Designated Individual Landmark

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New Brighton

New Brighton, formerly an independent village, is today a neighborhood located on the northwestern tip of Staten Island. The neighborhood comprises an older industrial and residential harbor front area along the Kill Van Kull west of St. George.

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