Staten Island, NY
Where We Work on Staten Island
We are based on Sunset Avenue in Westerleigh and we take demolition work across the island. Staten Island is not one job, so here is what actually changes from one part of it to another.
What changes is the building, not the address
A demolition estimate is really an estimate about access, material and hours. All three are set by the kind of house you are in, and Staten Island's housing changes more from the North Shore to the south shore than most people who live here realise.
A detached split-level in Great Kills with a long driveway, an attached townhouse in New Springville with a garage and a shared wall, and an 1890s frame house in Stapleton on a narrow lot inside a historic district are three different jobs even when the scope on paper is identical. That is the difference worth knowing about, so that is what the sections below describe.
01 Our own blocks
Westerleigh, Castleton Corners, Willowbrook and New Springville
Detached houses with lawns and driveways along the older streets, and the attached townhouses with street-level garages that the mid-island filled up with from the 1980s on.
In the detached houses the container goes in the driveway and material leaves by the side or garage door, which makes these among the simplest jobs in the city. In the townhouses the garage door is the route out and the shared wall is the constraint: the hours matter more than the route, and the neighbours are told before the first day.
Our own premises are at 8 Sunset Ave, Staten Island, NY 10314, in the middle of it.
02 The North Shore
St. George, Tompkinsville, Stapleton, New Brighton and Port Richmond
The island's oldest and densest stock: two- and three-storey frame and brick houses close together on narrow lots, some walk-up apartment buildings, and the commercial streets that go with them.
Many lots have no driveway, so the container sits at the curb with its permit and material leaves through the front door or down a stair over protected floor. Plaster on lath replaces drywall and the pre-1987 asbestos gate nearly always applies. St. George, St. Paul's Avenue and Stapleton Heights are historic districts, so a permitted interior job there files with Landmarks first. For a strip-out that leaves protected features alone that is a Certificate of No Effect, staff level and usually about ten business days.
03 The East Shore
Grasmere, Dongan Hills, New Dorp and Midland Beach
Detached houses on their own lots, a share of them raised or rebuilt since 2012, and the Hylan Boulevard shopping strips with their wide lots.
The houses run like our own blocks, with the driveway as the route out. The raised houses add a stair to the first floor and a garage or storage level beneath it that is often the route instead. The strips are covered on the commercial page: rear loading doors, a container in the lot, and neighbours trading on both sides.
04 The South Shore
Great Kills, Eltingville, Annadale and Tottenville
Large-lot detached houses, many of them newer than the asbestos gate's 1987 line, and townhouse developments along the main roads.
This is the easiest part of the city to take a house apart in. Long driveways, yards for a second container, a garage door as the route out, and drywall on studs behind the walls. What sets the schedule here is the family staying in the house and the legal hours on a quiet street, not the access.
A Staten Island street
We work across Staten Island. The industrial west shore around Travis and Bloomfield is covered on the commercial page, because the work there is warehouse strip-out. New Jersey is across the water and is not somewhere we work. If you are elsewhere in the city, our other sites cover the rest of it, and the number on this page reaches the same people.