Arden Heights, Staten Island
Arden Heights is a name increasingly applied to the western part of Annadale, a neighborhood located on the South Shore of Staten Island, New York City, USA. Erastus Wiman, a noted Staten Island real estate developer, coined the name "Arden Heights" in 1886; the origin of the name is somewhat of an enigma, as the immediate area contains no hills of any significance. Long noted for being the site of St. Michael's Home For Children, a Roman Catholic orphanage, Arden Heights underwent a serious transformation when Village Greens, a large condominium project, opened there in 1973. Soon many businesses sprung up to serve the condominium project's residents, and today the project stands at the center of a community bearing its own identity, separate from that of Annadale: Today, a large percentage of the residents of the condominium — and the many single-family homes that have since been built around it — are Jewish, giving Arden Heights more common ground with such Mid-Island neighborhoods as Willowbrook than with Annadale and other South Shore communities. In 1982 the orphanage closed, with some of the land on which it stood being sold to developers and the remainder set aside for use as a church, named for the recently-canonized St. John Neumann. The church also maintains a convent for the Presentation Sisters on the east side of the property; in 2005 a section of this land was sold off, with new home construction to follow here too — still another sign of the continuing housing boom on Staten Island, which has gone on virtually uninterrupted since the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964.
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