Grymes Hill, Staten Island
Grymes Hill is a neighborhood, situated upon a hill by that name, on Staten Island. The island is part of the USA's largest city, New York. The hill is named after Suzette Bosque Grymes, the widow of Louisiana's first governor, William Charles Cole Claiborne, who settled on Staten Island in 1836 (she had remarried a prominent New Orleans lawyer, John R. Grymes, after Governor Claiborne died in 1817). A local developer, Major Charles Howard, built many of the hill's earliest homes, and his name survives in Howard Avenue, the hill's main street; a portion of this street was known for a time as Serpentine Road due to its snake-like curvature. Grymes Hill is best noted currently for being the home of two institutions of higher learning: Wagner College, and the Staten Island campus of St. John's University. Also on the hill is the site of a former Roman Catholic monastery, which included a well-known school, named Augustinian Academy after the order of monks who ran it; the school closed in 1969, and today the property stands abandoned and has been the scene of much vandalism, a common problem on Staten Island.
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