Bloomfield, Staten Island : NYC Tourist Guide

Bloomfield

Bloomfield is the name of a locality on the West Shore of the New York City borough of Staten Island, New York, USA. It lies immediately to the north of Travis. Prall's Island is situated in the Arthur Kill off its coast.

Originally named Daniell's Neck when first settled in the 17th Century, it was later called Merrell Town after a local farmer. Its present name first appeared on a local map in 1874.

Throughout the 20th Century, very few people actually resided in Bloomfield, much of its land being used by construction companies to store heavy equipment, such as cement mixers. A large oil storage terminal maintained by Gulf Oil could also once be found there, leading to one of the service roads of the West Shore Expressway receiving the name of Gulf Avenue; the 440 acre (1.8 km²) terminal (built in 1936), which housed 82 tanks having a total capacity of 215 million US gallons (814,000 m³), was closed in 1998, and the tanks have since been demolished (on February 10, 1973, one of the tanks had exploded; even though the tank was empty at the time, the blast nonetheless resulted in the deaths of 40 workers).

Commercial - but not residential - development accelerated rapidly in the early 2000s, when several large office complexes were constructed; this in turn led to the establishment of other businesses, including a Hilton Hotel in 2003.

Bloomfield's vast expanses of open space have made it the focus of many ambitious proposals in the 2000s; the latest involves the possible building of a NASCAR racetrack at the site of the former Gulf Oil facility. But the area has yet to witness the kind of new-home construction that has been encountered virtually everywhere else on Staten Island since the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964.