This room in one New York Farm Colony building may have been a dining hall. It's connected to three other levels by the kind of dumbwaiter shaft often used to move meals between floors. I visited the campus 26 times between June of 2012 and November of 2020 and took more than 5,700 photographs. A tiny handful are on this website.

In 1829, New York's Richmond County, which comprises Staten Island, established its poor farm here on 96 acres of farm land. For almost 100 years, indigent people who lived here tended the fields and animals to provide food for themselves and other county institutions. In the 1920s, the City of New York took over the site, and the population here began to decline. The entire facility was closed in 1975, and quickly fell into disrepair. According to one story, it became home for a demented killer who victimized Staten Island children. According to latter-day legends, Satanists perform rites in the old buildings.

Over the years, the city peeled off pieces of the property for recreational use including two baseball diamonds and a soccer field. The Farm Colony is now down to 43 acres in the midst of a well-maintained, largely conservative Jewish neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the place has been a playground for vandals, graffiti artists and generations of teens, many of whom crawled in through a recurring hole in the chain link fence on Walcott Avenue. (The city repaired it, the kids snipped it open again.)  A guy who lives across the street said the place draws lots of teens at night, but he does not consider them a problem. In fact, he said, most of the kids are polite. The guy did not believe the stories about satanic rites. There were simply too many kids running around the place for that to happen, he explained.

In January of 2016, the New York City Council sold the remaining Farm Colony to a Staten Island developer named Raymond Masucci for one dollar. Masucci promised to demolish some structures, restore others, and build four six-story apartment buildings and 14 multiple-unit townhouses. The development was to be called Landmark Colony. A stretch of fencing along Brielle Avenue came down as the company moved in construction equipment. But a couple of months later the equipment and workers disappeared.