New York City Farm Colony

In 1670, Native Americans, including the Lenape, ceded all claims to Staten Island to the English in a deed to Governor Francis Lovelace.

In 1671, in order to encourage an expansion of the Dutch settlements, the English resurveyed Oude Dorp (which became known as 'Old Town') and expanded the lots along the shore to the south.

It is estimated that anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Protestants fled France during the wave of persecution that followed the repeal; François was one such refugee who had previously lived in the Dutch farming village of Haarlem with his family.

In 1915, its administration was merged with that of Seaview Hospital, which had been set up with the expressed purpose of treating tuberculosis (it is now a city-run nursing home, under the new name of Sea View Farms).

[3] For several years, the bank robber Willie Sutton, having broken prison in West Philadelphia and returned to his native New York, lived and worked at the Farm Colony, making many friends, and occasionally still carrying out robberies on the side, for which he was eventually recaptured.

[4] Until the 1930s, many if not most of the farm colony's residents were elderly, and at times numbered as many as 2,000; this number steadily declined after the Social Security system was adopted on the federal level in the United States (although noted photographer Alice Austen lived there for a brief period in the early 1950s[5]), and the programs of the Great Society implemented in the 1960s further depleted its ranks, leading to the facility being closed in 1975.