The Farm Colony.
It sounds remote. It is remote, so distant from the rest of New York City in its wooded isolation at the center of Staten Island that the bank robber Willie Sutton was able to work there quietly — hiding in plain sight — for a few years after a 1947 prison break. As a city employee, at that.
It is so remote that it was forgotten by just about everyone after it closed as a home for the aged poor in 1975; everyone, that is, except Staten Islanders who chafed while the abandoned 96-acre campus, officially part of the New York City Farm Colony-Seaview Hospital Historic District, fell into hopeless disrepair.
On January 19, 2016, the City Council approved a plan by the New York City Economic Development Corporation to sell 45 acres of the Farm Colony parcel to Raymond Masucci, a Staten Island developer, for $1.
At a cost of about $91 million, Mr. Masucci would rehabilitate five remaining buildings on the site, tear down five others and preserve a 112-year-old men’s dormitory as a stabilized ruin.
He would also construct three six-story apartment buildings and 14 multiple-unit townhouses, some with built-in garages, for a total of 344 condominiums. They would start opening next year.