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Despite its current somewhat maligned reputation among the five boroughs of the New Yor City, Staten Island has long been prized for the beauty of its natural areas. Although evidence of agriculture by American Indians dates from 3000 BCE, at the time European colonization in the 17th Century, the island was still largely woodlands. Extensive clearing of the lands along the south shore began with the first Dutch farming settlements in the late 1660s. In the following decades, after the takeover of the colony by the English, the island was subdivided into farming lots and manorial estates, resulting in a further advanced of cleared areas in the lowland regions.
The most radical change of the island was arguably during the American Revolution, when the island underwent extensive deforestation to supply the needs of the British troops that were garrisoned on the island from summer 1776 until after the end of the war in 1783.
During the 19th Century, industrial areas and population centers of the island grew along the Kill Van Kull and the harbor, but the much of the island remained largely rural in character. Woodland areas remained in unfarmable areas on the central ridge in wetlands.
The island was visited by the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who lived on the island from 1843 to 1844. Thoreau made observation of the local landscape and experimented with trees. He published his some of observations of the island's natural history in an essay called A Winter's Walk in October 1843.[1]
In 1848, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park acquired an estate on the island and promoted agricultural reform among his neighbors.[1]
The movement to preserve the land that has eventually become the Greenbelt dates for the construction of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which was completed in 1964. The master plan for the island and conceived by New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses called for a large network of freeways. The subsequent construction of the Staten Island Expressway resulted in a large-scale demolition of entire hillsides and the destruction of many wooded areas. Moreover the construction of the bridge allowed a rapid expansion of suburbanized development in the late 1960s, especially along the island's south shore.
History
Before the Bridge
After the Bridge