Bad Perms and Chill Vibes: Photographing Staten Island in the 1980s

The photographer Christine Osinski moved from lower Manhattan to Staten Island, near Snug Harbor, in 1982. She and her husband had just been booted from their loft, which was slated for redevelopment. They decided that they wanted to buy. “We were tired of renovating places,” Osinski says, “just to get thrown out.”

Before embarking on their house hunt, the couple didn’t know much about Staten Island. Arriving in New York from a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, Osinski was intrigued by the pull of the epicenter; she thought of Manhattan as the mainland. For her, Staten Island had been a place to breeze past when Manhattan’s close quarters and scorched sidewalks became insufferable. “We took the ferry a lot in the summer just to cool off,” Osinski says. “We’d go back and forth, back and forth, but never got off.”