Somewhere Diedrich Knickerbocker Rolls In His Grave

And they try to act like Staten Island is the forgotten borough:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg tripped yesterday over the old chestnut about how Staten Island became a part of New York City, instead of New Jersey.

Speaking at a news conference in Brooklyn, Hizzoner — originally from Massachusetts — mixed in a little mythology with his New York history.

Trailing off on a tangent about the origins of the Island, Bloomberg told the crowd that in the late 1600s, a governor used a boat race to settle a dispute over whether Staten Island should be part of New York or New Jersey.

“He set up a race — I forget whether it was rowing or sailing — around Staten Island, and New York won,” Bloomberg said. “And so we’ve got the great borough of Staten Island as part of New York rather than part of New Jersey.”

But the story is purely apocryphal.

“It is absolutely a myth,” said Carlotta DeFillo, librarian at the Staten Island Historical Society. “It is a lovely, persistent myth, but it is a myth.” Ms. DeFillo said the origin of the oft-repeated legend is unclear, but it has been traced as far back as The New York Evening Post in 1873 and has popped up in other written histories since then.