Some Of My Best Presidents Are Black

Residents of Rosebank in Staten Island insist that the neighborhood is no longer racist:

When Moe Wilson was growing up in Stapleton in the early 1980s, he and his friends wouldn’t venture far into Rosebank, or, as some of the locals called it, “No n — — – Land.”

A tree carving, the “n word” with a line through it, served as a warning in the scrub around the train tracks, not far from what is now the Waldbaums on Tompkins and Lynhurst avenues.

“You couldn’t go past so you didn’t take a chance,” Wilson said, notwithstanding his adolescent sorties past the neighborhood boundary. He was beaten up and hit with sticks, he remembered. “You had white families living in Stapleton, but there were no blacks living over there.”

He added, “It made me feel bad, of course, but that was how it was.”

Times have changed since then, but the Election night hate spree allegedly carried out by a group of young men who nicknamed themselves the “Rosebank Krew” has brought back the specter of the bad old days.

. . .

Rosebank residents approached yesterday were similarly keen to disown the teens, many of them emphatically pointing out that only one technically lives within the confines of the neighborhood.

Although federal authorities allege they kept a “makeshift outdoor clubhouse” in Rosebank, only one of the four, 18-year-old Bryan Garaventa, hails from the neighborhood, on Maryland Avenue. He already has pleaded guilty to federal charges, and is awaiting sentencing.

Two others, Ralph Nicoletti and Michael Contreras, both 18, live in Fort Wadsworth — Nicoletti on Wadsworth Avenue and Contreras on Judith Court. And the fourth, 21-year-old Brian Carranza, lives on Simonson Place in Port Richmond.

“They’re from Fort Wadsworth. They’re not even from Rosebank, and there’s the Spanish kid from Port Richmond,” said one lifelong Rosebank resident, somewhat inaccurately, as he stood in what he called the “heart of Rosebank” at the corner of Tompkins and Virginia avenues, near the Rosebank Boys Social Club and across the street from the Rosebank Deli.

“But everybody wants to look down on Rosebank,” he said.

The fortysomething man, wearing a thick, gold cross on a chain around his neck and jangling a key chain decorated with a plastic Italian flag, would not give his name because “people from the neighborhood, they don’t do that, there’s a code.”

Even so, he was eager to speak his mind: “Rosebank has changed. You can walk up and down the block and everywhere you will see blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Indians,” he said gesturing at the apartment above the social club and saying an African-American family lives there. “It used to be, out of respect, nobody came into our neighborhood and we didn’t go into their neighborhood. Now my son goes to a Catholic school in Stapleton, and you know who comes to my home to play? Black kids. You’ve got to go with the times. They change. I think Obama is good for the country.”