Neuropathy Doctor in Great Kills, NY

The eastern half of what has been known since 1865 as Great Kills was originally named Clarendon after a British colonial governor, and the western half was named Newtown. For a time, both were known as Giffords, after Daniel Gifford, a local commissioner and surveyor. The name survives in Giffords Lane and Giffords Glen, which are adjacent to the Great Kills train station that was formerly named Giffords, and also in the Gifford School, P.S. 32. The term “Great Kills” traces back informally at least to 1664, the final year of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, when French settler Jacques Guyon called the area “La Grand Kills”.

From the 1680s when English colonial government was organized, until 1898 when Staten Island consolidated into New York City, eastern Great Kills was officially part of the town of Southfield, Staten Island, New York, and western Great Kills was officially part of Westfield. Great Kills and Staten Island’s other East Shore neighborhoods were mostly rural and dotted with shoreline resorts until the 1950s, after which the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge brought heavy residential growth from Brooklyn.

The 17th-century Poillon-Seguine-Britton House near Great Kills Harbor was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, but was burned in 1989 and demolished in 1996. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics selected what is now Great Kills Park as a “Historic Aerospace Site” in 2006, to commemorate a pioneering rocket launch in 1933.