A crossing that predates the village
The Landmarks Preservation Commission's report on a Bay Street house records "regular steamboat ferry service in 1817 between Tompkinsville (laid out by Daniel Tompkins between 1819 and 1821) and lower Manhattan" (LP-1217). Today NYC DOT describes the Staten Island Ferry as a free, year-round service between Staten Island and Lower Manhattan, and the railway through Tompkinsville ends at St. George. Two centuries on, the question for a buyer is less romantic: what a house here has been through, and what the rules around it now allow.
The station at street level
Tompkinsville has a Staten Island Railway station of its own name. The state's station dataset records it as at grade, lists its northbound direction as "Ferry," and does not flag it as ADA accessible. Treat that flag as a starting point and confirm with the MTA. The station point falls in ZIP code tabulation area 10301.
Houses in the census tables
Tompkinsville and Stapleton share one official neighborhood area, Tompkinsville-Stapleton-Clifton-Fox Hills, and its tax-lot breakdown appears on the Stapleton page. The census tables for ZIP code tabulation area 10301, which also takes in St. George, add a second view. About three in ten homes there are free-standing single houses (29.9 percent) and about 19.0 percent are in two-unit buildings, according to the units-in-structure table. Close to two in five, 38.8 percent, went up by 1939 (year-built table), and owners live in 45.8 percent of occupied homes (tenure table). These five-year census estimates for 2020-2024 carry margins of error, so read each share as approximate.
A prewar two-family house raises its own set of questions. Does the certificate of occupancy match the number of kitchens and meters you see? Is each unit heated by its own system, or does one boiler serve both floors with a single thermostat? Does a shared stair give the upper unit a second way out? What separates the units: plaster and lath, or a rated assembly? And on the exterior, how many layers of siding hide the original clapboard, and what has moisture done to the sheathing behind them?
Two rules with narrow reach
The Local Law 152 gas-piping cycle skips one- and two-family homes; a three-family building in Community District 1 comes up in calendar 2028. The city's basement-apartment law, Local Law 126 of 2024, draws its program map without any Staten Island district, and its rules were still at the proposal stage in September 2026.
The corridor rezoning and a rule it switched off
The Department of City Planning's Bay Street Corridor plan page says the City Council voted to approve the plan on June 26, 2019. The page says the corridor had been "zoned for manufacturing uses since 1961," names Tompkinsville Park as one of its two ends, and describes replacing "an existing M1-1 manufacturing zoning district," with the aim to "connect the existing mixed-use town centers of St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton." Section 135-041 of the Zoning Resolution then strips every district inside the new special district out of the island's growth-management rules, the set that section 12-10 otherwise attaches to Staten Island's lower-density zoning.
A buyer with a house close to the corridor should read the district map for the lots next door as well as their own, because the corridor's zoning governs what can be built on them. The hillside district, a separate special district written for steep ground, also has mapped territory inside the same official area; ZoLa tells you, address by address, whether a lot falls in it.
Two landmarks that carry the name
Public School 15, the Daniel D. Tompkins School, was designated first, on November 19, 1996; its report gives the address as 98 Grant Street, also known as 149 St. Paul's Avenue, "Tompkinsville, Staten Island." The Tompkinsville (Joseph H. Lyons) Pool followed on September 16, 2008. Both are public buildings, and an individual designation covers the landmark's own site rather than the houses around it.
Water above and below the street
On FEMA's current flood maps, the VE coastal high-hazard zone and AE zones sit along the shoreline of the city's Tompkinsville-Stapleton-Clifton-Fox Hills area, and Zone X appears in shaded and unshaded forms; the shaded kind is the 500-year floodplain, and neither kind rules out water reaching a house. The preliminary maps return the same zones plus an open-water polygon, a reminder that a zone touching an official area can sit at or beyond the shoreline. The Sandy inundation layer the city publishes on NYC Open Data reaches inside the same area. None of that settles a single lot, so pull yours up through FEMA's Map Service Center.
On sewers, the sourced facts are borough-wide or north-shore-wide. A June 2010 DEP release said "Staten Island lacks storm and even sanitary sewers in some areas," and the department's plant listing gives the Port Richmond plant the island's northern section as its drainage area. Both describe large areas, one of them from 2010, and neither proves a specific house is connected. A camera pushed through the lateral, plus a look for a backwater valve, settles what the paperwork cannot.
Next step
Walkthroughs are available in English or Bangla, with the report delivered the same day. Get in touch with a Tompkinsville address, or read what a two- or three-family walkthrough includes.