Linoleumville, then Travis
A background paper City Planning wrote in 2001 for the Fresh Kills design competition (About Fresh Kills) says the American Linoleum Company, "the first linoleum factory in the nation," was established north of Fresh Kills in the 1870s. More than 700 people worked there at its height, and the works and workers' housing covered over 300 acres. The settlement kept the name Linoleumville until after the factory closed during the Depression; then it became Travis. A 1994 Landmarks Preservation Commission report (LP-1872) also places the linoleum works in the 1870s and describes Linoleumville as apparently a quasi-company town.
The same paper places the New Blazing Star Ferry and Inn, a stagecoach stop between Manhattan and Philadelphia, at the foot of Victory Boulevard, and records older shops along Victory Boulevard in Travis as of 2001. The name also appears on the city's Community Board 2 roster.
A drainage rebuild finished in 2021
In September 2021 the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Design and Construction announced the completion of a $33.1 million drainage upgrade in the Travis neighborhood, begun in 2018. New storm sewers went in along Victory Boulevard from Baron Boulevard to Glen Street and on parts of Glen Street, Melvin Avenue, Wild Avenue, Parish Avenue, Cannon Avenue, Prices Lane, Burke Avenue, Leroy Street, Meredith Avenue, Simmons Lane and Shelley Avenue. Crews built 90 catch basins, replaced 14 and added seven underground storm chambers; concrete-lined ductile-iron water mains replaced older cast-iron pipe, and some sanitary sewer was replaced.
The work also created a Bluebelt wetland of about one acre beside Cannon Avenue, between Parish Avenue and Prices Lane. Runoff enters through a stilling basin and flows on to Meredith Creek and the Arthur Kill; part of the site is in Meredith Woods Park. DEP's Bluebelt program page covers the island-wide approach.
That release is a 2021 account of work in the street. It never says a house left a septic tank, and it cannot show that a given house is tied into the city sewer. For one address, ask for DEP's connection record and have the house sewer scoped by camera.
Houses on blocks the sales file labels Travis
This page draws its Travis line from the Department of Finance's sales label, an assessment tag rather than an official boundary. Every block with at least one sale labeled Travis, in the annualized sales files for 2016 through 2025 or the rolling sales file for September 2025 through August 2026, comes to 35 blocks. On them PLUTO lists 972 residential lots with 1,316 homes: one-family houses hold 61.5 percent of the homes, two-family houses 19.9 percent, condominiums 14.4 percent and buildings that combine stores and homes 3.0 percent. Of 809 one-family lots, 467 carry DOF's attached or semi-detached class; the other 342 sit in its remaining one-family classes, detached ones among them.
PLUTO gives 18.1 percent of those homes a year before 1940, 13.8 percent 1940 through 1979 and 62.2 percent 1980 or later, with 5.9 percent undated. The pre-war group spans 191 lots, many with round placeholder years, so read it only as built before 1940. A house that old can hide wiring from several eras, cast-iron drains and a capped oil fill pipe.
Flood map counts and what each one counts
Testing each residential lot's center point on the 35 blocks against FEMA's effective National Flood Hazard Layer places 26 lots inside the Special Flood Hazard Area (Zone A holds 14 of them, Zone AE the other 12) and 7 more in shaded Zone X, the 0.2-percent-annual-chance floodplain, a flood hazard in its own right. Counting only blocks with a sale labeled Travis in the rolling file, September 2025 through August 2026, gives 24, 12 in each zone, because the block holding two Wild Avenue lots had no sale in those twelve months.
The counted lots include houses on Burke, Roswell, Alberta, Beresford, Wild and Meredith Avenues, and eleven on Cannon Avenue, the street the wetland runs along; the release does not say the wetland changed any lot's mapped zone. Zone A is drawn without a base flood elevation, so a lender or insurer may ask for an elevation certificate. FEMA's preliminary layer, whose status this page could not confirm, draws 66 lots on those blocks into Zone AE. Each count is a floor, since a yard or a house wall can cross into a zone when the lot's center point does not, and FEMA's map does not show flooding from heavy rain. Pull the panel for the exact lot from the FEMA Flood Map Service Center before signing.
Zoning, landmarks and the gas-piping law
- Zoning Resolution 12-10 places Staten Island's R3 districts in a lower density growth management area, and PLUTO zones most lots on those blocks R3A or R3-2, so an addition starts with those rules; no special zoning district is recorded on the residential lots.
- PLUTO zones at least 173 of the 1,156 lots on the same blocks M1-1, M2-1 or M3-1. Where a house backs onto one, ask how that lot was used; an environmental site assessment is a separate study.
- PLUTO records no individual landmark and no historic district on the residential lots of those blocks.
- Local Law 152 gas-piping checks for Community District 2 come due next in calendar 2029, per the Department of Buildings. One- and two-family homes, occupancy group R-3, are exempt; a building with three or more homes is covered if it has gas piping.
Getting around
The state's station list shows no Staten Island Railway stop named for Travis. DEP notes the wetland can be seen from the West Shore Expressway.
Walking a Travis house
Send a Travis address through the contact page. Both the one-house walkthrough and the version for two-family homes start out from East New York, can be held in Bangla or English, and finish with a written report that same day.