“The Summer of the Paymaster” (1990) by Alfred Nielsen is an extraordinary novel about a group of Annadale boys coming of age in the unspoiled and pre-bridge Staten Island of the early 1960s and growing to manhood during the turbulence of the Vietnam War and the counterculture of the later years of the decade. The author deftly intertwines the boys’ loss of childhood innocence with the post-bridge destruction of their idyllic South Shore woodlands.
Touchstone events and cultural markers include the cicada-filled summer of 1961; the 1963 Rossville fire; pre-Vatican II Catholic life at the old Our Lady Star of the Sea. The book offers generous descriptions of Al Deppe’s, the Saturday afternoon auctions on Richmond Avenue, many long-gone taverns and restaurants and life amidst the growing landfill and rampant overdevelopment.
Their lives changed practically overnight when the boys noticed construction vehicles and mounds of dirt in the woods where they played. They were told that the “bridge to Brooklyn is going up” and everything was going to change. “More and more houses had been built every year. Open fields became developments overnight. Long stretches of woods were leveled in a twinkling. New roads crisscrossed where there had been none.” As the 60s progressed, Staten Island had changed into “…something foreign, something uncomfortable, a new place that gluttonously chewed and swallowed memories,” where the “sacred places of boyhood” were all fast disappearing.
In addition to the universal human themes, it is a novel of unique physical and cultural dispossession- the deluge of outsiders and overdevelopment via the Verrazano Bridge. When the boys see the growing graffiti and vandalism in their neighborhood, it is observed that it “…was no longer a town circle. It was a sad and abused place, not a place to be proud of. Many of the people who lived here now had arrived from elsewhere and had no idea of how precious a place it had been. They had no idea what had been destroyed.”
Although reviewed very positively by the New York Times (11/18/1990) and other publications, this was the only book ever published by the author who was, at the time, a 43 year old Poughkeepsie health inspector. In a profile of Nielsen (12/18/1990) the Times expected to eventually see additional work from the successful author, but he hasn’t been heard from since.
Staten Island in Fiction 