Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Good Ol' Linoleumville


The town of Travis was originally named Long Neck. This was it's first name. But after a factory called The American Linoleum Manufacturing Company claimed its home in then's Travisville in 1873, the town became Linoleumville. It was right then and there that it became New York's worse neighborhood name, ever. At the time, 2/3 of that area was employed by the company and the area was booming. The factory was the first of its kind in America at the time it opened and took up 300 - acres of land in Travis. The area at the time, was undeveloped, so the started to build houses for workers and in less then 10 years it was a community complete with a Ferry.  This was only one area to be named after a factory on the island, Kreischerville now known as Charelston was named after a  brick factory.
  
 The factory closed its doors in 1931 and left a vast amount of people unemployed. After its closing there was a town meeting held where people would decide the fate of the towns name. They would vote on either a new name or to keep the old one. The die hards wanted to keep the name of Linoleumville arguing that it was a piece of Staten Island History. In all 4 people voted to retain this name. More then 300 people decided on Travis. This situation was written about in the magazine Time. Follow this link to read it TIME MAG
This is a short post because there is not much more to be said about Travis once called Linoleumville, it was a short lived era on Staten Island and often forgotten by residents. I am going to do a separate post on Travis because as a town Travis has some info to offer, but thats another story.