St. George / Stapleton

A Victorian Gothic cottage on the shore at Rosebank where Alice Austen lived and made around eight thousand photographs of New York between the 1880s and the 1930s. The house shows her work and tells her story, including the decades she spent there with Gertrude Tate. The lawn runs down to the water with the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge on one side and Lower Manhattan on the other, and the grounds are free and open even when the house is not.

House, Tue to Sun, 11am to 5pm, closed Monday. Grounds open daily until dusk. Admission suggested at five dollars, three for students and seniors, free under twelve

A Dominican kitchen on Bay Street two minutes from the Stapleton waterfront, doing yaroa, quipes, empanadas, patacón and homestyle plates. It opens at ten in the morning and runs to ten at night, midnight on Friday and Saturday, which on this stretch of Bay Street is the longest day anyone keeps. It is counter food eaten at a handful of tables.

Sun to Thu, 10am to 10pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to midnight

A small independent coffee bar in a Bay Street storefront a few blocks up from the Stapleton waterfront, doing espresso drinks, matcha, sandwiches and doughnuts. The specialty lattes top out around five dollars, which is the giveaway that it is built for people who live on the block rather than for anyone off the ferry. It is a daytime operation and it shuts in the afternoon.

Mon and Tue, 8am to 4pm. Thu, 8am to 4pm. Fri and Sat, 9am to 5pm. Sun, 9am to 4pm. Closed Wednesday

The only used bookshop on Staten Island, spread through the ground floor of a Bay Street building with cafe tables in among the shelves and a garden out the back. You can play the 33s and 45s on a turntable. The 78s are there too. Fair-trade coffee sits near house plants and a ten-for-ten-dollars CD bin. It is run by the Ganas community, which has been on the island since the 1970s, and the same space puts on poetry readings and open mics. Film screenings use it too.

Wed to Sat, noon to 6pm, later on event nights. Closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday

A taproom in a Tompkinsville warehouse with twelve of its own beers on, plus cocktails and Fort Hamilton whiskey for anyone who does not want beer. There is no kitchen, so the house policy is that you order food in from whatever is nearby and eat it at the table. Children are allowed in before 9pm and so are dogs.

Wed, 5pm to 11pm. Thu to Sat, noon to midnight. Sun, noon to 8pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday

A Sri Lankan dining hall on Bay Street fitted out with carved wood, brass and statuary that the family brought over themselves, which makes the inside look nothing like the block it sits on. The weekend buffet runs from half twelve to half nine and is served on a banana leaf. On weekdays it is a menu operation with a lunch and a dinner service and a break in the middle.

Tue to Fri, noon to 3pm and 5pm to 9pm. Sat and Sun, 12:30pm to 9:30pm. Closed Monday

A narrow shop on Victory Boulevard stocking the Sri Lankan side of Tompkinsville: teas, curry powders and spices, fresh produce you will not find in a supermarket beside clay cooking pots. A rack holds Sinhala-language newspapers and CDs. Tompkinsville holds the largest Sri Lankan population in the United States and this is one of the two groceries that serves it. It is a shop rather than a kitchen, so it is a ten-minute errand and not a sit-down.

Daily, roughly 9am to 9pm. The shop posts no hours of its own and the figure is from listings, so it is flagged as unverified

A small kitchen on Targee Street run by Mona with her granddaughter helping, cooking West African food alongside Jamaican plates. Jerk chicken and oxtail are on the menu. So are rice and beans. Fried plantain with smoked turkey and spinach comes in portions that feel closer to a home kitchen than a restaurant. It opens at half twelve and closes at six, Tuesday to Saturday, and there are only a few seats.

Tue to Sat, 12:30pm to 6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday

A counter on Victory Boulevard where you point at the trays of curries behind the glass and they build a plate. It opened in 1999 and is a fixture among the Sri Lankan places in Tompkinsville, which holds the largest Sri Lankan community in the United States. There are a handful of tables, no license and no ceremony.

Mon, 10am to 8pm. Wed to Sun, 10am to 8pm. Closed Tuesday

Two white wings forty feet high standing on the esplanade just north of the ferry terminal, facing the gap in the Lower Manhattan skyline. Inside them are 274 plaques, one for each Staten Island resident killed on September 11, 2001 and in the 1993 bombing, each carrying a name and birthday. A job and profile silhouette complete each plaque. It was designed by Masayuki Sono, who won an open competition in 2003, and dedicated on the third anniversary. The esplanade it sits on runs along the harbor past the ballpark and is open and free.

Outdoor and publicly accessible. The esplanade is a city waterfront walk with no gate and no admission

The square that Stapleton is built around, two blocks of grass and plane trees with Edgewater Village Hall standing in the middle of it. The hall went up in 1889 for the Village of Edgewater, which is what this part of the island was before the city absorbed it, and it is a designated landmark. There are benches, a playground at the Canal Street end and a war memorial, and on a weekday afternoon it is mostly people cutting through and sitting.

Open daily, 6am to 1am as a city park

A small cocktail bar a few doors down the same block, open six in the evening until four in the morning seven days a week including holidays. Drinks are discounted between six and nine. New York Magazine called it the best bar on Staten Island, which has not turned it into somewhere you need a plan to get into.

Daily, 6pm to 4am. Discounted cocktails 6pm to 9pm

Twenty taps and a long can list in the Van Duzer Street storefront that used to be Martini Red, with Skee-Ball and arcade cabinets along one wall and growlers to fill on the way out. The kitchen runs pizza, wings and burgers until late. It is open until four in the morning every night of the week, which is unusual anywhere and almost unheard of on this island.

Mon to Thu, noon to 4am. Fri to Sun, 11am to 4am