The dominance of one ethnic group does, of course, create tensions. "You've got the same people representing you in Congress over and over again, and when it does change, they're usually replaced with another Italian person," the schoolteacher Earnestine Lannigan says. "If Susan Molinari wants to run for borough president, all she has to do is put her name on the ballot, no advertising, and she'll win. Everything is Italian here. And Staten Island protects Staten Island, keeps everything inside. The attitude is, you have to keep all of your business in the family. If there's violence or discrimination and other problems, well, just look the other way -- it doesn't happen here."

Staten islanders mostly chuckle when they are reminded that to outsiders, the island is known mostly for the dump, the odorous Fresh Kills Landfill, which is scheduled to be shut down on New Year's Eve in 2001. Kill is Dutch for "river," and the area where the dump is located was once a series of tributaries that one 72-year-old man told me he used to go canoeing in, back in the fifties. Now the largest landfill in the world, at 4.5 square miles, it is a landscape that harbors its own myths and fascination. "You know, they say that it's one of the few things that can be seen from outer space," Paulie Dapolito tells me as we sit around the dinner table, "like the Great Wall of China." The dump offers a bizarre backdrop to the splashy and flashy goings-on. On Staten Island, the landfill, piling higher and higher every day -- and soon to surpass Todt Hill itself -- is often visible on the horizon. And if you can't see it, you can smell it. It sits almost in the middle of the island. Omnipresent though it is, people still try to avoid it at all costs.

"I don't like to come down this way," a short, plump woman in a green velour sweatsuit tells me one morning as she hurries toward her navy-blue Town Car outside the Department of Motor Vehicles in the area known as Travis, on the West Shore. She has a cigarette perched between her long red fingernails. And a necklace she is wearing that spells out her name in several carats of diamonds -- TERESA -- is glittering in the sunlight, as is her platinum hair. "It's very creepy down here," she says, and on that we concur.

The DMV is an isolated square white cinder-block building that sits almost at the end of Victory Boulevard on one side of the landfill, which towers behind it in the distance. From far off, the landfill looks like a couple of benign, even inviting, high grassy hills; you wouldn't know what was on the other side if not for the thousands of birds buzzing around the top. To the right of the DMV, across the West Shore Expressway, is a huge Con Edison plant with several smokestacks belching out clouds. And to the DMV's left is the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge, 375 acres of protected wetlands that surreally sit at the edge of the landfill. "Between the dump and the Con Ed plant," says the velour-clad woman, "what the hell kind of wildlife do you think is in there?"

The dump isn't the only anomaly that Staten Islanders often appear not to notice. There are more structures from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries here than anywhere else in the city, and most residents (including me while I was growing up) know little about them. On Staten Island, people in Jaguars and Mercedes Sports whiz past Revolutionary War conference houses and nineteenth-century Edwardian villas on their way to a pizza joint in a strip mall.

An entire eighteenth-century village, Historic Richmond Town, lies nearly intact in the valley at the base of winding Snake Hill Road, complete with a church graveyard with tombstones from the 1700s. Sandy Ground still sits near Prince's Bay, a community settled in the mid-1800s by freed black slaves, as Staten Island was home to some of the nation's leading abolitionists. In the Prince's Bay section of the island, at the end of a block of suburban tract homes of the type that dominates the island's South Shore, is a simple Cyclone-fence gate that opens up to the 27-acre nineteenth-century estate where 70-year-old George Burke, a retired interior designer, lives. Several dozen peacocks strut across the grounds, which include stables and caretakers' quarters. The main house, a sixteen-room Greek-revival mansion built in 1837, looks out across the bay to the Atlantic highlands of New Jersey. The estate once encompassed hundreds more acres, where all the tract housing surrounding it now sits.

"When I bought the house, it was a disaster, totally uninhabitable," explains Burke. "This is the fifth house I've restored." He and I and his protégé, my cousin Joann's designer, John LaPolla, are chatting in one of Burke's many sitting rooms, which are decorated with elaborate Edwardian, Victorian, Empire, and French Provincial furnishings.

The Burke-Seguine House, as it is now called, was owned by the French Huguenot Seguine family, who were one of the prominent Staten Island families of the 1700s and 1800s, along with the Astors and the Vanderbilts; they operated a world-renowned oyster farm on the bay. "As a kid, I grew up with the two Seguine girls," Burke tells me, explaining that he was raised in nearby Annadale, now an area of detached suburban homes that back then was mostly forest. "We used to have all our big horse shows here -- back then, everyone out here had horses. I used to ride out here and used to say to Mrs. Seguine, 'One day I'm going to own your house.' And she used to say, 'No, no, no. We built it, and for seven generations we've owned it. It's going to go to the girls.' Well, of course, the girls got married and moved away."