Things to do on Staten Island once you get off the ferry

The Staten Island Ferry runs between Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan and St. George on Staten Island, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, year-round, and it is free. Not discounted, not free with a transfer. Free. Weekday rush hours, roughly 6 to 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 to 8 p.m., get boats every 15 to 20 minutes; Saturday and Sunday service runs every 30 minutes. Bicycles ride free as well, boarding on the lower level at both terminals. If someone near Whitehall tries to sell you a ferry ticket, walk away. There are no tickets to sell.

The standard advice is to ride out, photograph the Statue of Liberty off the starboard rail, and board the next boat back. The view is genuinely good and the round trip costs you nothing but an hour. It also leaves you exactly where you started. What that advice skips is that the free boat lands you in a borough with a botanical garden, a restored village of 18th and 19th century buildings, more than 35 miles of marked hiking trail, a 2.5-mile boardwalk, and a former landfill being rebuilt as a park nearly three times the size of Central Park.

St. George Terminal is a transit hub, not a dead end. The Staten Island Railway platforms are inside the building. Bus ramps for most of the borough are attached to it. Everything below is reachable from that one room, and the two things closest to it are free and take under an hour combined.

Snug Harbor is the reason to come, and it is about two miles west of the terminal on Richmond Terrace. Take the S40 bus from Ramp D at the ferry terminal. The site was built in the 1830s as a retirement home for merchant sailors, which is why the front row along Richmond Terrace is five Greek Revival temple fronts in a line rather than anything you would expect from a cultural campus.

Take the S74 bus from the ferry to reach Historic Richmond Town at 441 Clarke Avenue, in the middle of the island. Budget the travel time honestly: the site tells visitors to expect around 90 minutes each way from midtown Manhattan by ferry and bus. The grounds are open dawn to dusk daily and cost nothing to walk. The museum and the historic buildings run on a shorter schedule, Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m., with guided tours at 2 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and at 1:30 and 3 p.m. on weekends. Admission is $8 adults, $6 seniors and students 12 to 17, $5 children 4 to 11. Monday and Tuesday it is closed, which catches people out.

Richmond Town sits at the southern edge of the Greenbelt, and the two work well as one trip. The Greenbelt's marked trails run roughly 35 miles in total: the Blue Trail at 12.3 miles, the Yellow at 8, the White at 7.6, the Red as a 4-mile loop, plus a 1-mile Nature Center Trail and a flat 2.6-mile multipurpose trail where bikes are allowed. The Blue and White are rated easy to moderate; the Yellow is the hard one, moderate to difficult. Moses' Mountain, a hill made from fill excavated for a highway that was never built, sits off the Yellow Trail near Rockland Avenue by High Rock Park, and gives you the best interior view of the island. Trails are free. Carry a map or a downloaded track, because the color blazes cross each other repeatedly and cell reception under the canopy is unreliable.

The Staten Island Railway runs from St. George to Tottenville, 24 stations, and it is the fastest way down the east and south shores. The fare is the standard transit fare, paid by tapping a contactless card, phone, or OMNY card at the station. Once you are on it, the ride is above ground almost the whole way and gives you a running look at the neighborhoods most visitors never see.

Ride to the end of the line for Conference House Park, 265 acres at the southernmost point of New York State. The Conference House itself is a stone manor from around 1680 and the site of the failed peace conference of September 11, 1776, where Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge met Admiral Richard Howe and got nowhere. House tours run weekends only, 12 to 4 p.m., leaving at 12, 1, 2, and 3, and cost $4 for adults and $3 for seniors and students. The park itself, its trails, and its view over Raritan Bay are free and open regardless. From the Tottenville station it is about a 15-minute walk: south on Main Street, right on Craig Avenue, right on Hylan Boulevard, left on Satterlee Street.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Boardwalk runs 2.5 miles along the east shore from Fort Wadsworth to Miller Field, connecting South Beach and Midland Beach. It is a boardwalk without a boardwalk economy attached, which means it is quiet on a weekday and you can actually see the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge filling the sky at the north end. Swimming is only permitted when lifeguards are on duty, which is a seasonal schedule set by NYC Parks; check the Parks site for the current dates before you plan a swim rather than a walk. Off season it is still one of the better long flat walks in the city.

Freshkills is the strangest thing on Staten Island and worth understanding even if you only see part of it. It is 2,200 acres, nearly three times Central Park, built on top of what was the city's landfill, and it is the largest park developed in New York City in over a century. It is being opened in phases from the edges inward, with full completion targeted for 2036.

What you can visit today without booking anything: Schmul Park, redesigned in 2012; the Owl Hollow soccer fields, opened in 2013; the New Springville Greenway near the Staten Island Mall, opened in 2015; and North Park Phase 1, opened in 2023, which is the piece that actually gets you up onto the capped mounds with views over the wetlands. Most of the remaining site is still closed to the public and only accessible through scheduled tours and events. Those are listed on the park's own site, they fill up, and they are the only legitimate way onto the rest of the site.