Exalted Views, Down-to-Earth Prices

AS Fitzgerald might have said, people who live on hills are different from you and me. From Murray Hill to Carnegie Hill in Manhattan, from Brooklyn Heights to Park Slope in Brooklyn, New Yorkers with cash to spend have long sought the high ground. In Staten Island, Todt Hill is a coveted area, as are Grymes Hill and Dongan Hills Colony. But for all its elevation, Ward Hill, on the island’s north shore, has managed to remain below the radar.

“It’s a very secret enclave,” said Estelle Karp, a sales agent with Coldwell Banker Hometime Realty, who has lived on the island for 33 years. “Very few people on Staten Island have ever been there or even heard of it.”
One Staten Islander who made the ascent, and was suitably impressed by the panoramic views she found there, was Muthoo Neravanda, who manages the Brooklyn office of her physician husband, Medappa.
In the late 1980s, the Neravandas, who lived in Dongan Hills, attended a dinner party at a friend’s home on Nixon Avenue in Ward Hill.
“It was awe-inspiring,” Ms. Neravanda said of the vista of Lower Manhattan and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge out her friend’s window. “It was, ‘Oh my God.’ The house was built into the hill, so as you enter you see the expanse of the bridge, and New York City, too.”
The image never left her, and over the next decade and a half, whenever Ms. Neravanda was in the area, she would drive up Ward Hill to admire the views and, she said, “just dream.”
Finally, in 2004, after both their children had grown up, the Neravandas bought a two-bedroom midcentury cottage on Tompkins Circle in Ward Hill, with sweeping views of the Staten Island and Brooklyn waterfronts and the serene blue band of water in between, from the lower part of Upper New York Bay, past the majestic span of the Verrazano and out to the open sea.
They didn’t move in until just this month, having provided the house as a home for their grown daughter and niece for several years.
Now the home has been thoroughly renovated, and the elder Neravandas have the daily pleasure of watching the languorous parade of ships making their way into New York Harbor in what, from this tranquil overlook, seems slow motion.
“Each day it’s different,” Ms. Neravanda said of the view. “One day the whole Narrows was full of mist and the whole bridge was missing, so it was the way it must have looked before the bridge was built, eerie but beautiful.”
As with many houses in Ward Hill, a large proportion of which date to the early decades of the last century, little work had been done on the Neravandas’ home since its construction. It seemed due for a face-lift.
On the outside, the couple transformed it into an angular contemporary. On the inside they added a bedroom to accommodate visiting children and grandchildren.
Although Ms. Neravanda would not disclose the cost of the house or its renovation, real estate records show that a renovated five-bedroom house next door sold last month for $725,000.
WHAT YOU’LL FIND
Many homes have remained in the same families for decades, but as longtime residents either retire away or pass away, Ward Hill has been enjoying an infusion of new residents from all walks of life.
“It’s a real eclectic mix of people, with a lot of artsy people moving in,” said Jody Scaravella, a restaurateur who lives in a renovated Dutch colonial down the block from the Neravandas. “It’s not a boring, homogeneous zone.”
In a terraced garden behind his house, Mr. Scaravella grows produce for Enoteca Maria, the Italian restaurant he owns in nearby St. George. While tending his zucchini in the summer, he said, he is occasionally able to hear live rock music being performed by talented bands at the homes of neighbors who work in the music industry. At other times he hears only the singing of birds.
“Urban bucolic” is how Joseph Carroll, the district manager of Community Board 1, described the area, adding that “it’s economically singular but ethnically diverse.” The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, based on samples from 2005 to 2009, estimated that residents in the area of Ward Hill and adjacent streets were 41 percent Hispanic, 29 percent white, 12 percent Asian and 8 percent black.
The neighborhood was named for Caleb T. Ward, who around 1835 built a monumental porticoed mansion on the crest of a hill 200 feet above sea level. The house, according to its city landmark designation report, is one of the finest examples of Greek Revival architecture in the five boroughs and one of the last great houses remaining from a time when Staten Island’s north shore was a resort for wealthy New Yorkers.