STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – Chuck Petersen lived in the Biddle House from about two years old through adulthood.
In his story on the Tottenville Historical Society website and upcoming book, he reminisces about his idyllic days in the old Staten Island, Tottenville neighborhood, painting a picture of a perfect town and beautiful life. Chuck Petersen’s parents, Katherine and A. Charles Petersen, purchased the Biddle House in 1942.
Chuck was about two years old; his sister Janice was born in 1940, and his brother Jack was born in 1927. The Henry Hogg Biddle House, constructed in 1845, is situated within Conference House Park. This park spans 260 acres and encompasses five historic homes.
It extends all the way down to the Raritan Bay and Arthur Kill, as detailed by the Tottenville Historical Society. The house at 70 Satterlee Street is on a hill overlooking the bay. Chuck Petersen mentioned that the house had ten fireplaces as its primary heat source and that there was a well located outside the side door.
Further toward the bay, there stood an outhouse. Inside the outhouse, there were three holes—two of them were higher and larger for adults, while one was lower and smaller for children. After the Petersens bought and almost completely renovated the house, they finally moved in by 1945.
The Petersen family enjoyed living in the Biddle House for nearly the next fifty years. It became known to those in Tottenville not as The Biddle House but as “The Petersen House.” Chuck Petersen spoke of his parents and how they treated the neighbors and cared for each other and the families.
In his book, he explains some of the stories of his father’s kindness. Chuck recalls the years he spent playing in the cupola and the scary day it burned down. It was a frightening moment in the fall of 1962 as he tried to help put out the fire with a household hose.
“The cupola was a great place to go up to inside. It had four sides when you walked up the stairs from the attic and climbed up in there. Of course, one side faced the bay, one side faced toward the ferry that went over to New Jersey, and then one faced the area that would be toward the road.
And my dad had gotten old maps and pictures and that sort of thing, so when you looked out one window, you saw old maps and drawings of what it was like years ago. So it was a great sort of history lesson for a kid like me. I was young, about seven or eight, and my parents would stay close to me.
There was a little ladder up to the top of the cupola and sort of a trap door you could go up and out; there wasn’t any fence around us; you could go up and sit there and dangle your feet, and you felt like you were on top of the world. It was thrilling and scary at the same time because you thought you could fall off.” The cupola was never rebuilt.
The Biddle House was designated a landmark on May 1, 1990. Petersen reminisced that his mother told them, “You don’t want to live here. It’s hard to maintain, and it’s not the most modern house and that sort of thing.
But, boy, we must find a way to preserve it.” “We are really happy it was saved as a historic home. I’m sure it would be now a large development of million-dollar houses overlooking the bay had my father not bought it,” Petersen said.
“When he bought it, people in town said, ‘You’ve got to be crazy. You just bought a haunted house, and it’s not worth keeping,’” Petersen continued. “My father had a couple of people in town who were good, skilled craftsmen, and he put them to work full-time on that house, and then he would work on it himself on weekends and evenings and that sort of thing.
So he proved them wrong, and I’m so glad he did. It was fun growing up there. Quite an experience,” he said.
D. Chuck Petersen’s book, Growing Up in the Historic Biddle House , will be published this fall. The book narrates the stories of family and friends and life at the southern tip of Staten Island, New York.
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