Conference House Park

Conference House Park covers the southern tip of Staten Island, in Tottenville, at the southernmost point of New York State. Its shore faces the Arthur Kill and Raritan Bay, and it holds four historic houses. The oldest is the Conference House, a stone manor built around 1680. There, on September 11, 1776, two months after the Declaration of Independence, the British admiral Lord Howe met Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Edward Rutledge to talk peace. No agreement was reached, and the war went on for seven more years. Long before any of that, the Lenape used the bluff above the water as a seasonal settlement and a burial ground.

For Troop 23 this is a place of service. Each year since 2023 the troop has come here for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, working with NYC Parks and the Conference House Park Conservancy, and in February 2024 it came back for a conservation project.

The map above marks the Visitor Center at 298 Satterlee Street, where the troop meets the park's staff and volunteers before the work starts.

MLK Day of Service

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a federal holiday and a national day of service, and the troop spends it working. NYC Parks and the Conference House Park Conservancy, whose president, Jim Pistilli, hosts the day, decide what the park needs and meet the group with gloves and tools. Scouts, leaders and families do the work.

In 2023 the job was the beach along the Arthur Kill: Scouts picked up the shredded remains of old sandbags that had been left to hold back the waves, then walked the coast collecting trash. In 2024 it was the beach again, with buckets and grabbers in the cold. In 2025 a forecast of four to seven inches of snow put the day off, and the troop came on Saturday, April 5, instead, to clear overgrown plants. In 2026 the snow had already fallen, and the troop spent the morning cutting back brush with loppers near the shore.

The day ends over pizza, by now a tradition of its own. Each year has its own page: 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.

The Bioswale, 2024

In January 2024 John Kilcullen, then the park's director, offered the troop a conservation project. Near the park's pavilion, beside the main path down to the water, stormwater from Hylan Boulevard runs down a stream bed into a newly expanded bioswale, a planted basin that holds the water and lets it soak slowly into the ground, so less of what washes off the road reaches the bay. Wineberry and blackberry had moved in and were crowding out the native wetland grasses and sedges.

On Sunday, February 25, 2024, Scouts and adults cut and dug out the invasive plants to keep the bioswale open, and afterward Mr. Kilcullen walked the group through the park's trees and what each is good for. It was the kind of project the Camping merit badge asks for: conservation work approved by the agency that manages the land. The day is on the Bioswale Service Project page.

Getting There

The Visitor Center is at 298 Satterlee Street, Staten Island, NY 10307, in Tottenville. By train, the Staten Island Railway ends at Tottenville station, a walk of about a mile from the Visitor Center.

From Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge it is about twenty miles by car, across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and down the island. On service days the troop carpools from the OLA parking lot.

The park runs down to the shore, where a striped post that NYC Parks calls the South Pole marks the southernmost point of New York State.

NYC Parks has the park map and directions on its own Conference House Park page. Troop 23 is a Scouts BSA troop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and every family starts the same way: come to a Monday meeting.