Old Town (Staten Island Railway station)

Old Town is a Staten Island Railway station in the neighborhood of Old Town, Staten Island, New York.

Station layout

The station opened between the years of 1937 and 1939. The original name of the station was "Old Town Road;" the "Road" was dropped soon after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority assumed control of the Staten Island Railway from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1971 (the MTA concurrently shortened the name of the Huguenot Park station to simply "Huguenot").

The station is located on an embankment at Railroad Avenue on the main line. It has two side platforms, and metal orange canopies and walls. The exit at the south end leads to Old Town Road while an additional staircase at the north end of the northbound platform leads to a roadway to Dawson Place and Oregon Road, and is used most heavily by students from the adjacent Academy of St. Dorothy, a Roman Catholic elementary school. Just north of this station, a spur that had multiple purposes and served the press building of the Staten Island Advance newspaper is nowadays used as a storage spur for ballast cars.

Dirty Old Town

"Dirty Old Town" is a British song written by Ewan MacColl in 1949 that was made popular by The Dubliners and has been recorded by many others since.

History

The song was written about Salford, Greater Manchester, England, the town where MacColl was born and brought up. It was originally composed for an interlude to cover an awkward scene change in his 1949 play Landscape with Chimneys, set in a North of England industrial town, but with the growing popularity of folk music the song became a standard. The first verse refers to the Gasworks croft, which was a piece of open land adjacent to the Gasworks 53°28′50″N 2°16′36″W / 53.4806°N 2.2768°W / 53.4806; -2.2768, and then speaks of the old canal, which was the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal. The line in the original version about smelling a spring on “the Salford wind” is sometimes sung as “the sulphured wind”. But in any case, most singers tend to drop the Salford reference altogether, in favour of calling the wind “smoky”. Thanks to Luke Kelly, the Pogues, U2, and others Dirty Old Town has all but taken out Irish citizenship in the years since it was written and has allowed the song to be unofficially adopted by Dublin.

Dirty Old Town (film)

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists: Dirty Old Town is a 2003 concert film by director Justin Mitchell documenting a day in the life of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists on Coney Island. The bulk of the footage is of the band's energetic performance at the Siren Music Festival, interspersed with interviews, boardwalk montages, and a cameo by comedian David Cross. This film is named after the old Ewan MacColl song "Dirty Old Town"; Leo performs a live cover of this song at the beginning of the movie.

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