Though my work over the past several decades has turned me into something of a world citizen, I've never thought of myself as anything but a New Yorker - despite the fact that for the past thirty years I've chosen to live here in the "forgotten borough." Perhaps it's because I was born and raised in the cosmopolitan sections of Manhattan: Greenwich Village, the upper West Side. But I trace it to my parents' broad-mindedness, which echoed the diversity I saw for myself in the streets of this city. It seemed as if there was always room enough here for everybody from everywhere - which meant that there was room enough here for me.

I spent the middle of the Sixties in San Francisco, going to graduate school and playing rock & roll. By the time I came back, Manhattan rents had started to get pricey; nothing like they are today, of course, but neither was my income. The late Robert Stock, a poet I'd gotten to know in the Bay Area, had moved back east just before me; Bob had a big family and no money, and a genius for finding cheap living space. He and his wife had rented some sprawling, run-down former Vanderbilt family mansion out here, which seemed always filled to overflowing with a shifting crowd of visiting poets, musicians, painters and other creative types, many of whom were also residing nearby.

It was enough to persuade my first wife and I that, if we came out here to live, we wouldn't entirely lack for company. She was already pregnant with our son; the anticipatory baby clothes were beginning to crowd our tiny one-bedroom on West 70th Street, and we couldn't afford a higher rent on my small salary from a day job at a publishing firm, even when augmented by the much more modest compensation for my first efforts at free-lance writing for the Village Voice. So, with startling speed, I went from being someone who'd never spent an entire day on the Island to being a resident.

To be sure, there was a bit of culture shock in that, though hardly any identity crisis. Most of the people we knew saw living in any other part of the city (except for Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill) as a kind of spiritual death, and considered Staten Island a foreign and probably hostile country. They looked at us as if we'd turned into foolhardy pioneers. I still considered myself a New Yorker. But then, though it was unfamiliar to me, I'd never thought of Staten Island as anything but another part of New York City.

Which is hardly how native Islanders saw it. Of course, even though we'd never lived in Brooklyn, the borough that Thomas Wolfe claimed "only the dead know," we represented what the most xenophobic native Islanders used to call generically "the Brooklyn element" - the riffraff that swept across the water when they opened the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in '64. (Never mind that those who'd preceded the then-established locals to these shores saw them as hordes of dangerous Eurotrash; bigotry knows no irony.)

And I suppose that, at least on one level, they were right: I was a typical rootless U.S. hybrid, Russian-Jewish and Scots-Protestant mixed, father from New York and mother from rural West Virginia, long-haired and often weirdly dressed when not at my day job, married to an immigrant Argentinian woman. With no ties to anyone or anything here on the Island, how could we be seen as anything but outsiders? And how could newcomers like us not change the dynamics of what had, up till then, functioned as a largely self-contained, protected enclave?

Cheap space, plentiful trees and proximity to the ferry aside, what drew us to the North Shore generally and Stapleton specifically was its ethnic and cultural diversity. Even then, it was a neighborhood that gave the lie to the stereotype of the Island as monolithically Italian: the streets were crowded with Black, hispanic, latino and oriental folks, as well as a variety of whites from many backgrounds. The Island's beaches had not yet been closed to swimming due to pollution, and on a hot summer day South Beach resembled the ethnically mixed Rockaways or Coney Island - close enough, at least, to satisfy me. So did the streets of Stapleton.

Our first apartment, a third-floor walk-up atop Gelgisser's Hardware on Broad Street, had five rooms and an enclosed back porch -- for which we paid $225 a month, heat and hot water included. The front windows looked out at the Stapleton Houses across the street. The service shops up and down Broad and Canal were still thriving; we had a great butcher shop next door, a fine bakery a block away, dry-cleaning and a laundromat a few doors down, Miller's Pharmacy on the corner, some okay restaurants, a genuine old-fashioned movie theater, a string of second-hand/antique shops and even a good used-book store down on Bay Street. Looked like a typical working- to middle-class neighborhood, which is where I've always felt most comfortable.

We didn't know it then, of course, but the area was sliding towards economic collapse. The safety net of social services started shredding, turning Stapleton Houses into less of a way station for people in trouble and more a dumping ground for the permanently disenfranchised. Local businesses began to close, taking the community's already slender base of financial support with them. The vast, long-abandoned brick brewery that faced onto Canal Street - decrepit but still salvageable when we came here - finally went under the wrecker's ball. Some of the picturesque old houses that give these neighborhoods their charm -- especially those in need of major repair - got boarded up, burned down, went to ruin. Gradually it turned into an urbanscape dotted with vacant lots and shuttered storefronts, a place hardly anyone moved into out of choice.

Yet a number of us who might have left hung on - riding out the city's planting a methadone clinic and OTB parlor side by side in Tappen Park, the cunning back-room real-estate turnovers and pork-barrel deceptions of the notorious Homeport scam, the short-lived effort to turn a stretch of Bay Street into a nightclub zone. Contrary to the self-serving promises of our local pols, the Navy's arrival brought neither jobs nor money to this area's residents and businesses, so neither its presence nor its departure made much day-to-day difference. Its legacy, unexploited so far, is a refurbished Tappen Park, a freshly dredged shoreline and a cleared and renovated section of coastline with a spectacular view of the V-N bridge, the harbor and the boroughs across the water.

But there's new single-family housing where the brewery once stood. I see people rehabbing their homes on every street I walk along. Those of us who decided to stay on are still here. And we've been joined by others, from around the world. I buy my cheese and olives at a shop run by refugee Muslims from the former Yugoslavia. The excellent new second-hand store (with a terrific used-book section) on Canal Street is owned and operated by Nigerians. Specialty stores around here sell goods from Africa, Mexico, Japan, Korea, the Philippines.

At the thriving Western Beef supermarket - which replaced the more upscale but unsuccessful King Kullen - you can buy staples from Pakistan, Thailand, Guyana, the Caribbean, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador. Large sacks of garlic; quart jars of unfamiliar spices; fruits, roots and tubers you've never tasted before. "We know the neighborhood," they advertise, and the frequently packed aisles and crowded check-out lines indicate that they do indeed. Everyone from everywhere lives here now, like it or not. I love it: that's my working definition of cosmopolitan. And I believe that, if the North Shore has a future worth working toward, they're its building blocks.