It made a few people bitter. “We had five per cent of the city’s population and we got a hundred per cent of the garbage,” Fossella, who is now the Staten Island borough president, told me recently. “Staten Island was dumped on, literally and figuratively, and the rest of the city said, ‘Too bad.’ ” The dump was eventually closed in 2001 under Rudy Giuliani, who had narrowly won the 1993 mayoral election against David Dinkins, a vote largely swung by Staten Islanders. (Giuliani also made the Staten Island ferry free.) That same year, the island’s residents also considered, in a nonbinding plebiscite, whether they even wanted to be a part of New York City anymore. Sixty-five per cent voted no.