The Advance

Richmond County Advance, the Daily advance, staten Island advance

The "Advance" includes Richmond County Advance, The Daily Advance and Staten Island Advance

from the collections of Historic Richmond Town and The New York Public Library.

April 10, 1886 - August 17, 1910 (with gaps - some of which are filled by the separate files listed below)

April 7, 1888 - March 15, 1890

October 22, 1898 - August 25, 1900

September 12, 1913 - August 7, 1914

June 3, 1914 - January 9, 1920 (with gaps)

January 10, 1920 - October 8, 1920.

January 4, 1921 - June 20, 1921

June 21, 1921 - October 22, 1921

October 22, 1921 - January 31, 1922

February 1, 1922 - May 10. 1922

Feburary 2, 1922 - August 14, 1922

For the newest Staten Island Advance issues (from 1991 to the present) search: silive.com. The official site of the Advance is keyword searchable and returns selected individual articles in the results.

Microfilm holdings:

The Advance issues published between the online issues listed above and the recent papers on silive.com are available on microfilm at NYPL's St. George Library Center. More, earlier, issues are available at Historic Richmond Town and the Staten Island Museum.

Search Tips: The Advance is posted on different websites depending on the publication date. The run of the papers on any one website may not be consecutive. So be certain where your desired dates are hosted. Some searches may require following links to multiple sites and searching each individually.

The “Richmond County Advance” was established at West New Brighton March 27, 1886 as a weekly paper by John Crawford Jr., publisher, who had previously worked at the North Shore Advocate newspaper (published 1869-1877), and James C. Kennedy, editor. It occupied a building at 72 Broadway, West New Brighton, before moving to 1267 Castleton Avenue at Bodine Street (near Clove Rd.) in 1916, under publisher William G. Willcox. The paper remained in this building until its current site in Grasmere opened in 1960. The Advance became a daily paper in June 1918 under general manager Blanchard Preble and editor Edward Johnson. In 1922 the paper was sold to a young entrepreneur and manager at The Bayonne Times named S. I. (Samuel Irving) Newhouse who formed the Staten Island Advance Company. That year their masthead proclaimed the paper had "Double the circulation of all other Island papers combined." It continued under the name “Staten Island Advance” and remains the primary news source for most Staten Islanders. It is the only NYC daily paper published in a borough outside of Manhattan.

Early offices of The Advance.

Mr. Newhouse was born in 1895 and moved to West New Brighton in 1925 to manage operations at the Advance and then later to 25 Ward Avenue, Tompkinsville which was his home into the 1940s. He began purchasing additional newspapers in 1932 and in 1949 changed his company's name to Advance Publications, Inc. Today it is a multi-national communications giant, ranking 40th on the Forbes list of largest private companies (July, 2016.) Subsidiaries include Condé Nast (The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired), Reddit.com, Random House and newspapers in more than twenty-five U.S. cities. Advance Publications' official corporate address is 950 W. Fingerboard Rd., Staten Island, the current Staten Island Advance building. The first Staten Island Advance printed at this location was published on November 7, 1960. S.I. Newhouse died in 1979 and is buried in Baron Hirsch Cemetery in Graniteville. The ferryboat S.I. Newhouse is named for him. His nephew, Richard Diamond, succeeded him as the Advance publisher for 50 years.

A. The first Advance published, April 10,1886.

B. The new press, 1921, could print 16 pages at once.

C. The Advance office on Castleton Avenue, September 1913.

D. Publisher William G. Willcox, 1914.

E. S. I. Newhouse Sr. on the cover of Time.

F. The current Staten Island Advance building in Grasmere. (Google Street View)