re: Why is Staten Island one of New York City’s 5 Burroughs?

Why is Lake Charles on Calcasieu Lake?

Why is Savannah, Georgia further west than Youngstown, Ohio?

Why is El Paso, Texas closer to San Diego, California than it is to Beaumont, Texas?

Why is grand isle part of Jefferson parish? It’s closer to plaquemenes and you drive through lafourche to get there

Ask this guy

I finally got around to looking into this a little deeper, I'm actually a little disappointed in the OT.
I figured some historian/geographer on the OT would know.

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The grant of west jersey by the duke of York, who held it and also New York was for east of the Delaware river until the Hudson river and the Atlantic.

So...not any islands in the mouth of the Hudson.

West jersey was Quaker. 1664

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this is the closest thing to the answer, but it is far more complicated story and the whole thing was finally resolved completely until 1998 Supreme Court ruling, which is very interesting and surprising.

Article from Village Voice going into a lot of detail why Staten Island is part of New York

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By the early nineteenth century, New York and New Jersey had settled the Line War — the dispute over their land border near the Poconos — but their maritime boundary in the New York City area was still hotly contested. The colonial charters were considered the ultimate authority, and New York took the maximalist interpretation of “bounded on the east part by the main sea, and part by Hudson’s river”: It claimed that the eastern edge of New Jersey was, at the high-tide point, where the water met the shore. By this logic, even the docks or wharves New Jersey built on its own shore were New York’s — and New York routinely sent tax collectors and other government officials to enforce its supposed rights. New Jersey, to fight back, now made a sweeping claim of its own: It said that the line ought to run down the middle of the Hudson and then follow the channel out to sea, which would give it control not only of its own shore but of Staten Island as well, which by 1830 had 7,000 inhabitants and had never been controlled by the New Jersey government. In 1832, New Jersey finally took New York to court over the dispute — specifically, to the Supreme Court. But it wasn’t clear that the court had the jurisdiction to hear the case; New York definitely didn’t think so, and at first refused even to send lawyers to argue its side. The case also arose during a delicate moment in U.S. politics. South Carolina was threatening to refuse to enforce a newly passed federal tariff, and the Jackson administration didn’t want another headache involving states’ rights. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had just ruled against Georgia in its dispute with the Cherokee Nation, and Georgia was similarly refusing to go along with the decision. Chief Justice Marshall may have worried that if New York ignored a ruling against it as well, the court’s prestige would be irreparably harmed, so he postponed the case until the next year. That gave Martin Van Buren, newly elected U.S. vice president and one of New York’s biggest power brokers, time to swoop in and arrange a compromise. New Jersey would get the line it wanted down the middle of the Hudson, and the right to build and control piers and docks on its shore. But the line would jog around Staten Island, leaving Richmond County as part of New York State and, once consolidation went through in 1898, New York City. One wonders how serious New Jersey was about its claim in the first place; perhaps it was just a chip it could bargain away to get the shore rights that were its overriding goal. But whatever the case, that’s how Staten Island definitively became part of New York: no boat race involved, just a treaty with Native Americans and a little vice-presidential arm-twisting. There’s one odd footnote: Van Buren’s line down the Hudson left two uninhabited islets that had long been administered by New York — Ellis Island and Bedloe’s Island — on the New Jersey side of the maritime border. New Jersey was, again, mostly concerned about its commercial docks, so it agreed to let those islands remain New York land surrounded by New Jersey water. Bedloe’s Island became the base of a giant statue gifted to us by France and was renamed Liberty Island; Ellis Island, meanwhile, became the port of entry for millions of immigrants, and in order to accommodate them all, was expanded tenfold by landfill. New Jersey sued, claiming that the newly constructed parts of the island belonged to it, and in 1998 the Supreme Court agreed — which is what makes figuring out sales taxes on Ellis Island unduly complicated to this day.

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why you got to go east in new orleans to hit the west bank.

Mich was state 9 yrs before Wisconsin.

Why (and how) does Hawaii have an Interstate

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Why is Lake Charles on Calcasieu Lake?

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But it's not. It's on Lake Charles and Prien Lake. Calcasieu Lake is South of the city.

This is true. I grew up on SI. My late dad’s former law partner and friend, the late state senator John Marchi spearheaded the secession movement of SI from NYC. The city got a lot of our tax money but city services to SI were sub-par. Marchi was a great man. He beat John Lindsay in the mayoral republican primary in 1969. Lindsay ran as an independent. Marchi and the democrat split the conservative/moderate vote and Lindsay was re-elected mayor of NYC. I always thought John Marchi should have challenged Jacob Javitts for his US Senate seat.

There are many beautiful places on SI, but parts are a dump (quite literally).

I left SI after HS in 1969 and never lived there full time again. I’ve lived in Virginia since 1973 when I came down for law school. I haven’t visited the Island in 15 years. I don’t miss it but it was a great place to grow up.