Bulls Head’s Fun Station Camp Swells to 300 Kids, Adds Tri-State Field Trips

As summer camp enrolments rebound, Staten Island’s Fun Station Day Camp embodies the city’s evolving approach to childhood, parenting—and the summer economy.

On a humid July morning on Staten Island, a fleet of yellow buses—each bearing the grinning face of an ice-cream cone—pulls up outside an unassuming indoor amusement park. Within minutes, more than 300 children, ages six to twelve, spill out, greeted by a gaggle of sunburnt counsellors and the whiff of hand sanitizer. Here in Bulls Head, a neighbourhood often overshadowed by more storied boroughs, the Fun Station Day Camp is quietly scripting a different vision of New York’s summer.

Established 14 years ago by Chris Mancusi, a dean and teacher at Totten Intermediate School in Tottenville, Fun Station camp has swelled from its modest origins—just 24 campers in its inaugural summer—to one of the borough’s most sought-after day programs. The formula is straightforward but effective: lean on the logistics of an indoor amusement park, dispatch daily expeditions that reach as far as New Jersey’s boardwalks and Manhattan’s Museums of Ice Cream, and tend to the modern parent’s core anxieties—safety, ease, and enrichment. Free door-to-door pickups, extended hours, and complimentary lunches smooth the experience for working caregivers.

While city officials trumpet summer as “the season of the child,” programs like Fun Station highlight the economics at play. For New York’s 1.1 million school-age children, nearly 40% of whom live below the federal poverty line, access to structured, affordable camps varies wildly by borough and income. In a city where a weeklong STEM camp can tip the scales at $700, Fun Station’s capacity to serve hundreds without the trappings of exclusivity is not merely a convenience; it is a lifeline for overstretched families.

The stakes are not only personal. Summer learning loss—the reading and math regression that disproportionately afflicts low-income children—remains a policy worry, even as post-pandemic recoveries bring New York’s attendance rates back to pre-Covid levels. Research from RAND has found that quality summer experiences can arrest this “summer slide,” boosting academic performance through what experts drily term “enriched out-of-school time.” That the city still lacks a universal approach to summer programming, relying instead on a patchwork of public subsidies, private providers, and out-of-pocket expense, bodes unevenly for future generations.

Camps like Fun Station thus inhabit a delicate middle ground. They are neither the storied sleep-away institutions of upstate lore nor the threadbare drop-in programs of yesteryear’s rec centres. Instead, they are hybrids—mixing field trips to theme parks with science labs, art projects, and tactical use of the city’s own bewildering logistics. In this way, they are peculiarly metropolitan: improvisational, resourceful, and anxious about liability.

For parents, the pitch is irresistible. New York’s workforce recovery—now approaching pre-pandemic heights—depends not only on employers’ willingness to tolerate flex-time, but on secure options for children when school doors close each June. It is no accident that Fun Station’s director is also a coach at St. Joseph by-the-Sea, or that demand for Staten Island day camps has doubled in five years. Behind each registration lurks not nostalgia, but necessity.

More than child’s play, a microcosm of the city’s summer economy

Beyond immediate family life, these programmes generate a legion of seasonal jobs for teachers, teens, and returning college students. Staten Island’s camp sector, while dwarfed by Manhattan’s culture industry or Brooklyn’s retail, delivers a vital—if often overlooked—spur to the borough’s quieter summer commerce: bus rentals, snack suppliers, insurance contracts, an occasional windfall for neighbouring ice-cream parlours.

Moreover, such camps increasingly serve as soft launch pads for social integration. Fun Station’s roster reflects the borough’s shifting demographics—immigrants from South Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Caribbean rub shoulders with the old Italian-Irish core. “Camp” now means learning to share space, language, and pizza slices, often stitching together cultural gaps more nimbly than classroom curricula.

Nationally, the story is uneven. According to the American Camp Association, enrollment at day camps rebounded by 12% in 2024, following a sharp pandemic drop. Yet accessible programmes remain a rarity in most cities, with hundreds still languishing on waitlists or, worse, priced out entirely. The New York model—patchy, entrepreneurial, and ever at risk of budgetary whim—nevertheless manages to absorb more children than many of its peers. In Europe, where municipal governments routinely subsidise August-long care, the American penchant for private initiative and uneven access remains perplexing.

All this, of course, is mere preamble to a more pointed question: What, precisely, should summer mean in cities like New York? If structured camps now serve as default child-minders—a by-product of dual-income households and threadbare public provision—do they portend a future where leisure is ever more scheduled and commodified? Or, more charitably, does their rickety architecture reflect a city’s real genius: to improvise community among shifting needs?

We reckon the latter. The continued vitality of Fun Station and its ilk attests less to a logistical triumph than to an urban temperament—a commitment to finding order, variety, and opportunity in unlikely places. As city budgets face perennial duress, it is the improvisational grit of such modest institutions—and their ability to integrate fun, safety, and social glue—that will carry the heaviest load, both for children and the city they will one day inherit.

It is, perhaps, a peculiarly New York fate that the most ordinary rituals—day trips, sack lunches, waiting for a bus—become the battlegrounds of policy, identity, and ambition. Staten Island’s Fun Station is not about nostalgia for a lost innocence; it is about adapting, yet again, to what the summer demands. If it sometimes feels that every solution here is both provisional and just good enough, that too is a local tradition.

In the final analysis, Fun Station’s particular mix of field trips, free lunches, and meticulous logistics is unlikely to mollify every critic of the city’s fractured child-care regime. Yet for hundreds of parents at their wits’ end each July, it is more than a stopgap—it is proof the city remains functional, even inventive, when it matters most. ■