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When people speak of the Forgotten Borough and tell stories about the desolation and rampant crime on Staten Island, they are speaking of its northern half. Everything north of the Staten Island Expressway was the worst hit by the fallout and the first region of the island to be evacuated afterward. It is a highly urbanized region of the island with tightly packed residential homes, apartment buildings and businesses juxtaposed with factories and desolate stretches of abandoned highway, rail yards and miles upon miles of abandoned buildings.
Everything east Route 440 into Jersey City, also known as the Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway has fallen into a state of sickening revitalization under the monicker of the "Rookery", a neighborhood rife with drug dealers, rapists, murderers and criminals who had come to pick on the corpse of Staten Island after it had been evacuated, and simply never left.
West of the expressway are miles of residential buildings, factories and railyards that once connected Jersey City and Staten Island, now sitting in disrepair amidst rusting tracks and derelict train cars. This while northern end of Staten Island is still largely a no-man's-land, and only on the New Jersey side of the Bayonne Bridge that crosses north into Jersey City has a police checkpoint designed to keep motorists out of Staten Island.