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As the tram takes off, schoolchildren and Scandinavian tourists press their cheeks against the windowpanes to watch New York rise from the river. From high above the city, Manhattan looks like an illustration torn from a Curious George storybook. Fancy East Side apartment towers cohere into an intricate web of brick and glass. Yellow taxicabs bustle along streets that seem to go on forever. And on the next page, George gazes in wonder at the enormous steel-crowned towers of the Queensboro Bridge, the quintessence of New York’s resplendent grandeur. Still, though the emblematic Midtown skyline and the long straight streets of the city can be grasped from here like nowhere else, there is a sense that Manhattan is falling away.
Despite its geographical proximity to Manhattan, Roosevelt Island feels like a different city from a different time. Modern apartment complexes, reminiscent of some ex-Soviet, Eastern European wasteland, stretch northward from the tram. To the south, the stone ruins of a former smallpox hospital dominate an overgrown New England grassland. The island is an inhospitable site wholly unexpected from the whimsical tramway journey taken to reach it.
The essence of Roosevelt Island rests in the paradox of its history. Caught between the vestiges of defunct asylums and a 1970s utopian new town, the island possesses a conflicted sense of time and place, transporting its tenants and visitors into a purgatorial time warp, at times beautiful, often strange, but for the most part well worth the trip.
In the New York harbor, Manhattan is the feudal lord of islands. It rules like a tyrannical despot over a scattered island peasantry. To its sea-encapsulated subordinates, such as Rikers and Randall’s Islands, it has bequeathed the sick, the maimed, the insane, and the criminal. The narrow strip of land today known as Roosevelt Island has a long entrenched tradition of exile, and symbolically changing names from Varcken’s (Hog) Island, Blackwell’s Island, and Welfare Island, just to name a few. A 1903 silent film created by the Thomas Edison Company attests to its murky past, as a series of gloomy asylums, hospitals, and penitentiaries, some still standing today, roll past in a grainy black and white procession.
Though elements of the past remain, history has changed Roosevelt Island significantly. Beginning in the 1930s, many of the island’s older and more infamous institutions began to be replaced with newer facilities. Meanwhile, a pair of hospitals were built on each end of the island to replace the outgoing tenants. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Urban Development Corporation planned an elaborate mixed-income apartment complex that today dominates the island, though some of those plans are only just now being realized. At present, after the long-awaited completion of a subway link, housing construction has accelerated and a new park is planned for the island’s southern tip.
Finished in 1989, Roosevelt Island station bears little resemblance to most of the New York City subway system. Its station has a futuristic, tubular metal ceiling and runs incredibly deep underground, not unlike the vaulted subterranean stations of Washington, D.C. Just past the station exit, the island’s Main Street runs along a short sinewy path marked by identical storefronts with uniform red signage and white font. Developed by Johnson/Burgee, the truncated complex was originally intended as traffic-free, though now it merely creates the sensation of a dense canyon of concrete.
Past Main Street, the island peters into a depressing stretch of bland apartments and hospital complexes. Though the street runs beside a pleasant pedestrian path, the view serves mostly as a reminder that the island’s most attractive property is the skyline in which it plays no part. Seagulls guard the shore, and depending on the location, either conjure up images of Hitchcock’s The Birds or warm childhood memories of the beach. To the west, The Octagon, a former asylum turned luxury condominium, perfectly embodies the spirit of Roosevelt Island. A stone lighthouse marks the end of the island’s northern stretch, and from there Ward’s and Randall’s Islands, transected by the Hell Gate and Triborough Bridges, present a welcome panorama at the end of a dreary path.
The doldrum of Roosevelt Island’s northern reaches is stayed only by the journey in store to the south. Below the Queensboro Bridge’s imposing ballasts lies the stone shell of a former Smallpox hospital, built in 1856. In contrast to Main Street’s stark modernity, these Gothic ruins clash against a silhouette of midtown skyscrapers. Fenced off and near collapsing, the building stands relentless against a city of progress. At the island’s end, a bare grass plateau looks out on steel spires crowded by sleek glass structures—New York can hardly be seen in such magnificence.
The southern tip of Roosevelt Island is a lonely, dreamlike place. From its boulder-strewn shore, one cannot help but look outward at the looming city. Here, watching the tugboats gradually pass downriver into the Atlantic, Roosevelt Island could not seem at once any closer to or farther from the city. But before the sun-drenched fields succumb to dark shadows and the sun falls behind the Williamsburg Bridge, leave the island. For though purged of its stone asylums, Roosevelt Island will forever be a place of exile, a state of mind far from New York, a barge sunken beside a city it will never be part of, waiting for the tugboat Charon to carry its castaways downriver to Fresh Kills.