I’m a New Yorker, and I run. I get bored doing laps around the park or running up and down the Hudson River path. Instead, I use my long-distance runs to explore the neighborhoods in my city, especially in the outer boroughs. I’ve decided to take a cheap digital camera with me on some of my runs to document the city and its changes as seen when crossing on foot.


Saturday, August 14, 2010

To Blackwell's Welfare Roosevelt Island

Here's slightly old run I've been late in posting: A Memorial Day weekend 9-miler from Brooklyn to Roosevelt Island.

Roosevelt Island is... strange. It looks less like part of New York City than a worker's housing district in one of the richer European social democracies. Which considering the community's birth during the Lindsay administration was probably not far from the desired effect. The first apartments on the island opened up in 1975; many of the units were part of the Mitchell-Lama affordable housing scheme. Roosevelt Island is part of Manhattan, but you can only get to the rest of the borough via the subway or an aerial tram suspended over the East River. To cross to the island on foot, you have to come in through Queens, via the parking garage.

R.I. has just one street—Main Street, natch—laid out according to a master plan by John Burgee and Philip Johnson. The street is closed to most traffic other than buses.

Before it became one of the last strongholds of the middle class in Manhattan, Roosevelt as known as Welfare Island and Blackwell's Island. It was home to  "The Alcatraz of New York", a work house, hospitals—including a smallpox quarantine—and the octagonal Lunatic Asylum, now part of a luxury rental complex that went up at the tail-end of the bubble. The current website of The Octagon sells the historic character of the place with sweet euphemism, saying it opened in 1841 as an "island retreat," which was visited by Charles Dickens, who remarked on its lovely staircase. They skip this part of Dickens' American Notes: "The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror." 1 & 2 Bedroom Rentals Available Now! As low as $2200/Month!


From roosevelt
South Williamsburg


From roosevelt
Art-to-go on Bedford Ave.


From roosevelt

From roosevelt
Automotive High School, for manly men


From roosevelt
Greenpoint Rococo

From roosevelt
Another sad ghost bike, this one for Liz Byrne, 44


From roosevelt
Crossing Pulaski Bridge to Long Island City, Queens


From roosevelt
Not an especially interesting building, except that I got
married in it.


From roosevelt

From roosevelt
An allée of London planes alongside the Queensbridge projects



From roosevelt
The Queensboro, a.k.a. 59th Street, Bridge.

From roosevelt
The giant "Big Allis" power plant


From roosevelt
Roosevelt Island Bridge


From roosevelt

From roosevelt
The door to the Island


From roosevelt
Descending

From roosevelt
Exit on Main Street

From roosevelt

From roosevelt

From roosevelt

From roosevelt
The old asylum—I mean, island retreat

From roosevelt
The lighthouse

From roosevelt
Lazy fishermen

From roosevelt

From roosevelt
The campus of The Rockefeller University looms over the FDR—
nearby, yet hidden, Hogwarts-like, from the view of most New
Yorkers. But you can see it from here.

From roosevelt

From roosevelt
Good Shepard is Espiscopal, but the island's Catholic parish uses
it for masses, too.


From roosevelt

From roosevelt

From roosevelt
Some new boom-era buildings

From roosevelt
Blackwell House, one of the island's first buildings

From roosevelt
An old trolley kiosk that used to be on the 59th Street Bridge
above

From roosevelt
The tram is down for renovation

From roosevelt

From roosevelt
Coler Hospital, one of two long-term care hospitals on the island,
a reminder of its institutional legacy.

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