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!

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South Williamsburg

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Art-to-go on Bedford Ave.

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Automotive High School, for manly men

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Greenpoint Rococo

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

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Crossing Pulaski Bridge to Long Island City, Queens

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

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An allée of London planes alongside the Queensbridge projects

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

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The giant "Big Allis" power plant

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Roosevelt Island Bridge

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The door to the Island

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Descending

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Exit on Main Street

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The old asylum—I mean, island retreat

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The lighthouse

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Lazy fishermen

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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.

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

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Some new boom-era buildings

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Blackwell House, one of the island's first buildings

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

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The tram is down for renovation

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