Located in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, two-mile long Roosevelt Island since 1971 has been the home of a small town of about 8300 people. Native-Americans called the island Minnehanak ("Long Island"), and the Dutch called it Varkens. It’s had a variety of names in English: Blackwell’s Island since 1686, then Welfare Island in 1921, and finally, since 1973, Roosevelt Island; a substantial memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt was supposed to occupy the island’s southern tip, but the plans were scotched when the architect passed away. In 1828 the first of the island’s lengthy succession of asylums, penitentiaries and hospitals opened; its isolation in the East River gave NYC a convenient place to stash dangerous or contagiously ill people.
By the 1920s and 1930s the Island was a bizarre fiefdom of gangsters serving time in the neglectful tenure of Joseph McCann, who ran Blackwell Penitentiary. The mobsters had the comforts of home smuggled in and lived well amid the deteriorating, squalid conditions surrounding them. The penitentiary was closed and moved to Rikers Island in 1935.
By the 1930s the era of institutionalization on Welfare Island was winding down. Goldwater Memorial Hospital (Dr. S.S. Goldwater, Commissioner of Hospitals) opened in 1939 and Bird S. Coler Hospital in 1952. The rest of the island was in ruins by this time.
Plans for park and residential development, including a subway connection, began to circulate in the 1960s. Finally, a plan envisioned by Philip Johnson and John Burgee was decided upon. The Urban Development Corporation, inaugurated in 1969, hired developers and construction began. Roosevelt Island was built up with high-rise developments and a promenade on the eastern and western sides of the island. No dogs were allowed at first, and cars were discouraged (they were allowed only in the parking garage near the bridge; buses transported people up and down Main St., one of two named streets in the development).
Though it’s technically a part of Manhattan, until 1976 the only way to get there by vehicle was by a bridge at 36th Ave. and Vernon Blvd. in Astoria, Queens; that’s still the only way to get there by car or bus. Since 1976, the only tramway in NYC has run from Second Ave. and 60th St. and, since 1989, subways tunnel to one of the deepest stations in the system here.
Most visitors to the island alight from the tramway or the Roosevelt Island subway station and enjoy the riverside parks in the center and north end of the island. The south end is sparsely visited, but now has the bulk of the island’s historic relics.
Above is one of what was originally five exquisite entrance and exit kiosks, rendered in Beaux Arts terra cotta, that used to stand at 2nd Ave. and E. 60th St. where trolleys from Queens let out, or accepted passengers from an underground station. It’s had two other homes since then. One of the kiosks, now the Roosevelt Island Visitor Center, is dwarfed by the Queensboro/59th St./Ed Koch Bridge, as well as one of the huge stanchions that carry the tramway wires.
At the intercession of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society’s Judy Berdy, who worked with the kiosk’s former location at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in Bedford-Stuyvesant and several other agencies, in 2006 the kiosk was transported here to the spot where the trolley elevator landing was once located, where it now serves as the Roosevelt Island Historical Society‘s visitor center.
Roosevelt Island’s first permanent resident was Captain John Manning, a disgraced British naval officer who’d allowed Fort Amsterdam (on Governor’s Island) to fall to the Dutch in 1673. Upon Manning’s death the island was passed on to his stepdaughter Mary and her husband, Robert Blackwell, and the island stayed in the Blackwell family till 1823, retaining the name “Blackwell’s Island” for decades after that.
The oldest building on Roosevelt Island is the Blackwell Farmhouse which dates to 1794. In 1828, the farmhouse was purchased by the city, and it later became the administrative center for the succession of institutions that sprung up on Blackwell’s Island beginning that year. The Blackwell family also maintained residences in Ravenswood, Queens.
Ruins of the Smallpox Hospital, built in 1856 by James Renwick Jr., the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, have recently been made more accessible to public view, though the ruin remains fenced off. Visitors can view it from the outside, but the interior isn’t yet safe for the public. Unusually, it’s well-lit at night and its ghostly outline can be seen from Manhattan Island after dark. The picnic tables and food trucks detract from the ambience.
In the 1850s smallpox was a dangerously transmittable illness and its sufferers were quarantined here. In the late-1800s North Brother Island became NYC’s quarantine center, and the hospital became a nurses’ residence. It’s gradually deteriorated here since the 1950s.
Another Roosevelt Island “ruin” that’s perhaps less well-known is the Strecker Laboratory, a premier facility for bacteriological research, constructed in the 1890s as an adjunct to the long-demolished City Hospital in a Romanesque Revival style by architects Frederick Withers and Walter Dickson. Since it closed in the 1950s, it was allowed to collapse for nearly 40 years despite its landmarking in 1975. In 2000, the Laboratory was renovated and restored, but it still stands alone in an empty lot north of the Smallpox Hospital, awaiting visitors. As far as I can ascertain it contains electrical works and isn’t likely to open soon.
Viewable from the south end of the new Southpoint Park (open every day except Tuesday) is U Thant Island, named for the Burmese secretary-general of the United Nations between 1961 and 1971. The island was built by subway pioneer August Belmont, who was completing the Steinway Tunnels under the East River. Piano manufacturer William Steinway began the tunnels in 1890, hoping to extend trolley service between Manhattan and Queens. Steinway died before the project could be finished, but Belmont stepped in. Belmont Island (as it was then called) was made up of landfill from the excavated tunnel. For the next 70 years, Belmont Island was all but forgotten, but in 1976, United Nations employees who were followers of spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy rediscovered the island and redecorated it by planting trees and flowers. The island was renamed for U Thant, a good friend of Chinmoy.
Four Freedoms Park, at the southern end of the island, is named for FDR’s focus in his State of the Union address in 1941: Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Roosevelt’s giant bust (changed from the original design depicting him in a wheelchair) is an enlargement of a sculpture originally created in 1933 by Jo Davidson, one of the most prominent American sculptors of the 20th century. The memorial was designed by Louis Kahn in his final commission, and was in the works for decades.
The focal point of the Park is a 1050-pound bronze bust of President Roosevelt, an enlargement of a sculpture originally created in 1933 by Jo Davidson, one of the most prominent American sculptors of the 20th century. Davidson sculpted a life-size clay, working with FDR in the Oval Office at the White House.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)