About this listing
Historic and modern buildings mark the history of this island
Place Details
Borough : Manhattan
Neighborhood : Roosevelt Island
Place Matters Profile
A unique planned community on the East River, Roosevelt Island incorporated elements from its long history into a cutting-edge late 1960s urban design. Today it combines a mix of market and affordable housing, historic landmark buildings, parkland, and incomparable views of the East River and the rest of the city in a small 147-acre package.
Roosevelt Island’s name dates only to 1973, as it was renamed in its transformation into a residential community. It was Minnahanonck to native New Yorkers, Hogs Island in Dutch New Amsterdam, and Blackwell’s Island for more than two centuries, named after the British family who owned the island from 1686. In 1821 the family sold the island to the City of New York, which found it a fit place to isolate poor, ill, and troubled New Yorkers. Hospitals, insane asylums, and prisons would dominate the landscape for more than one hundred years. Nineteenth century writers including Charles Dickens and Nellie Bly visited the island and observed
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A unique planned community on the East River, Roosevelt Island incorporated elements from its long history into a cutting-edge late 1960s urban design. Today it combines a mix of market and affordable housing, historic landmark buildings, parkland, and incomparable views of the East River and the rest of the city in a small 147-acre package.
Roosevelt Island’s name dates only to 1973, as it was renamed in its transformation into a residential community. It was Minnahanonck to native New Yorkers, Hogs Island in Dutch New Amsterdam, and Blackwell’s Island for more than two centuries, named after the British family who owned the island from 1686. In 1821 the family sold the island to the City of New York, which found it a fit place to isolate poor, ill, and troubled New Yorkers. Hospitals, insane asylums, and prisons would dominate the landscape for more than one hundred years. Nineteenth century writers including Charles Dickens and Nellie Bly visited the island and observed appaling conditions at its penitentiary and lunatic asylum. Scandals continued to rock the island through 1921, when the City changed the island’s name to Welfare Island in an effort to improve its image.
In 1968, when Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed a committee to study possible uses for the island, it seemed largely devoid of people. As late as the 1940s, the island’s institutions had been home to as many as ten thousand people. By the ‘60s, only two hospitals and the Fire Department’s training school remained active among the remains of abandoned city institutions. Among the possibilities raised for the island’s redevelopment were an amusement park, prisons, a nuclear power plant, or a housing development. New York City was then in the grips of what was seen as a “housing crisis”; there were not enough places for people to live, but also not enough room to build new homes without displacing others. Given this scenario, the almost 150 acres of land on the East River began to look very attractive.
Lindsay’s committee reported back in early 1969, recommending the development of a “small housing community of unusual appeal” set alongside a large park, which could serve a larger number of New Yorkers. Additionally, committee members strongly insisted on preserving the island’s important historical structures—including Blackwell House, one of the oldest wood farmhouses in the city, and the dramatic octagonal tower of the former New York Lunatic Asylum.
A master plan conceived the following year by the architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee proposed a “new town in town” for 20,000 people. Residents would live in a town center with shops and restaurants, offices and schools, and a park at its center. The island’s housing would be sited along a traffic-free, gently curving Main Street, with each building oriented to provide every apartment with river views, and a pedestrian promenade along the water’s edge circling the entire island. Their proposals for what was then “the island nobody knows” were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Their vision was of an urban community of the future with the best features of the past. Residents would enjoy the density of an urban neighborhood, as well as access to the jobs and excitement of the big city across the river. At the same time, Roosevelt Island’s setting provided access to nature, and the quiet and safety that were luring many of the city’s middle-class residents to the suburbs.
The plan was implemented by the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a New York State agency organized to speed new construction projects to improve New York State’s cities. The island was re-named Roosevelt Island, in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1973. Northtown, the first residential sector of Roosevelt Island, featured four buildings designed by the architects José Luis Sert and John Johansen and occupied in 1975.
The UDC sought to build housing for those who needed it but also to create what they called “balanced” communities with a mix of incomes and ethnicities. Northtown’s 2100 units of housing included 1000 units subsidized for elderly and moderate/lower-income families, and 1100 apartments for middle and upper-middle income families subsidized under the Mitchell-Lama state housing program.
On this tranquil island, all cars would have to park at Motorgate, a giant one thousand car garage on the island’s east side, and people would move around the island on foot or via electric minibus. A series of intimate-sized “mini-schools” were distributed throughout the island’s housing, to avoid sending children to the impersonal, thousand-plus student schools then being criticized throughout the city. Landmarks were integrated with the cityscape—the 1889 Chapel of the Good Shepherd was renovated into a community center and parish. The remaining hospitals (today, the Coler Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Center) would continue to provide long-term care to almost 2000 patients.
Roosevelt Island also featured a novel vacuum system for trash disposal. Household trash was conveyed to a central plant via underground pneumatic tubes in an automated vacuum system, or AVAC, so that loud garbage trucks and smelly curbside garbage would not mar the island’s tranquil environment. At the time, this system was only in use in Disneyland. Still an anomaly in the United States, AVAC systems can now be found in numerous European and Asian cities.
One of the catalysts for the island’s development had been the construction of a new subway line (today the F), which was to pass under the island. When planners realized that the subway link was not going to be ready in time to serve the island’s first residents, an architect at the UDC, an avid skier, suggested a cable car system as an interim solution. The Roosevelt Tramway—with its characteristic red car—was born. Though the F train has been in service since 1989, the aerial tramway has become Roosevelt Island’s beloved symbol.
Roosevelt Island today is a far cry from the architectural renderings of the late 1960s. Work on the original plan came to a halt when the UDC faced fiscal collapse in 1975. Retail and business venues never took hold to the extent predicted. The electric minibuses have been replaced with hybrid buses carrying 50 passengers each; the mini-schools are gone, replaced by a large capacity public elementary and middle school.
Two new parks are under construction at the southern tip of the island. Wild Gardens – Green Rooms will incorporate two landmarks—Strecker Laboratory and the Smallpox Hospital. Four Freedoms Park, in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was designed by renowned architect Louis Kahn, has been in planning since 1973, and finally broke ground in April 2010.
Construction on the island’s remaining undeveloped area, a series of luxury towers, lacks the architectural and social care of the island’s original housing. Six new residential towers in what was to be Southtown have been constructed since 2002, with far less affordable housing. A luxury condominium has been built around the landmark Octagon lobby, with two wings on the footprint of the 1895 asylum. Eastwood, one of the island’s original buildings, has left the Mitchell-Lama program, causing concern about Roosevelt Island’s future as a mixed income community.
Still, it is hardly an extension of the Upper East Side. This small town of 13,000 high-rise residents remains an anomaly, a sleepy place in the center of the city’s bustle, a NYC neighborhood administered by a special state agency, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation. For most New Yorkers it is still an unknown island, meriting a visit only for the novelty of a tram ride over the East River. On the other side, though, it is a respite, a curiosity, and a community to which its residents are passionately committed.
—Mariana Mogilevich, August 2010
Sources
Annual Report. New York: New York State Urban Development Corporation, 1974.
Judith Berdy. “Preserving Social History on Roosevelt Island.” Gotham Gazette 23 May 2005 (access at http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/fea/20050523/202/1408)
Judith Berdy and the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. Images of America: Roosevelt Island. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Press, 2003.
The Island Nobody Knows. New York: New York State Urban Development Corporation, 1969.
Report of the Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee. New York, February 1969.
Ivan D. Steen. “New Town in the City: Edward J. Logue and His Vision for Roosevelt Island, New York” Journal of Planning History 9:3 (2010), 183-197.
