Every once in a while it would be nice to see New York City, like life, from a distance — but not too great a distance. Roosevelt Island offers just such a perspective on Manhattan and Queens. You can reach the 2-mile-long island on the F train or by car, but the dramatic trip over the East River in the aerial tram from Manhattan is worth a pinprick of vertigo for its views of the bridges up and down the river, and of the disparate architecture of the island itself.
ROOSEVELT ISLAND’S ISOLATION was for centuries an asset. The river provided a boundary to its farmland when 17th-century Dutch settlers called it Hog Island; and as Blackwell’s Island it was a place of quarantine, for the ill, the criminal and the insane. Its current name dates from the 1970s, when the city hoped to revitalize the island with a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt at its southern tip. Louis I. Kahn’s original design was finally realized this year when the Four Freedoms Park, with its strict allées of linden trees and brilliant white granite slopes, opened last month. The park, closed after last week’s storm, is scheduled to reopen on Nov. 8.
JUST NORTH OF THE MEMORIAL are the ivy-covered ruins of the neo-Gothic smallpox hospital, designed by James Renwick Jr., and the intact 1909 Strecker Memorial Laboratory, a stone Romanesque-Revival building built by local prisoners. The laboratory once contained an autopsy room and cold storage for six cadavers; today it houses electrical converters for the subway system. Toward Queens there are views of the Pepsi-Cola sign; to the West are riverside views of the United Nations complex, the underpasses of the F.D.R. Drive, and the hidden gardens of Sutton and Beekman Places, as well as the Chrysler Building and other Midtown landmarks.
THE BLACKWELL HOUSE is the oldest structure on the island, built in 1796 for the descendants of its first English residents. In 1828, Peter Cooper sat on the porch and negotiated the city’s purchase of the island for $32,000. Apartment houses now tower over the little farmhouse; along Main Street, state-subsidized Mitchell-Lama rental buildings sit next to market-rate rentals and housing for researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and N.Y.U. faculty. The brutal 20th-century architecture and the sparse ground-level retail options might make the island seem an austere place, but sports fields, swimming pools, tennis courts and even a garden club, with 120 plots (at $45 per year, for those who get through the waiting list) make life here more appealing.
CORNELL PLANS TO BUILD a graduate school for technology near Four Freedoms Park, and the partnership of Hudson and Related Companies will start construction on the first of three new Riverwalk rental buildings early next year. With all that improvement, some of the island’s open space will be lost; Lighthouse Park, also temporarily closed after the storm, at the north end of the island, is one of the green areas that will remain. Looking east to Long Island City, glimpse some of the large-scale works at Socrates Sculpture Park and the arched windows and clock tower of the old Sohmer Piano Factory. To the west, there’s the massive Italianate power station at 74th Street and the F.D.R. Drive; a building you might not know was there if you weren’t seeing it from here.
