On my first visit to New York, one of the touristy things that we did was take the tram to Roosevelt Island. Roosevelt Island is a long skinny island in the East River, that runs for about 20 city blocks, from about 46th Street to about 84th Street. For many years, the only way to reach the island was to take the tram from Manhattan or to drive across a bridge from Queens, on the other side of the river. (Which meant that, if you were taking a cab from Manhattan, you took the 59th Street Bridge to Queens, then made a U-Turn and took a different bridge half-way back across the river to Roosevelt Island. Cha-ching.)
Now a subway stops there and it’s on the East River Ferry route. Cornell has a tech campus there. And the state has built a park with a monument to Franklyn D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms* at the south end of the island. Housing there has gone from quirky and a bit run-down (as referenced in the Horror movie, Dark Water, set there) to trendy and expensive. I shouldn’t bother saying “expensive” out loud – it’s New York City: all housing is expensive here. Or perhaps I should say, it’s 2024, all housing is expensive everywhere. Population explosion, you know.
Roosevelt Island’s transportation problems have made it’s history interesting. One of it’s early names was Blackwell Island and that is what it was called until the early 20th century, when it was renamed Welfare Island. It was renamed again Roosevelt Island when it was rehabbed in the early 1970’s. But, along with the official names, it had nicknames. Farewell Island is what the people who lived there called it because if were sent to that Island, you basically bid goodbye to life. And, since the only way to get there for much of it’s life as an institutional island, was by ferry, if you were banished there on a stormy night, you might bid life farewell, literally.**
That is the aspect of Roosevelt Island that Stacy Horn captures in Damnation Island. This history covers the various institutions that the island became known for throughout the 1800s and 1900s. Poorhouses, men’s and women’s prisons, workhouses, a home for the aged and infirm, lunatic asylums, and a variety of hospitals, smallpox hospitals, charity hospitals, women’s hospitals, and hospitals for the incurables ((Typhoid Mary was famously quarantined there, repeatedly, and finally until her death). Basically, it was a place to hide away unwanted people that other New Yorkers didn’t want contact with.
Horn vividly recreates the two worlds: the world where people who had committed crimes, people without money, with contagious or chronic diseases (including chronic old age), or mental illness weren’t wanted; and the world where they ended up. Fun fact: on the island, early hospitals were in close proximity to the prisons, providing healthy prisoners to staff the hospitals and poorhouses. Now that’s a lose-lose proposition!***
As with any public works, there was a cycle of buildings becoming worn down, rat-infested, fire-traps until something horrible happened, at which point, politicians had to get all fired up (to shut up reformers), rebuild the institutions (often shortsightedly), so that everyone could go back to ignoring what was happening there until the whole cycle started all over again.
That cycle ended in the 1960s, when real estate developers recognized: hey! this island has a great view of Manhattan! The prisons were moved to Rikers****, the lunatic asylum was relocated to Wards Island (the next island to the north), hospitals were closed or relocated, and the island was reimagined for a luxury housing community. But if you visit now, once you pass the shiny new Tech Campus on your way to Four Freedoms state park, you will walk past the ruins of earlier times. Reading this book puts those historical structures in better perspective.
In one sense, the island’s redevelopment and renaming after FDR, and the dedication of the park to the Four Freedoms seems darkly appropriate: Freedom of Speech and Expression – when holding unconventional opinions could, in darker times, get you sent to a prison or lunatic asylum on the island. Freedom from Want, when being unable to support yourself could get you banished to a workhouse or poorhouse on the island. And Freedom from Fear – when some people’s greatest fear was being sent to this island.
Think about that, the next time you go to that chi-chi new bar on the island that everyone’s raving about.
I highly recommend this book, especially if you live in New York. Horn makes it easy to picture yourself in the earlier times of the island, and captures the fear and desperation of the people sentenced to go there, the challenges that bring them there, and the attitudes of the people who banish them there.
Remember that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat history.
*Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
**One of the things you may notice, if you take a bus or cab into Manhattan from the airports, is that pass a lot of very big cemeteries on your way. What the heck, right? Well, there weren’t a lot of options for burying people in Manhattan. Some churches, for example, ended up burying people in layers in their churchyards, raising the level of their churchyards high above street level. And there was an African American burial ground in lower Manhattan that the city just plowed over and built on top of. (There’s a memorial to it on Duane Street – the Duane in Duane Reade – and Elk Street, now renamed African Burial Ground Way, in true New York fashion.) But most people were buried in all that empty land across the river in Queens and Brooklyn. The funeral parties were ferried across the East River which, being a tidal river, is not an easy river to ferry. I remember reading once – maybe it was in a book about the Brooklyn Bridge? – about a funeral party that got caught in a storm, their barge capsized, and the family ended up with a lot of other funerals to attend. So it was no wonder that taking the ferry to Blackwell’s Island on a dark stormy night was to be dreaded.
***There is another little island north of Roosevelt Island, past the Triboro Bridge, off the Bronx – Hart Island – that people dreaded more than Blackwell’s or Welfare Island: it’s NYC’s potter’s field, where the poor and victims of mass pandemics end up. There’s a whole section dedicated to people who died from AIDS and another dedicated to victims of Covid, all those bodies in freezer trucks that you saw on the news in early 2020. Here’s a scary statistic that I just discovered looking up the name of this island: 28% of those buried on Hart Island, even during normal times, are infants. Because some people only care about babies until they emerge from the womb.
****Now doomed for closure. Someone needs to figure out that putting prisons on islands is not practical.
Change+Management 