March 21 – Celebrating Our Island

By admin

Opening Day, 1952
Coler Welcomes New Residents

SPECIAL EDITION  MARCH 21, 2020
CELEBRATING
OUR ISLAND

This is the fourth in a series of historical articles

Wonders of Roosevelt Island    
 Stephen BlankMember of the Board, Roosevelt Island Historical Society
January 8, 2020

When Lynn and I arrived on Roosevelt Island 43 years ago, we were fascinated by this new urban community recently linked to the “mainland” by an aerial tramway. With its Main Street, diverse population, shops, network of new organizations, odd school system (two grades housed in each of the 5 residential buildings) and hearty band of pioneers, it seemed like another world. And beautiful: The view from the Island compared with Naples, Haifa or Hong Kong. Simply wonderful.
 
The view was indeed wonderful, but in 1977, little was left intact on the once crowded island where many medical and social institutions serving New York’s poor, afflicted and criminal were once found, including the infamous Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary and the iconic Insane Asylum. (A word of explanation. Our island was inherited by the Blackwell family in 1685 and known as Blackwell’s Island for the next 250 years. In 1921, the name was changed to Welfare Island, for obvious reasons. Finally in 1973, Welfare Island was renamed Roosevelt Island.) At that point, there were few functional buildings – including the 5 WIRE residential buildings, the Chapel of Good Shepherd and Goldwater and Bird S. Coler hospitals.
 
Blackwell’s Island’s population had begun to decline at the end of the 19^th century. In the 1930s, Robert Moses wanted to tear down everything that remained and make a great public park here. Another idea floated about the same time was to create a new hospital park on the island. The Central Nurses Residence opened in 1939 (the empty building was demolished in 2002) and Goldwater hospital opened in 1938, replacing the Blackwell Island penitentiary. Bird S. Coler Hospital opened in 1952, the last of the pre-Roosevelt Island constructions. These hospitals joined two older facilities – City Hospital at the southern end of the island and Metropolitan Hospital at the northern end. The fire training facility and laundry were operating and nurses training went on.
 
So, in the early 1950s, parts of Welfare Island were still functioning. But much of it had been allowed to deteriorate. Soon, only Goldwater and Coler would remain. Most of the island’s buildings were left to ruin. Welfare Island, over the years between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, wrote Judy Berdy in her Images of America volume on Roosevelt Island, “became a haunted, desolate landscape full of wonderful, abandoned buildings…”  
 
We pioneers learned only later how our children played in the ruins. Actually, not just children. Lynn and I tried to figure a way to drag the enormous pews out of the half collapsed Catholic church. The neglect was painful. We watched the old City Hospital that stretched from east to west across the island burn and the glorious interior of the old insane asylum was trashed. But on each July 4^th, we were permitted walk down to the southern tip of the island to watch the Macy fireworks, through a field of milled stones from former medical buildings
 
Welfare Island had once been well manicured. There were gardens and lawns.  But decades before the first new Roosevelt Island building began, much of the island had gone to seed and the remains of many buildings of Welfare Island were overgrown.  No one recalls precisely what was growing here in the 1950s or ‘60s, but photos from this period show open fields and stands of trees. Native as well as non-native flora repopulated the island. The cover was surely similar to what would grow unmanaged across this part of New York. We know that there were some fine trees – American elms that would die in the 1950s because of Dutch elm disease as well as pin oaks, London plane trees, red maples and the invasive Norway maples some of which continue to survive today.  Some wildlife had found their way to the island. There are reports of pheasants roaming around, a yellow fox, maybe even a turkey living on the southern end of the island.

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From the beginning, efforts to restore Welfare Island (and create Roosevelt Island) focused on the built environment.
 
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In October 1969, a team headed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee prepared a report on “the Island Nobody Knows”, one of the first steps taken toward the redevelopment of the island. The report concentrated on the remarkable buildings – or remains of buildings – found on the island, its “important landmarks”. It laid out splendid ideas for “docks and harbors for water buses and taxis of the sort that have long and efficiently served Venice… and two glass-tower elevators for pedestrian access from the 59^th St Bridge.”  The danger is, the authors write, that if steps are not taken quickly, these remarkable assets will be forgotten. We live today with several of these assets – the Chapel of Good Shepherd remains a central community resource, the Octagon has been rebuilt and the Smallpox Hospital remains – but with an uncertain future.  

 
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There are other remarkable assets on our island, assets we look at every day but rarely see.
These are our natural treasures – what grows here and lives here and visits here.  
The natural environment is as vital in our island’s past and to its future as the built environment.
 
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A grand change that has taken place over the past decades is the island’s setting in the East River. When we arrived in 1977, the East River was dirty – really dirty – and while we were told fish skulked at the bottom, that was hard to believe. Today, natural life has re-emerged. The Audubon Society says that more than a dozen species of water birds have returned to the area since the 1970’s, including eight species of heron and egret alone. There’s much more life in the water. Hard to believe: Whale sightings in New York City waters – out to sea, not in the harbor! – have jumped from 5 to 272 since 2010. This is not due solely to cleaner water. Climate change is important, too, as are longer-term efforts to restore several strains of bird life. But the NYC Department of Environmental Protection reports that NY harbor is cleaner today than it’s been in nearly 110 years.
 
The East River if not quite drinkable, is much cleaner, enough so that kayakers and jet skiers no longer draw a startled look. Our island’s setting has been transformed over the past few decades, and our river setting is more in touch with the natural world than has been the case in decades – or more.

In creating the new Roosevelt Island, from the Lighthouse Park in the north to the FDR Memorial in the south, most of the wild vegetation that had grown up since the 1930s was destroyed. A Survey of Trees on Roosevelt Island was carried out in 2012, and counted some 1500 trees of all types including more recently planted linden and ginkgoes along Main Street. We do not know what was cut down in the original WIRE construction, but we know that 107 trees were lost when the Cornell campus was built and 137 were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Some older trees do remain and some creative landscaping has been done – for example, the planting of native plants in Southpoint Park, such as the ironweed, Joe Pye, and switchgrass at the northern entrance. Roosevelt Island, especially in the moment of Cherry Blossoms, is a very beautiful place.
 
There’s more aquatic life, and the wildfowl are remarkable. If you walk on the island you will see much more life. Gulls, of course, and other fowl – and, no, not just the ubiquitous Canada geese many of which no longer migrate.  Rossana Ceruzzi, Executive Director of the Wildlife Freedom Foundation, the island’s licensed wildlife expert, says that the island now hosts swans, herons, cormorants, as well as other variants of migratory geese which visit us en route in spring and fall.  She tells us that a whole zoological garden of critters live here, too: raccoons, opossums (probably brought here and abandoned) and even small brow bats (which few of us actually see) as well as the ever energetic eastern grey squirrels and their mutant black cousins.
 
In this era, “no one thought of natural space,” says Michael Feller, a naturalist and educator who regularly brings his School of Visual Arts students to Roosevelt Island. The Johnson and Burgee report suggested the creation of a 25 acre “ecological park” stretching southward from the Octagon (which was to be preserved and rehabilitated). “Here there would be reconstructed”, the report said, “all the innumerable environmental conditions that exit in our part of the country, to enable visitors, young and old, to study the interaction of natural organisms with their man-made surroundings.” This park would be “unique, not only in this country but throughout the world.” But the idea here was a built park, not to preserve the wild growth that had emerged in the previous decades.

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One wild area one the island dating back to the 1930s-‘50s does survive.
 
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Our remaining wild area is the fenced-off east and west shoreline of Southpoint Park. These areas have been largely neglected since the development of the Park which opened in August, 2011 (although they were used as dumps for materials gathered from the southern end of the island).  A positive aspect of this human inattention has been that wildlife has found safe, welcoming habitat along the shore and within these two small areas (estimated to be about 1.4 acres in total), because human presence is restricted by fencing along the interior boundaries.
 
Our friend and fellow Roosevelt Islander, the naturalist Jack Burkhalter tells us that many native and migratory birds have found homes or feed and rest here.  On the western shoreline Canada geese nest and rear their goslings, who often trail their parents throughout the Park, to the delight of visitors.  In addition, the shoreline habitat has been home to Mallard ducks and their ducklings.  In the fall, white-throated sparrows and song sparrows have been seen eating the seeds of native switchgrass while perched on the tall grass stems.  On the eastern shoreline, the thicket of trees, saplings, and forbs provides shelter and food for many native species of birds, including the black-crowned night heron, tufted titmice, gray catbirds, Northern mockingbirds, house finches, song sparrows, among others.  The tree nests of American robins and mockingbirds have been sighted as well.  Insect life provides diversity and food for birds. Monarch butterflies, milkweed bugs, and milkweed tussock moth caterpillars have been observed there. Native trees such as silver maple, cottonwood, green ash, and red mulberry live here, and native plants growing in this shoreline habitat include New England aster, common milkweed, fleabanes, white snakeroot, and goldenrods. The area is also home to invasive species such as Japanese knotweed and rampant field bindweed.  
 
These small areas host a wide array of plants and provide habitats for birds and insects. More, they provide our island with an irreplaceable link to its past.

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In many ways, the island project has done well. Our unique urban community, the aerial Tram, the new Cornell Tech Campus, our famous cherry blossoms and the FDR Memorial have made Roosevelt Island a lovely place to live and an attraction for visitors from around the world.
 
But crucial questions remain affecting our island’s treasures, our vital ties to the island’s past and its fragile heritage.
At the southern end of the island in particular:
            What will happen with the Smallpox Hospital?
            How will the Island’s sea wall be restored?  
            And what will happen to our few remaining wild spaces?

EDITORIAL

Little things
My desk is a mess
I cannot master Mailchimp
I made 12 containers of chicken soup
Looking out of the window at peaceful Queens
No traffic on the Queensboro Bridge
Watching Beano the cat sleep
Being welcomed at Shoprite by an exhausted, yet enthusiastic staff
Finding lots of Entenmenns cakes to take for distribution at Coler for residents coffee hour
Being on an island of blooming daffodils, remembering many were planted after 9/11
Keeping in touch with friends and family
I think I will miss the NYC Ferries passing by my window soon
A bright and beautiful sunrise tomorrow morning beaming into my window

Judith Berdy