Monday, January 11, 2021 – WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN ON OUR ISLAND, MANY CONCEPTS
Scandals of the Upper West Side
Tuesday, January 12,
7 PM
RIHS Lecture
The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and the New York Public Library are proud to host Beth Goffe and her presentation “Scandals of the Upper West Side.” Beth Goffe is a licensed New York City tour guide. An Upper West Side resident for over three decades, she is enamored with the city’s history and has amassed quite a few entertaining stories over the years.
To register: https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2020/01/12/scandals-upper-west-side
259th Edition
January 11, 2021
Goldwater Hospital, 1939 RIHS Archives (c)
Roosevelt Island: What Might Have Been
Stephen Blank
Our little island, rising bravely from the East River, has inspired quite a few visions of what might be done here. Some were very serious (a site for the City’s penitentiary), some fanciful (a New York version of Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens) and some weird (a massive site for 70,000 island inhabitants). I hope you will join me on a brief tour of some of these visions.
The first, of course, was New York City’s vision for the island. In the 1820s, the City bought several small islands where it would build new institutions to house the City’s sick, criminal or indigent. In 1828, our island was purchased from the Blackwell family; a penitentiary would be built here. For the next century, Blackwell’s Island – or, as it became officially known in 1921, Welfare Island – was a major center for some of the City’s most important social institutions.
Blackwell’s Island’s population began to decline at the end of the 19th century and key institutions were closed. In the 1930s, Robert Moses laid out his idea: he would tear down everything that remained and make a great public park here. On June 17, 1934, the New York Times reported that Mayor LaGuardia said that he had instructed Moses, then Commissioner of Parks, to turn at least part of Welfare Island into a public park.
This kicked off an intense debate between Moses and Dr. Sigmund Schultz Goldwater, City Commissioner for Hospitals. Goldwater headed the project to build a new Welfare Island Hospital for Chronic Diseases on the site of the old penitentiary (which would be renamed Goldwater Memorial Hospital in his honor). Goldwater had a very different vision. He wanted to build a suite of seven modern medical facilities in a hospital park on the island. Moses had already opened parks on Randall’s and Wards Islands, and the scale tipped in Goldwater’s favor. The first steps were taken in 1938 with the opening of Goldwater hospital and in 1939 with the Central Nurses Residence. After the war, in 1952, Bird S. Coler Hospital was opened.
But by the early 1950s, although parts of Welfare Island were still functioning, 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…”
These 147 acres, so close to the heart of the City and yet at a distance drew the attention of planners and dreamers. All sorts of ideas were thrown in the air.
Financier Frederick Richmond envisioned creating a new town on Welfare Island with an estimated future population of 70,000. He enlisted Victor Gruen, architect and city planner who in 1961 created a design that would “deck over most of the island with a twenty-two foot high, two-level concrete platform, stashing beneath it schools, shops, pedestrian concourses, a trash and freight system, and an internal transportation system run on conveyor belts.. Above the platform rose a staggered line of fifty-story towers, loosely stitched together by an undulating wall of apartment buildings, ranging in height from eight to thirty stories.” (Rebecca Read Shanor, The City That Never Was, 1988, p. 188). The idea was that this would create a kind of vertical suburb, a haven for families wishing to flee the City’s urban center.
The big problem was transportation. Certainly the island’s bridge to Queens and the elevators down from the 59th St Bridge would be inadequate for a population of 70,000. Then, in 1965, the Transit Authority released a $28 million plan to build a subway under the East River from 63rd Street in Manhattan to Long Island City with a station on Welfare Island. Completion was set for the early 1970s and more possibilities for the island seemed to open.
Landscape architects and site planners Robert Zion and Harold Breen, champions of “vest-pocket” parks in Manhattan, had another take on the island. They saw it as a great park, “with sprawling pleasure ground, modeled after Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen’s famous in–town amusement and cultural park.” The planners said that it would “not be a garish, noisy reef of honkey-tonk…” Rather it would be “an attractive informal country-like setting” with restaurants and other amenities.
But other ideas were also afoot. In the face of outraged community opposition, Con Ed dropped its plan build the world’s largest nuclear plant at the Ravenswood Facility – across the East River from Welfare Island. It then advanced another idea to build a nuclear reactor on Welfare Island. But the in-town nuclear option failed to gain traction, and the idea died quickly.
And Zion and Breen revised their original plan, adding a remarkable new dimension. In 1967, the government of Egypt promised to gift an ancient temple to the United States in thanks for the assistance given in the construction of a new high dam at the southern end of the Nile. A tussle ensured over where it would go: The Smithsonian wanted the temple, but New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art got it. Not everyone was pleased with the idea of expanding the Met into Central Park to house the temple. Zion and Breen’s new proposal suggested siting it here, at the southern end of the island. Indeed, perhaps the Met’s entire Egyptian collection might be moved here.
Their proposal was submitted in 1968 to the Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee that had been recently created by Mayor John Lindsey to determine the best possible use for the city-owned island.
An article in NYC Urbanism discusses even more ideas: One far-fetched proposal included digging up bodies in Queens and Brooklyn cemeteries and reburying them on the Island to free up space in the two Boroughs. Other ideas included linking the island to Midtown via landfill and multiple causeways, funneling the East River and shipping traffic through a narrow canal. A university here?
The Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee published a plan which was later incorporated into the General Development Plan produced by Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), which he formed in 1969. The UDC issued a 141-page report analyzing the different options for the island. They proceeded to sign a 99-year lease for the land and brought in architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee to design an ambitious masterplan with housing for 20,000 new residents.
The Island Nobody Knows, NYS Urban Development Corporation 1969 (c)
In October 1969, the Johnson-Burgee team revealed its report on “the Island Nobody Knows”. They called for a mixed-income, automobile-free community planned around landscaped plazas and promenades utilizing the picturesque river and skyline views. While the development would have commercial and civic buildings – a public school, daycare facility, parking garage, office space and a hotel – the large majority of space would be used for apartment buildings of varying shapes and sizes. The area was split into two “towns,” Northtown and Southtown, of which there were nine zones, five parks, and four building lots. This was done to preserve the vistas from the island and to avoid long slab-like developments running the length of the island, as seen in the Gruen Plan. The report concentrated on the remarkable buildings – or remains of buildings – found on the island, the island’s “important landmarks”. It laid out impressive 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 59th St Bridge.”
The masterplan was approved in October 1969 and the UDC immediately lept into action, hiring architects for the housing, garage, commercial facilities, infrastructure, and parks. In a ceremony in 1973, Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay were present for the renaming of Welfare Island in honor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the ceremony, architect Louis Kahn revealed his design for the memorial park to be constructed on the island’s Southpoint. And so begins the new phase of our island.
It might have been fun to wander up north on the island to play in our own Tivoli gardens, or to meander south to visit our Temple of Dendur. Or perhaps to enjoy docks and water taxis like Venice. But I’m glad we didn’t get a nuclear reactor.
Thanks for coming with me.
Stephen Blank
RIHS
January 9, 2021
WEEKEND PHOTO
The address of Chapel of the Good Shepherd Jay Jacobson, Alexis Villefane and Nina Lublin and Nancy Brown got it right
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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EDITORIAL
After last week, I keep thinking that I hope we can keep it together until next Wednesday at 12 noon. My friend Barbara plans to be at the east river facing the countdown clock in Long Island City.
I want a new clock showing days of normalcy. For me it has been 4 years of waking up in trepidation over the news every day.
Though my name is Berdy, I do the only tweets I want to hear come from birds.
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Sources:
https://www.nycurbanism.com/brutalnyc/2017/2/15/eastwood
Rebecca Read Shanor, The City That Never Was, 1988
Greg Goldin, Sam Lubell, Never Built New York, 2016
Judith Berdy, Roosevelt Island; Images of America, 2003
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
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rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
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