WHERE: The southern third of Roosevelt Island
START/FINISH: Roosevelt Island subway station (F train), fully accessible
DISTANCE: 1.9 miles (3 kilometers)
Photographs by Michael Cairl.
Roosevelt Island is a narrow finger of land in the East River. In 1637, Dutch Governor Wouter van Twiller purchased the island, then known as Hog Island, from the Canarsie Indians. After the Dutch surrendered to the English in 1664, Captain John Manning acquired the island in 1666, which became known as Manning’s Island, and twenty years later, Manning’s son-in-law, Robert Blackwell, became the island’s new owner and namesake. The City of New York bought Blackwell’s Island from the Blackwell family in 1828 and over the years constructed the Smallpox Hospital, the Lunatic Asylum, a jail, a workhouse, and other facilities. In 1921 the City renamed the island Welfare Island, and between 1939 and 1952 two new municipal hospitals for the chronically ill, Bird S. Coler Hospital and Goldwater Memorial Hospital, were built. The Fire Department constructed a training facility on the island. When the Queensboro Bridge opened in 1909, an elevator was built to carry pedestrians and vehicles between the bridge and the island. Road access came in 1955 with the construction of the Welfare Island Bridge to Queens.
In 1969 the city leased the island to the New York State Urban Development Corporation for 99 years. The UDC built a new town on the island, which was renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973. In 1976 the Roosevelt Island Tramway opened just north of the Queensboro Bridge, as a temporary measure to take people between Manhattan and the island. Nearly 50 years later, the aerial tramway is a beloved fixture in the cityscape. The subway came to Roosevelt Island in 1989.
From newyorkalmanack.com:
The island was a pioneer in creating barrier free environments with curb cuts, elevators, wide doors, and low counters, according to Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, which has extensively documented this history, and has a rich archive on the hospital, its leading doctors and some of its patients. She says that the hospital and associated research institutes have hosted many outstanding research scientists and doctors, including hospital director Dr. David Seegal who made advances in nephritis and rheumatic fever, and Julius Axlerod who won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for neuro-pharmalogical research relating to pain relief. Important studies of tuberculosis, arthritis and cirrhosis were also conducted there.
This short walk was around the southern third of the island, south of the Queensboro Bridge. Starting at the subway station, I walked south to the tramway terminal. Here, one of five kiosks that used to serve passengers for the Queensboro Bridge streetcars has been made into a pleasant little visitors center.
From here I crossed over to the Queens side of the island - a very short walk - and walked south past the bridge to the Cornell Tech campus. This research institution is a joint project of Cornell University and the Technion in Haifa, Israel. It opened in 2017 on the site formerly occupied by Goldwater Memorial Hospital.
From newyorkalmanack.com:
The Goldwater Hospital was a monument to the golden years of public health in New York City, designed in distinctive chevrons to offer light and air to all its patients. The rooms had terraces to allow patients direct access to fresh air, and each ward featured a solarium. The hospital had 2,700 windows.
In its early years Goldwater cared for polio patients and ran a wheelchair repair shop with a national reputation for innovation and patient service. Mike Acevedo, nicknamed Dr. Wheelchair, ran it as a “wheel chair pit-stop that maintained and repaired a stock of more than 2,000 wheelchairs.” In his early work during the Vietnam era, they would scavenge parts from model airplanes to use as controls.
There was a nursing school and residence on the island. The Central Nurses Residence had 600 rooms, built by the Works Progress Administration. New York City ran the School of Practical Nursing from 194 -to 1970. One of the most famous nurses is best known outside of her work with patients. Jazz singer Alberta Hunter worked at Goldwater for 20 years, but is most known for her blues recordings of the teens to 1940s. Concealing her age, she studied for a nursing degree, and upon retirement started singing again until she died at age 89.
When Goldwater closed, its patients, many confined to wheelchairs, were moved to Coler Hospital (now Coler-Goldwater Hospital) at the north end of Roosevelt Island, or to the renovated old North General Hospital in Harlem (now the Henry J. Carter Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility).
The Cornell Tech campus is architecturally excellent; it is light, accessible, and with plenty of space for the general public to walk around. Time will tell what innovations come from there.
Cornell Tech campus.
Crossing the campus, I was back on the Manhattan side of the island, walking south toward the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. A short distance past the park entrance was something I didn’t know about before: the FDR Hope Memorial. Completed in 2020, it is a monument to the thirty-second President of the United States overcoming disability. Markers in the pathway commemorate events in his life and afterwards, culminating in something that remains an aspiration.
At the end of the walkway is a bronze statue of FDR in a wheelchair, greeting a girl who has a crutch and a leg brace. I sat on a bench there for a good while, contemplating that Franklin Roosevelt, a son of privilege, rose to greatness only after succumbing to polio in 1921. I thought of my own journey. I might never achieve greatness - I’m not sure I could define “greatness” - but my experience of stroke has given me new purpose. That might be enough. It’s not what I do about the stroke, it’s what I do with the stroke, and I mean to do plenty.
The FDR Hope Memorial is on part of the site occupied by Charity Hospital, previously City Hospital. This was designed by James Renwick and opened in 1861. In 1877, Charity Hospital opened a school of nursing, the fourth such training institution in the United States. The program of education for nurses encompassed two to three years of training in the care of patients and general hospital cleanliness. At Charity Hospital, nurses treated patients, assisted surgeons, weighed and cared for newborns, and took cooking classes. In 1957, Charity Hospital and the neighboring Smallpox Hospital were closed and their patients transferred to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Charity Hospital fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1994.
From the FDR Hope Memorial I went past the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital on my way to the Four Freedoms Memorial. The central portion of the hospital, designed by James Renwick, opened in 1856. The north and south wings opened early in the 20th Century. Although a smallpox vaccine existed when the hospital opened, smallpox remained a public health problem in New York City and smallpox patients were kept on Blackwell’s Island, away from the city.
Ruins of the Smallpox Hospital.
The Four Freedoms Memorial was one of the last works designed by Louis Kahn (1902 - 1974), who had the plans with him when he died in New York’s Pennsylvania Station. Kahn was known for outwardly hard-edged buildings; for example, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut certainly is that, but inside it is an outstanding place to view art. Approaching from the north, the visitor passes between a double row of trees that narrow as they approach the point, framing views of the New York skyline and the harbor. The memorial is a procession of elegant open-air spaces, culminating in a 3,600-square-foot (330 square meters) plaza surrounded by 28 blocks of North Carolina granite, each weighing 36 tons. The courtyard contains a bust of Roosevelt, sculpted in 1933 by Jo Davidson. At the north end of the open-air room at the tip of the island is an excerpt from FDR’s Four Freedoms speech of January 6, 1941. Looking at this, I couldn’t help thinking that we surely are led by lesser lights today.
View south from the Four Freedoms Memorial.
There is nothing bombastic about this space; it is cool, contemplative, peaceful. At the far southern end the narrowing entry to the Memorial gives way to the great sweep of the city, looking down the East River.
The walk back to the subway more or less retraced my steps. The southern part of Roosevelt Island is by far more interesting than the northern part. The island as a whole packs in a respectable amount of history.