To start with, the East River isn’t a river. It’s a tidal straight connecting the Long Island Sound and the upper bay; when the tide changes, the entire Atlantic tries to pour through. The current gets up to about 7 mph and changes direction at each slack tide. Fun times if you’re in a sailboat.
The straight stretch of the East River north of Corlears Hook is divided into two channels by a long narrow island. It was originally called Blackwell’s Island after the damned soul who thought that putting a farm on an island surrounded by salt water and with limited spring water was a good idea. It became the municipal dumping ground in the nineteenth century, starting with a poorhouse, an insane asylum, a jail, and a smallpox hospital, and eventually was renamed Welfare Island as a result.
When urban renewal came along, the island was renamed Roosevelt after FDR, although given what it was in his lifetime, I don’t know that he would have appreciated the gesture. It’s now a pleasant if excruciatingly boring place to live, with its own subway stop and an elevated tram to Manhattan. The reality of it was pegged nicely in the opening scene of Dark Water: as a mother and daughter take the tram to go look at an apartment on the island, the little girl says, in an accusing tone of voice, “This isn’t Manhattan.”
Mayor Mike’s latest grand project, a new engineering school, will be located on the south end of the island, where presumably the ghosts of the dead lunatics will serve as teaching assistants.
Island Hospital – the hospital for indigents – after twenty years of abandonment in 1989:
