Neighbors and friends are calling for support in raising Earl Albert's spirits while he recovers!
Discover all the ways you can rediscover NYC!
Like most of the World's Fair structures, these commemorative mosaic medallions may soon be lost!
We’ve written a lot of articles on New York City’s islands, both abandoned and in use. While the city itself is interesting and filled with cool history and things to do, its islands, such as North Brother’s Island, Hart Island, Governors Island, and Rikers Island, also have some intriguing sights. Now, it’s time to rediscover New York City’s Roosevelt Island – a residential, 2-mile long island packed with interesting secrets.
Though Roosevelt Island is now named after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, people called quite a few different things before this. The Lenape tribe, who first inhabited the island, called it “Minnehanonck.” According to the New York Times, this name is commonly thought to be translated to “Long Island” or “It’s nice to be on the island.”
When the Dutch purchased Roosevelt Island from the Native Americans in 1637, they renamed it “Varken Eylandt,” or “Hogs Island” for all the hogs raised there. A little while later, a British captain named John Manning lived on the island in shame after shortly surrendering New York to the Dutch, so that it became known as “Manning’s Island.”
The name changed to “Blackwell’s Island” in 1686, when Captain Manning’s stepdaughter inherited the island and married Robert Blackwell. During this namesake, it became home to institutions such as a prison, lunatic asylum, and a smallpox hospital, all of which will be discussed later in this list.
In 1921, the city renamed the island “Welfare Island” when it started reforming the area, establishing hospitals. Finally, in 1973 it became “Roosevelt Island,” after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A descendant of Robert Blackwell, James Blackwell, built a house called the Blackwell House, now on Main Street, in about 1796. When the city bought Blackwell’s Island, the island became less agricultural and more institutional. When a penitentiary was erected in 1829, the house became a residential place for institutional administrators. The house was abandoned during the 1900s and restored in the early 1970s.
In addition to being one of the few New York farmhouses from the period immediately following the Revolutionary War, it is also the only surviving building on Roosevelt Island from the time period when the island was still private property.
Many have probably heard of Nellie Bly, who pretended to be insane to write a breakthrough investigative piece on the cruelty of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. This very same asylum is the standing Octagon Building on Roosevelt Island. The asylum opened in 1838, and rumors quickly spread about its brutal abuse of the inmates.
In her expose, “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” Bly called the asylum a “human rat-trap” with staff who “choked, beat and harassed patients.”
The asylum moved to Ward’s Island a little while later, so this building became the Metropolitan Hospital, which then moved to Harlem in the 1950s. The asylum’s original octagon still stands as a classy apartment complex near a beautiful community garden – quite a contrast to what it used to be. Visitors are generally welcome to enter octagon, which serves as the lobby and look at the old photographs on display.
Though the island is now residential and a tourist attraction, there used to be a penitentiary on the island and the city once used it as a place for undesirable people. The main building was completed in 1832, and eventually had a north wing when Bellevue Hospital was divided and sent some of its inmates to Blackwell’s Island.
The penitentiary housed around 7000 inmates, all of whom had to perform daily labor. It contained 221 cells, most of which were filled with minor offenders. It closed in 1936, shortly after Rikers Island opened.
Read also about our inside visits into Rikers Island.
The Renwick Smallpox Hospital
If the lunatic asylum and prison weren’t enough, we’ll add one more former, creepy institution on Roosevelt Island to the list: a smallpox hospital.
By the end of the 1800s, it was common to isolate patients suffering from contagious diseases like smallpox on islands, like North Brother Island, Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, and of course, Blackwell’s Island. The island’s Gothic-revival style Renwick Smallpox Hospital was designed by James Renwick Jr. (who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral), built using labor from the lunatic asylum, completed in 1856.
It functioned for 19 years and treated about 7000 patients. Many of these were impoverished immigrants who didn’t trust the immunization process or Union soldiers who needed curing. In 1875, the hospital moved to North Brother Island when the hospital became too crowded but the original building remains today and is the only landmarked ruin in New York City. During the construction of FDR Four Freedoms Park, the organization behind the park hoped to use the hospital as a visitor center but funds and interest petered out, after an initial stabilization.
The Delacorte Fountain was dedicated in 1968 by George T. Delacorte, who wanted New York to have an equivalent to Switzerland’s Jet D’Eau. It sprayed East River water hundreds of feet into the air across from the United Nations on the southern edge of Roosevelt Island. However, the New York Times reported in 1987 that the city’s Parks Commissioner had fears that “liquid waste was being flung 400 feet in the eyes and faces of people who lived on Sutton Place.”
In response to this, the water was chlorinated, which lowered its height to 240 feet. During the later drought years, people worried the fountain would represent overconsumption of water, so it was turned off. In 1985, the powerful streams of water washed off the topsoil from some newly planted trees and crushed a car roof. The next year, the geyser stopped working.
The boat prow jutting out of Roosevelt Island
It might seem like the large boat prow sticking out the side of Octagon Park is some intriguing, ancient remnant of a ship washed ashore. However, turns out it’s an art project. There actually used to be a boat landing in this location, and in 1997 a performance stage and observation platform were built in the shape of a boat prow.
A Tom Otterness sculpture in the East River
If you were to stroll along the western promenade of Roosevelt Island, you might want to peer over into the East River: there are small, funny looking, green statues in the water. These quirky sculptures were created by Tom Otterness in 1996, and the installation as a whole is called “The Marriage of Real Estate and Money.”
The FDR Four Freedoms Park
The FDR Four Freedoms Park, finished in 2012, took forty years to finally complete. Louis Kahn was one of the most influential architects of the 19th century, and died shortly after the project commenced in 1973. Over the years, economic crises and political sensibilities halted progress on the park until architect Gina Pollara revived the project. As such, Roosevelt Island’s Four Freedoms Park is the only establishment designed by Louis Kahn in New York City.
At the opening ceremony, Governor Cuomo said the park was a testament to Louis Kahn, whose design lay “dormant for years but could be picked up and be as vital and current as it was when he designed it.”
See our behind-the-scenes documentation of the construction of Four Freedoms Park in 2011.
The bright red tramway system carrying commuters from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island and back was established in 1976 as a temporary means of transportation for island residents while they waited for the completion of the Island’s subway link. However, by the time the link was there, the tramway had already become an integral part of mode of transportation, so it continued to operate and became permanent. Today it remains a crucial part of New York City’s transit system, with a $25 million renovation in 2010, and has carried over 26 million passengers.
This is probably one you didn’t expect: Roosevelt Island has the only Automated Vacuum Collection System (AVAC) to serve a residential complex in the entire nation. An AVAC is essentially a high speed waste transportation system that uses underground pneumatic tubes to a collection station, where it is compacted and sealed in containers. The AVAC moves 5.8 tons of trash per day.
Check out other locations in New York City where you can find remnants of pneumatic tubes.
Demolished in 2014, Goldwater Hospital had a long basement level tunnel that formed a spine below the hospital’s six buildings. Here’s an image of the tunnel, from our series on NYC’s secret tunnels taken by LTVSquad, who used it to access all of the buildings, which were destroyed to be replaced by the Cornell NYC Tech Campus.
In 2013, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation issued a Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEI) regarding the steam plant that sits just behind the tram station, built in parts from 1932 through the 1950s. Although the RFEI specifically targets real estate developers for the adaptive reuse of the 56,000 square foot space, one self-started community organization had been eyeing the property. The Friends of the Roosevelt Island Steam Plant (FRISP) hopes to transform the building and surrounding vacant land into a Museum for Technology, Art and Science (MOTAAS), but as of November 2014 there were no updates from the RIOC about the space. The steam plant shut down in 2014, take a look at our photos inside the steam plant while it was still in operation.
Next, check out 8 Abandoned Islands Near NYC and 6 Abandoned Asylums and Hospitals in the NYC Region.
Subscribe to our newsletter
