Walking Tour : A Lighthouse with Celebrity on Roosevelt Island

     For 5 years as an Astorian, I spent time in Socrates Sculpture Park and gazed at the little lighthouse sitting on Roosevelt Island, amidst the East River (seen from my viewpoint above).  I've never seen it lit.  Today, I got curious about how it got there.

     I referred to the internet via my cellphone.  It was built by James Renwick, Jr..  I recognized that name as the architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue!  Wow!  (He also built Grace Church on Broadway.  See my blog entry about that: http://halfwindsorfullthrottle.blogspot.com/2016/02/walking-tour-of-gothic-grace-church-nyc.html )

     What was Renwick doing on that small strip of island?  

     He was building the island's smallpox hospital, circa 1856.  During the "gothic" lighthouse's construction in 1872, NYC quarantined its smallpox patients on the island for "loathsome malady treatment".  Simultaneously, the lighthouse was built with stones quarried on the island by inmates of its penitentiary.  What a combo: patients and prisoners.  Ironic that the island's first name translated into "Nice to Be Here"!

     Originally, the island was called Minnahannock (which means "It's Nice to Be Here") by the Canarsie Tribe of Native American Indians.  Canarsie is still the name of a historic area in Kings County... a.k.a. Brooklyn.  (It is alongside Kings Highway, a road from the 1700s named for the King of England.  It connects Crown Heights with New Utrecht--a neighborhood from 1652 named for the Dutch city of Utrecht). 

     When the Brits conquered Manhattan from the Dutch in 1666, they called it Manning's Island, named after the Sheriff of New York.  His son-in-law, Robert Blackwell, took it over and named it Blackwell's Island.  

     45 years after America won the Revolutionary War, NYC bought the island and made it a site for corrective institutions.  In true NYC fashion, it included a scandalous prison, a Lunatic Asylum, a workhouse, an almshouse, a pathological bacteria research lab, and the aforementioned Smallpox Quarantine Hospital.  Such a fun island.  Ergo, by 1921, the city renamed it Welfare Island.  In the 1970s, it was named after President FDR.

     As you can see below, the city (perhaps sensibly) never intended road access to the island!  The Queensboro Bridge, built in 1909, goes right over it.  (It is named for Queens County, which was created in honor of the Queen of England of 1683).

Yet, a photograph from 1917 shows the storehouse for an elevator that allowed vehicular access to the island from the Queensboro Bridge.  The elevator was dismantled in 1955, as were the streetcars that accessed the island.

Subways finally arrived in 1989 (13 years behind schedule... which is typical of our Metropolitan Transit Authority).  Otherwise, the only way to the island is the "cable car" tram.

The island's Visitor Center occupies an old Victorian streetcar station (below).  Stairs and an elevator gave access from the station to the streetcar station in the middle of the Queensboro Bridge.

Trolleys used to zip across the bridge (as seen below), until such systems were removed from America after WWII.

Nowadays, you can also get around the island by bus.

See that tower in the background?  It has its own special history!  (It's former ruins are seen below).

     The 5-story Octagon was first built in 1841 by Alexander Jackson Davis.  He was the era's most influential architect, famous for his Hudson River estates, including Lyndhurst Castle (for a former NYC mayor), and the Secret Society Skull & Bones building at Yale.  The tower was the administrative center to the NYC Lunatic Asylum.  It was so stunning that the young English novelist, Charles Dickens, praised its flying spiral staircase.  In 1894, it became the Metropolitan Hospital until abandoned in 1955.  The tower's two wings were demolished in the 1970s.  Restored in 2006, it now looks like this...

Maybe that was the inspiration for why the lighthouse is also octagonal?      If you know the TV series, "Gotham", you're familiar with its Arkham Asylum (seen below).  

It might be based on this island's hospitals and asylums.  Only ruins remain...

     But riverside properties in NYC are popular, so the 2-mile island is undergoing "gentrification".  

     Recently, smart people finally realized that the southern tip of Roosevelt Island is a perfect viewing spot for the Macy's Fourth of July Fireworks!  Perhaps soon, we'll see the lighthouse shine, once again--even just as a novelty (like the illuminated bridges) to justify living costs on the "reclaimed" island.  Either way, when I peer at it from my local park, I'll have a new appreciation for it all, because I learned, there is a wealth of history in even a minor structure 50-feet tall.