Thursday, September 29, 2016

Walking Tour : A Lighthouse with Celebrity Status 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 never saw 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.  
*To learn more about the Blackwell family (during my Walking Tour of Astoria), please use this link:

     45 years after America won the Revolutionary War, NYC bought the island.  There were ideals to transform the island into a beautiful park and community center, which the overcrowded and overdeveloped city lacked.  If that initiative succeeded, it might've looked like this today...


     Yet, since NYC never cared about those things, it made the island into 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 Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  As an American, I will provide the correct pronunciation of FDR's surname.  Many people mispronounce it as "Rose-a-velt".  That is wrong.  The name has only two syllables, and it is spoken as "Roose-velt", due to its Dutch origins.  (The first Roosevelt to emigrate from the Netherlands to America was in the 1640s).  The island should be pronounced the same way.
     As you can see below, the city never intended road access to the island!  Built in 1909, the Queensboro Bridge 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.

2 comments:

  1. I think it’s amazing that they converted the octogon into apartments. Some condos there are selling at over $1million! The ruins/ smallpox hospital are also going under renovation. We tried to gain access but it would’ve taken too long with all the paperwork.

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    1. Yes, the developer's dollar talks and nobody walks! Sadly funny. Perhaps the "restored ruins" will still be worth your time to visit as a new adventure. While you can't access the petite lighthouse, you should explore Grace Church (less tourists and older than his other church: St. Patrick's).

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