New York, NY —
There’s going to be a housing boom on Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island. Potential tenants are flocking to get applications into an almost finished, luxury, 500 unit apartment building. The two mile long island, rich in city history, is already the place 10,000 New Yorkers call home and several new buildings are under construction. Now, joining the new wave of development is The Octagon. WNYC’s Richard Hake visited the site to find traces of New York’s medical history.
» Slideshow: Roosevelt Island Past and Future
HAKE: From the esplanade you can see the lights of cars across the East River along the FDR. Drivers get a great glimpse of the hospital ruins of New York’s past. As they speed by- a red Roosevelt Island bus slowly meanders its way along the narrow stretch of land’s Main Street. The smallpox hospital at the south end is illuminated –showing off its skeletal remains. Once called Blackwell’s Island –then Welfare Island and in 1973 Roosevelt Island. And, according to historian and resident Judith Berdy it was a necessity for New York City.
BERDY: And that’s because it was a place where they put people they didn’t know what to do with. It was the lunatic asylum, the alms house, the hospital, the institutions.
HAKE: Even though the island has natural beauty it was not a place you’d want to visit let alone live.
BERDY: No, No, No, this was a heck of a place to come. People didn’t want to come here. The hospitals had a pretty bad reputation. Until after the 1870s, 1880s then they were vastly improved in medicine and was advancing. But in the 1850s and 60s you went to a hospital to die and only poor people went to hospitals.
HAKE: Here on the northern end of the Island is the Octagon. Designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, its famous rotunda was used for administrative offices of Metropolitan Hospital and before that the Pauper’s Lunatic Asylum. The two ward buildings which jetted out from the Octagon have long been demolished. What was left of this building after two recent fires …just eight walls. Architect Bruce Becker has been working on restoring the Octagon for the past eight years.
BECKER: Most developers would much prefer to come to this site and have nothing exist or have someone say this isn’t worth preserving. Bulldoze it. Just build something new. But for me that’s a lot less interesting.
HAKE: Becker and Becker Associates, had to fight bureaucratic red tape and lawsuits from some angry Roosevelt Islanders, but eventually got the go ahead. They managed to painstakingly re-create the Octagon’s grand entrance including the crowning dome. And, at the same time develop 500 units of market value housing with some set aside for moderate income tenants.
HAKE: The Octagon, which is visible from the East Side of Manhattan, will be the lobby of the complex. It’s the same brick entrance where Charles Dickens visited in 1824 and wrote about in his classic American Notes read here by WNYC’s Rex Doane.
REX: The building is handsome; and is remarkable for a spacious and elegant staircase. The whole structure is not yet finished, but it is already one of considerable size and extent, and is capable of accommodating a very large number of patients.
HAKE: Architect Bruce Becker specializes in preserving that history. He did it at the Times Square Hotel and at Morrisania Hospital in the Bronx --incorporating new uses to very old spaces.
BECKER: It was the architecture that Dickens remarked about in a very positive way. He was blown away by the outside, by that famous spiral stair. So we’re hoping that we are re-creating all of the wonderful, magnificent things and that the rest is left to history.
HAKE: By the rest he means the hospital’s very sordid past which Dickens also wrote about.
REX: Everything had a very lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.
HAKE: Yet today, as Becker gives us a tour, he says people visiting the Octagon will get a very different experience.
BECKER: So in the Octagon tower we’ll have a public gallery, we’ll have a lounge, we’ll have a 22-hundred square foot fitness center, a billiard room, a screening room, a library. It just goes up and up and up and then there’s this wonderful lantern up on the top where you can look at the East River from.
HAKE: So if what we’re looking at right now? This is the very top of…if you drove down the FDR five or ten years ago and saw the remains of this, Yes, this is the very top. And of course we’ve gone on way beyond that by putting the dome back.
HAKE: Becker, along with Gotham Construction Company, has managed to preserve this slice of history and create an environmental green building. Its rooftop solar panels will make The Octagon 35 percent more energy efficient than other new buildings. But will people want to live in a former lunatic asylum?
HAKE: Directly across the river on the Upper East Side, Rebecca Shaw sits in her office in a supportive housing facility for people with disabilities. She’s a social worker for the Doe Fund and takes pride in saying she was the first newborn to live on the Island when it was re-named Roosevelt Island. Shaw remembers growing up there.
SHAW: When there were all of these weeds and grass and all kinds of it was completely before it was built up almost this forest and we used to bike ride and play.
HAKE: And she recalls the ghost stories the kids used to tell each other about the ominous looking ruins.
SHAW: Everybody used to wonder what is the Octagon? What is that? Ya know there was some mystery involved in the Octagon and what took place in there and there were some fires that took place.
HAKE: Now Shaw is moving back to Roosevelt Island, signing one of the first leases for an apartment at the Octagon.
SHAW: It has that sort of small town USA feel, but it’s still really in Manhattan. It is so close you get there in ten minutes.
HAKE: A five minute tram ride brings you to historian’s Judith Berdy’s apartment in one of the island’s original residential buildings….Rivercross. She’s lived on the island since 1976 and welcomes the respectful balance of history with the new development.
BERDY: Lunatic asylum and hospital grabs people’s attention. But a beautifully designed floating staircase going up to the sky with a cupola and a widow’s walk on top of the building and the American flag flying on top of it…is very important to the island.
HAKE: Also important to Berdy is a former resident of the Octagon—now living with her.
BERDY: And Wanda, needless to say having grown up in the ruins of the Octagon is an excellent runner and jumper and she’s very happy to be living inside of an apartment and not inside the abandoned building.
HAKE: Wanda was one of hundreds of cats found living inside the Octagon when construction started. For WNYC, I’m Richard Hake.
» Slideshow: Roosevelt Island pictures
» Octagon website
» Becker and Becker Architects website
» Roosevelt Island Historical Society