And so I was walking again in New York City, and if I wasn’t exactly expecting
to find ruin, then at least I was hoping for patina and signs of wear, for
signs of a city that didn’t look like it had just been “repurposed” and reclad
in the trappings of “out of the box” modern architecture. It was uphill work, let me tell you.
But I thought I might be onto something by going for a walk on Roosevelt
Island, a two-mile long, 150 acre island
in the middle of the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. It’s been through a lot of names: Minnehanonk,
Hog Island, Blackwell’s Island, and Welfare Island, before its current designation,
named after Franklin (rather than Teddy) Roosevelt.
I’d never been there before, though I had looked down on it from the
Queensborough Bridge that crosses high above it. At the time I didn’t think it looked like the
most enticing bit of territory, but now I’d discovered there was something there
known as the Renwick Ruin (note the singular), a former smallpox hospital designed
by the architect James Renwick, opened in 1856 and abandoned a century or so
later.
I asked my New York alumni if any of them had ever been to Roosevelt Island,
and only one had, my wife, who’d been to a visit a friend in hospital there,
more of an acquaintance really, who’d been horribly injured in a car accident
and left paralyzed. The hospital specialized
in treating such injuries, but it had been a long time ago, and she said she knew
nothing of any ruins.
Online research brought up some contradictory information about the
extent to which the ruins were or weren’t accessible to the urban
explorer. Certainly I didn’t imagine I
was going to be able to cavort among the bare ruined choirs but I decided I’d
do what I could, see what I could see, walk where I could.
So off I went on a hot, humid, overcast day that threatened rain, in
order to see the ruins of a smallpox hospital.
In a perfect word I would have walked there, but there’s currently no
sane way to do that from Manhattan. You’d have to walk all the way into Queens
across one bridge then back across another, which would be pretty knackering
even on a day that wasn’t hot, humid, overcast, and threatening rain. And in any case it’s a straight shot to get
there on the F train: I was going there for a walk, not to torture myself.
Emerge from the deep subway on Roosevelt Island and you’re right at the
waterfront. The terrain is flat, there
are very few vehicles, this is a great place to walk. There are also great views of Manhattan on
one side, and views of Queens on the other, the latter largely grittier than
the former.
But I always think it’s disrespectful to go a place just in order to get
a good view of some other place. I think
your attention should be focused on the place you’re in, you should embrace the
local topography.
And so I walked down to the ruins, probably less than a mile, and it was
much as expected, there was some severe fencing around he old hospital, various
metal struts in place to keep the structure standing, and no entry of course, although
inevitably a few graffiti “artists” had been in there.
There were volunteers at a stand offering maps and information and “emergency
ponchos” if the rain suddenly came on.
They told me that the plan was to make the ruin even more stable but not
to rebuild it, then to open it to the public.
Ruins, we know, are always in a state of flux, but one artist’s
rendition of how they might end up looks like this (which will be pretty bad,
if you ask me):
Two things stood out about the current state of the Renwich Ruins: first,
that in making the building stable they’ve also made it far more
picturesque. Nature has got in there and
done its work. That exuberance of ivy
growing up over the structure, really does make it look Gothic and magnificent.
And two, round the back (as it were) the powers that be had collected,
stacked and I think catalogued, all the broken bits of masonry, and these fragments
they had shored (or at least stored) against their ruins, on wooden palates.
You can see some fine rusted metal pillars there too, and in fact there
were quite a few of these scattered elsewhere on the island, folly columns, folly
ruins, I suppose you might say.
There is some authentic native flora planted around much of the southern
end of the island, perhaps not quite as authentic or rigorously maintained as in
the Time Landscape on Houston Street in Manhattan, but it does make it possible
to look out through ancient, primitive foliage, and see the towers of Manhattan
just a few hundred yards away across the water, but looking as though they come
from another civilization, maybe another universe.
But the fact was I’d seen other signs of ruin on the island too, though
at first I didn’t know what I was looking at.
To get to the Renwick Ruin I had to walk past a giant, expansive
collection of buildings, that looked to me like a gently Brutalist housing
development, vaguely Bauhaus, vaguely streamlined moderne, but the structures
were derelict and fenced off, and there few workmen around, and signs on the
external fences saying the whole lot was due for demolition.
I know
now this wasn’t some housing development at all, it’s what was the Goldwater Memorial
Hospital, the place my wife had gone visiting, a nursing facility for patients who’d suffered spinal or neck injuries and, at best, used
wheelchairs. Now the patients are gone,
which seems a terrible shame. If Roosevelt
Island is a good place to walk - flat, great views, very little motor traffic,
surely it was even better as a place for wheelchair users.
It’s being demolished to make way
for an outpost of Cornell University, which will apparently, look something that
like the image below.
Am I feeling nostalgic for
ruins? Only partly.
