GEOFF NICHOLSON: THE LONG LOST WALKER: Renwick Ruin

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.