Roosevelt Island, New York

Roosevelt Island is one of the strangest places in New York and it looks like no other section of town. It's a two-mile long, 600-foot wide island (once called Welfare Island for its many sanitoriums, nursing hospitals and prisons) on the East River between Manhattan and Long Island City and it feels like the lonely outskirts of a post-war downtown, say Houston, San Jose or San Diego. Despite a long history as an institutional center and refuge for the destitute, the island was recreated in the 1970s as a high-density, masterplanned middle class community. Construction continues today.

Cars must enter/exit the island via the Roosevelt Island Bridge (connecting to Queens). Most public parking is confined to a massive garage at the bridge's entrance.

Some 7,500 residents of diverse backgrounds -- Whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are all well-represented -- share several high-rise complexes, mostly in the middle and north end of the island. There's just one street, Main Street, that bisects the northern half and entering it feels like walking into a narrow canyon. The architecture ranges from bland concrete slabs to appealing modernist rectangles.

There's heaps of parkland and public space, with a perimeter pathway around the entire island, a decent-sized park occupying the northern point and several smaller parks throughout the residential north and center.

On the northern tip is an attractive and renovated lighthouse, built in 1872 on a tiny island that was later attached to Roosevelt Island.

The island's legacy, though, is its many institutions past and present. After the City bought the island in the first half of the 19th century, it constructed a sprawling penitentiary there, soon followed by a "Municipal Lunatic Asylum." Later came several other medical facilities, including a Smallpox Hospital in 1854. Today, much of that is gone or has been incorporated into the dominant Coler-Goldwater Specialty Care and Nursing Facility (shown below), which houses nearly 2,000 residents with acute rehabilitative needs, both physical and mental.

The Strecker Memorial Laboratory, an 1892 landmark on the southern tip of the island, was once a major medical research facility and has been recently renovated by the MTA for a power conversion substation.

The Blackwell farmhouse, named for the island's first European settlers (who mined local quarries and cultivated fruit orchards), still stands at the foot of Main Street. It was originally constructed around 1800 and restored in 1973.

In truth, Roosevelt Island's most striking sights are its ample views of other places: Manhattan and Queens. Below, a tugboat pulls containers (looking toward East Harlem).

The Queensboro Bridge, which connects 59th Street in Manhattan with Long Island City, Queens.

By far the most prominent landmark on the Queens side of the East River is KeySpan's Ravenswood Power Plant.

Long Island City, Queens Pt. II

Once its own city before Queens County was fully developed and swallowed up by New York City, Long Island City is now the catch-all for a fairly dreary industrial hodge podge made up of several smaller neighborhoods: Hunters Point (detailed earlier), Dutch Kills, Ravenswood and Court Square. (During its 28 years of cityhood -- 1870-1898 -- Long Island City also included Astoria and Steinway.) There's little to link the sub-sections other than the themes of industry and overpowering and inhumanly scaled infrastructure.

The neighborhood's hub, adjacent to Hunters Point, is Court Square, centered around the beautiful Beaux Arts New York State Supreme Court building. Originally built in 1876 as the Long Island City Courthouse (and rebuilt in 1908), it's very hard to imagine a time that this formed the center of any discernable neighborhood or city. It's an unreadable hub butchered by bad planning and interrupted by the needs of transportation and industry.

Across the street from the courthouse is New York's tallest structure outside of Manhattan, the Citicorp Building, with 48 stories and 663 feet. It's not a bad landmark at all and stands completely alone in the far reaches of the sky, visible from every point in western Queens.

Near the hub is a permitted graffiti explosion at 5 Pointz, a sprawling warehouse on Davis Street.

Warehouses, scrapyards and other low-grade industries abound.

In one area around 21st Street, former factories and warehouses have been reborn as film and tv studios, including the big-signed Silver Cup, once a massive bakery.

The Queensboro Bridge and its approach, finished in 1909, is an impressive and gritty structure and it effectively cuts LIC into two pieces.

To the east and across the bridge's approach, Dutch Kills has a somewhat more cohesive and residential character of modest clapboard homes and small brick tenements that house a mostly Hispanic and Black community.

Along LIC's western edge, bordering onto the East River, is Ravenswood, a largely industrial zone with patches of public housing and modest residential streets. Here, a rotting factory on 12th Street has met a graffiti crew called the Wallnuts:

A major landmark is the Ravenswood Plant, once known as "Big Allis." Formerly a Con-Ed facility, it spilled tens of thousands of gallons of fuel oil from underground pipelines in the 1990s. After scandals and half-hearted clean-up efforts, the plant was sold to current owner KeySpan Energy.

From the Ravenswood Houses to the Queensbridge Houses is a scrappy residential area that feels more isolated than it does destitute. The Hip Hop-ily immortalized Queensbridge is one of the city's first (1939), largest (3,149 units in 26 buildings) and most successful housing projects.

Ravenswood Houses:

Queensbridge Houses: