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.