GETAWAY T
ELL anyone you’re island hopping around New York City and expect blank, bemused faces. After all, it’s not a Greek archipelago. While it’s hard to miss Lady Liberty’s outstretched arm, waving regally from her designated spot on the Hudson River, Manhattan also has a string of other lesser known water-lapped satellites.
They range from Governors Island in New York Harbor – a playground of jazz and poetry festivals, open May to September – to Randall’s Island Park, which is criss-crossed by tennis courts, football fields and baseball pitches.
Each metropolitan atoll is an intriguing scrap of floating land that really cranks into action come spring and summer.
Roosevelt Island is nuzzled limpet-like against Manhattan’s East flank. Mention it and people tend to exclaim thoughtfully, “I’ve always meant to take the cable car sometime.” So, fortified by muffins and breakfast bagels at our homey Best Western in mid-town East, we walk the 11 blocks north to the Roosevelt Island Tramway, and do just that.
Built in 1976, the tramway is strung high above the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, its two cable cars in raspberry-ripple red and white trace languidly back and forth, never quite meeting.
Slotting in alongside Roosevelt Island commuters (the fare’s the same as a subway journey with an MTA metrocard), there’s a dawning sense of exposure as we rise, suspended over the East River. On the ground, you’re snared between the city’s towers, each one squeezing out its own hunk of sky, but bobbing steadily through the air, you’re able to examine those colossal columns of glass and steel from a whole different perspective.
The island is just 240m by 3km, and has the shape and stance of the short arm of a wishbone, snapped off from the main branch of the city.
We track along its west flank to the frog-green, tree-lined isosceles of Four Freedoms Park, a clipped and minimalist memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but our progress is stalled by the tumbledown ruin of the island’s former Smallpox Hospital.
The Victorian-era quarantine site, now stark and hollowed out by vines, is a reminder that New York’s islands historically have rather dark and sickly pasts. Ellis Island offered hope or damnation for arriving immigrants; Rikers Island is notorious for its soon-to-be-shut down penitentiary, while America’s largest mass grave can be found on the uninhabited Hart Island.
Roosevelt is lived on, but it’s still a little eerie. Blame the blocky, cold war-style apartment complexes, and the fact that, the further from the tram terminal you wander - and you can’t go far – the emptier it feels. Soon though, its 9,000 residents, including those crabbing intently off the boardwalk, will have to make room; developers have plans to turn the island into a tech centre to rival Palo Alto.
City Island, however, has no impending hi-tech gloss to contend with. Shaped like a knobbly
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