EAST RIVER

ISLANDS

you enter the East River, the air changes, still salty but drier; the ocean wind is gone, the currents more complicated. Beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, you might see a police boat or the flash of hundreds of silversides running from a school of hungry striped bass. You see Dumbo on your starboard side, the new towers on the Lower East Side off port, and eventually U Thant Island up ahead, a bodega-size rock clump constructed from construction debris left over from what subway workers still call the Steinway Tunnel but everyone else knows as the route of the 7 train.

Originally called Belmont Island, it was renamed U Thant thanks to a few followers of guru Sri Chinmoy, a peace activist who ran a meditation center in Jamaica, Queens, and, according to his followers, wrote 1,500 books. Among those followers were U.N. staff, including U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, a Burmese diplomat. When Thant died in 1974, Chinmoy’s U.N. contingent leased Belmont, renamed it, and erected a peace arch. Birds, in particular cormorants, now nest in the arch’s folds.

Given its proximity to the U.N., the island has occasionally been used for protest. In 1972, members of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, protesting a U.N. speech by Leonid Brezhnev, took it over. The protesters borrowed a powerboat for themselves, rented a tugboat, and packed the latter with journalists. Then the protesters—who included Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams and Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton—renamed the island “Soviet Jewry Freedom Island,” unfurled a banner, and occupied the rock pile for a few hours. Finally, a police boat showed up. The cops radioed back asking for procedure: “The borough presidents are here!”

The islands’ names are never a fixed thing. Take Roosevelt Island, which is said to have first been named Minnehanonck, meaning, depending on your source, “nice island.” In the old notes from the city government in the 1630s, Wouter van Twiller, a Dutch West India Company colonizer, is reported to have convinced the local LenniLenape community that the land was no longer theirs and offered them what might have been perceived as money for land or as a payment on which to base some kind of

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sharing of resources. Van Twiller, who later claimed what would become Wards and Randalls islands, raised pigs on Roosevelt— calling it Varckens, or “hogs island.” The British colonists renamed it Blackwells and used it as a penitentiary. In 1841, the New York City Lunatic Asylum was opened, and a decade later the island’s first workhouse. By 1921, now home to the Smallpox Hospital, Maternity Hospital, and City Hospital, the city rebranded it Welfare Island.

But by the 1950s, several of the institutions had closed and about half the island was abandoned. Eventually, the state hired architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee to draw up new plans for Welfare. The pair designed what amounted to a small town: apartments, shops, parks, a town center, and one main street, which would be low on cars thanks to a central garage. To meet requirements set by Nixon’s Housing secretary, some of Johnson’s buildings had to get bigger than he wanted, and the courtyards were disconnected from the river. “This is no longer my island,” Johnson cried. But in many ways, the island, renamed Roosevelt during construction, worked. To this day, despite new development pressures, like Cornell’s planned tech campus, it has a more racially and economically diverse populace than comparable communities. As a sleeper utopia, it’s an odd place physically, a showcase of Brutalist architecture and purposely preserved ruined asylums and open spaces— but it is also, true to its name, a nice island.

Just past Roosevelt, at the intersection of the Harlem and the East rivers, is an island graveyard. Twice a day at this spot, the tides shift. For half of the day, the water from the lower harbor runs up into Long Island

Sound, and then in the second half it runs back.

Meanwhile, the Harlem

River, with its own system of high and low tides, adds to the chaos of currents. For most of recorded time, this exchange of billions of gallons through the constricted channel also washed against a smattering of islands, making the spot so treacherous it nearly stopped the British fleet in 1776. At Hell Gate, as the spot is known, 1,000 ships ran aground in an average year. Big ships avoided it and instead sailed around Montauk, on Long Island, a drastically longer trip—until 1876, when the Army started blowing up every island except Mill Rock.

It was the largest man-made explosion in human history, as far as anyone covering it knew. Crowds lined the shores, carts stopped in the streets; in Yorktown on the

Manhattan side and Astoria in Queens, people secured their furniture. Beer gardens were packed and (secure) rooftops crowded. “Finally, at 2 o’clock 48 minutes and 30 seconds, a roaring, reverberating sound was heard taking everyone by surprise,” a Boston Globe correspondent wrote. “A very palpable vibration of the earth followed, lasting about two seconds.”

From the Times: “Then came a grand and thrilling spectacle. The water rose up like a wall of many geysers, separate, yet united, to a height from 60 to 70 feet.” Vibrations from the explosion were felt as far away as Princeton as a small flock of islands disbanded, their names like ghosts: Hog’s Back, Frying Pan, Bald-Headed Billy. Shipping trade reportedly increased by $4 million worth a day.

The islands have always been part of the city’s infrastructure, sometimes quite literally. Just past Mill Rock, on the conjoined twin islands of Randalls and Ward, the FDNY maintains a training facility where firefighters start practice fires. The Parks Department keeps its vehicles there, under a 45,000-square-foot green roof. It is also home to the city’s finest nitrogen-processing sewage-treatment facility, handling 275 million gallons of fluid waste every day from the western Bronx and the Upper East Side of Manhattan—12,000 acres and a million people—and, crucially, taking the nitrogen out of the water sent back into the harbor. Want to kill aquatic life fast? Pump nitrogen into the water. The Wards Island plant is like a giant apology for building it on what was once Little Hell Gate Salt Marsh, and building so many others on so many other wetlands. Marshes are natural waste-treatment systems, feeding harbor life with all the stuff they produce, but we built over the marsh to combine Wards and Randalls. In 1939, that’s just what you did with islands. Islands were for waste, people included.

Which brings us to Rikers, just ahead in the center of the East River as we prepare to sail into Pelham Bay and Long Island Sound. Before prisoners lived on Rikers, it was a dump. Garbage scows coming from all over the city brought rats with them. The Department of Correction once estimated there were a million rats on the island. In 1933, to avoid ashes from burning trash being blown on the World’s Fair, the dump was closed, and the prison soon opened. All through the ’60s and ’70s, the prison suffered from overcrowding, and in the ’80s, during the war against drugs that attacked low-income neighborhoods, the jails became even more like POW camps: strip searches, rapes, brutality of all kinds, solitary confinement, inhumane treatment of the mentally ill.

Some 40 years later, the city has committed to tearing it down (by a still-up-in-theair date), but then what? A city commission proposed extending a runway at La Guardia and building a new terminal, expanding airport capacity by 40 percent. Developers smell housing, though the airport limits building heights. The people who have worked for decades to close Rikers want the island to memorialize the loss not just of individuals—children who committed suicide, those who watched their lives waste away because they couldn’t make bail—but to the communities around the city that suffered disproportionately from Rikers. “People don’t want some giant statue; they want stories, stories of what happened, so it can never happen again,” says Brandon Holmes, the coordinator for the CLOSErikers campaign. He imagines Rikers as a place that makes enough clean energy to close the power plants that still pollute low-income neighborhoods, an island that restores health.

Rikers, when it’s closed, could end up in

Islands direct us to examine what divides us or disconnects us, what makes one

place a sanctuary, the other an asylum.

limbo, as for a long time did nearby North Brother Island, once an institutional campus dotted with decorative trees, now the largest forest in the South Bronx. It is currently another heron sanctuary, slowly being restored with native species by the Parks Department. But it has also been, variously, an isolation hospital for people with infectious diseases, a housing complex for veterans studying on the GI Bill after WWII, and a home for people with drug addictions. Typhoid Mary was quarantined there for a quarter of a century till she died in 1938. She was not the only typhoid carrier in the city, but rather a poor immigrant who made the mistake of infecting her wealthy employers.