42 new york | august 19–september 1, 2019
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 suf-
fered 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, soli-
tary confinement, inhumane treatment of
the mentally ill.
Some 40 years later, the city has commit-
ted to tearing it down (by a still-up-in-the-
air date), but then what? A city commission
proposed extending a runway at La Guar-
dia and building a new terminal, expand-
ing airport capacity by 40 percent. Devel-
opers 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 commit-
ted 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 inlimbo, as for a long time did nearby North
Brother Island, once an institutional cam-
pus dotted with decorative trees, now the
largest forest in the South Bronx. It is cur-
rently 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 car-
rier in the city, but rather a poor immigrant
who made the mistake of infecting her
wealthy employers.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 Hospi-
tal, Maternity Hospital, and City Hospital,
the city rebranded it Welfare Island.
But by the 1950s, several of the institu-
tions 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 require-
ments set by Nixon’s Housing secretary,
some of Johnson’s buildings had to get big-
ger than he wanted, and the courtyards were
disconnected from the river. “This is no lon-
ger 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 uto-
pia, it’s an odd place physically, a showcase
of Brutalist architecture and purposely pre-
served 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 grave-
yard. 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 aver-
age 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 gar-
dens 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 sur-
prise,” a Boston Globe correspondent wrote.
“A very palpable vibration of the earth fol-
lowed, 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 liter-
ally. 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 islike 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-treat-
ment 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. InIsl nds direct us to ex mine what
divides us or disconnects us, what m kes one
pl ce a s nctu ry, the other n sylum.