EASTRIVER
ROOSEVELT ISLANDToday, tourists take the tram to Roosevelt to see the cherry blossoms at the finally finished FDR memorial by Louis Kahn. In 1842, while visiting so-called slums in New York, Charles Dickens took a boat there to see the Octagon Tower, New York’s new so-called insane asylum. “Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was verypainful,” he wrote. “The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye,
the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.” The creatorof Scrooge liked the architecture, calling it “spacious and elegant.” In 2006, it was converted to luxury rentals: a two-bedroom, two-bath goes for $4,700 a month.