EAST IVER ISLANDS
nce 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 hun-
dreds of silversides running from
a school of hungry striped bass.
You see Dumbo on your star-
board 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 pro-
test. 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 bor-
rowed a powerboat for themselves, rented
a tugboat, and packed the latter with jour-
nalists. Then the protesters—who
included Bronx Borough President Rob-
ert 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 govern-
ment in the 1630s, Wouter van Twiller, a
Dutch West India Company colonizer, is
reported to have convinced the local Lenni-
Lenape 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 of40 new york | august 19–september 1, 2019O
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