Roosevelt Island : Northtown

Welcome to Roosevelt Island. A misunderstood place where time slows down, weather patterns change, and 25¢ will still get you a decent bus ride. This week's posts are going to present you with a cross section of Roosevelt Island – from the southern most tip, all the way up to Lighthouse Park.

After opening it's first building, Island House, in the early 1970's Northtown quickly became, and has remained, the main drag on Roosevelt Island. Nestled between the Roosevelt Island Bridge on the north, and the Tram and Subway on the south, the solitary stretch of Main Street is pretty easy to access. Throughout the 70's and 80's many more buildings were constructed, including Manhattan Park, which began to bring a less "soviet depression" style of building to the island.

Most of the original WIRE developments (Westview, Island House, Riverwalk, Eastwood) match each other in terms of style, color and vision. The canopied walkways create for great shelter during bad weather, but also make Main St feel very claustrophobic. If not for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd (built in 1889) in the middle of the neighborhood, the entire street would be enclosed by towering apartments.

Down the street things begin to open up a bit as Capobianco Field takes over the east side, and the Roosevelt Island Public School, P.S. 217, shows up on the west. Though, P.S. 217 brings it's own unique style to the street, complete with curved facade and mult-colored accents.

It's after this point that Manhattan Park begins and Main Street has an opportunity to open up a bit. However, the municipal parking structure ensures that it doesn't happen. Taking up the equivalent of two full city blocks, the 30+ year old concrete mass is both imposing and strangely beautiful. It's repetitive pattern of gray blocks works as a great foil for Manhattan Park's green spaces. Originally built to hold every single car on the island (automobiles were originally banned from Main St - save for essential services) it now acts as just a general parking structure with monthly rates. The massive, triangular structure to the south of the main garage holds stairs, escalators and elevators to get down to street level. The Roosevelt Island Bridge feeds right into both the garage and the off-ramp to Main Street, and there's a lot of brilliant, vintage signs that still hang all around here. While it's technically closed to the public, the top of the parking garage offers some really great views of the area.

The final building on this part of Main Street belongs to the AVAC/Trash Collection system. Unique to Roosevelt Island (and Disney World), AVAC connects all the buildings on the island with a series of high-speed pneumatic tubes, which forces trash to fly under resident's feet at 50 MPH. As I understand it, this was also implemented to ensure as few vehicles were needed on the island.

Of course, now cars are more than welcome on the island. However, the issues that they originally wanted to avoid are now common place: Traffic jams, overcrowding, double parking. With red buses, Public Safety, Delivery Trucks, and countless pedestrians are fighting for some street space, it's often quite a battle to endure.

Northtown is highlighted in orange on this week's map: