New York – Roosevelt Island / Four Freedoms Park – 3

After visiting Four Freedoms Park, it’s worth heading north to tour the rest of the Island – an urban renewal project that dramatically changed Roosevelt Island from a place with a long history as a location for hospitals, prisons and ‘lunatic asylums’ known as Welfare Island to, starting in 1968 with a plan by  Philip Johnson and John Burgee, a mixed-use community of affordable housing for about 10,000 residents.

This was New York’s False Creek South, also being developed at that time, with much of the same vision and many of the same policies.

The architecture looks uninspired to our eyes, in dour shades of brown and grey, but the urban-design ideas hold up.  The buildings more or less meander down a Main Street with apartments above and shops and community amenities on the ground floors.  The presence of many children animate the avenue – part of a strong community feel immediately evident to an outsider.

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Given that New York is a winter city, the idea of arcades, popular in that era, must have made sense.  But as in most northern places, they don’t work: too dark, too narrow, too separated, with an absence of street trees and a softening landscape on the sidewalk.

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Newer development to the south is more upscale, glassier, less socially connected – a reflection of the gentrification occurring on the island, that will no doubt to be further impacted by the development of a new technology campus by Cornell University now beginning construction.  It too will change the Island significantly, making it more of a place to work and learn as well as to live, and less of the special place separate from the city in which it thrives.