Roosevelt Island

Even at the height of the Thursday morning rush, Roosevelt Islanders have time to stop and talk about transportation. That's because they're likely watching two or three or four F trains go by, packed to the doors with Manhattan-bound commuters.

As newcomers flock to Roosevelt Island, transportation on and off the 147-acre landmass is becoming increasingly challenging. The temporary suspension for upgrades of the island's iconic tram next spring will only exacerbate the situation.

"We're at capacity," said Jonathan Kalkin, who's on the board of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC), which manages the island. "Sometimes you do have to wait--especially in the morning--for another train, depending on how gutsy you are, how much New York is in you to push through.  read more »

In 2000, Roosevelt Island had less than 10,000 residents. Since then, 1,331 new apartments have gone up or are under construction. Another 1,160 are expected within the next five years.

These new structures will pile thousands of fresh faces--and Fresh Direct trucks, as one resident put it--onto the sleepy spit of East River land once officially called Welfare Island, possibly changing it forever.

In 2006, tenants moved in to the Octagon, Becker and Becker's 500-unit luxury restoration of the insane asylum on the Island's north end. The real colossus, however, is the nine-building Riverwalk development, a joint project of Hudson Companies and the Related Companies.  read more »

Carmen, a 30-year resident of Roosevelt Island, remembers when mom-and-pop shops lined the main commercial drag of what was once an enclave of affordable housing in the middle of the East River. Now most of the storefronts on Main Street are empty and much of the retail space surrounding the gleaming, luxury condos of the Riverwalk complex remains vacant, despite a steady stream of new residents to the 2-acre island over the past few years.

“There used to be a pizza parlor, a fish store, and that office building there used to be a sports bar,” Carmen recalled on a blustery December evening, shifting her groceries to point out each abandoned shop.

“There was a Bigelow’s pharmacy, but they had to partner with Gristedes to survive… I knew the bakery owners and they really got a raw deal… They had some back rent, then they had a flood and RIOC wouldn’t repair it, so they lost their lease. The rest is history,” she sighed.  read more »

New York University has paid $9.4 million for a bloc of 25 condos in Riverwalk Landing on Roosevelt Island--the fourth and most recently completed building in the luxury residential complex being developed through a joint venture of Hudson Properties and the Related Companies.

David Kramer, a principal at Hudson Properties, confirmed in a phone interview today that the latest sale is "one of four or five closings" N.Y.U. has made on the 58 condos at Riverwalk that it agreed to purchase.  read more »

Manhattan is no longer big enough for NYU.

The Greenwich Village-based university recently purchased 58 units at the soon-to-open Riverwalk Landing condominium on Roosevelt Island as part of a new faculty housing program. Under the Riverwalk Landing Purchase Program, the school will resell the units to N.Y.U. faculty at below-market value. And it only gets better for the professors. Notonly will the condos be offered at a discount, but the university will give secondary financing for up to 30 percent of a unit's purchase price.
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Where there's a plane crash, there's the NTSB.

Today the agency released a few conclusions from their ongoing investigation of the Cory Lidle plane crash from last month. Here's what we know: The plane should have had 2,100 feet of clearance space from buildings on the east side but because (1) the plane was flying mid-river near Roosevelt Island and (2) a light wind, the plane had only 1,300 feet of clearance.

The result: the plane would have needed an "aggressive" turn to avoid a crash and, well, that didn't happen.

What we still don't know: Was Lidle or his flight instructor the pilot? And just how aggressive did that aggressive turn need to be? Were they flying dangerously on the edge or was this just bad luck?  read more »

- John Koblin

Tomorrow kicks off a conference on rising energy costs at the Community Church of New York.

Then, the City Council Transportation Committee meets to discuss Roosevelt Island tram safety.

In the afternoon, NARAL Pro-Choice New York hosts their annual Champions of Choice awards at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where last year's champion, Mike Bloomberg, is schedule to say a few words.

Then, George Pataki attends shiva for Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, just before Harlem residents protest Columbia University's proposed expansion plans at the university's main gate.

And in the evening, Wesley Clark headlines two fundraisers for WesPAC: a cocktail reception at the home of George Soros, followed by dinner at The Carlyle.

—Nicole Brydson

It just so happened that Tuesday's tram-jam took place during opening week at the Octagon on Roosevelt Island. That wouldn't seem like good news for a real estate proposition--converting a former insane asylum into market-rate rentals--that was a little crazy to begin with. Not so, says architect and developer Bruce Becker.

The number of unique visitors to the website rose to 1,769 on Wednesday, the day after the tram delay, almost six times the typical traffic. Rubberneckers? Perhaps, though yesterday, he said, two out of the seven real visitors at the rental office filled out applications, which fell in the normal range. Of the 500 apartments, 244 have been rented and 30 households moved in this week, as scheduled.

"I think certainly the fact that there was a special section in the newspaper about the tram, people were just more aware of it," he said. "For the longest time, Roosevelt Island has been this secret. A lot of people didn't know it was part of Manhattan. A lot of people didn't know the F train went to the island."  read more »

Good thing it does, too.

-Matthew Schuerman

Speaking at fire department headquarters in Brooklyn this afternoon, the Mayor seemed to grow a bit frustrated with questions about why it took so long for rescuers to retrieve all the people trapped in a Roosevelt Island tram stranded above the East River.

"They didn't rush to do anything," Bloomberg said, reminding that the rescue was a success. "This is not a race so that you can beat a deadline for your television interview."

- Jason Horowitz

On Friday night, 77 designers displayed their plans for the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.

The designers participated in an international idea contest hosted by the Emerging New York Architects Committee (yes, kids, that works out to ENYA) to create a Universal Arts Center in the shadow of the eerie, gothic Smallpox Hospital at the southern tip of the island (you may have seen it driving up the FDR), which was built in 1856 and designed by James Renwick, Jr., whose crowning achievement was St. Patrick's Cathedral.

But the thing has been a massive, if beautiful, ruin for years now, and for a long time was fenced off from the rest of the island.

Now, the Roosevelt Island Visual Arts Association with Coler-Goldwater Hospital asked designers to breathe new life into the site that was once dubbed Welfare Island.  read more »

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