Eleanor Schetlin was born in 1920, in the 20th year of her father's employment in the Island's storehouse. Now nearly 80, she treated members of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society and their guests to her luminous memories of her childhood here.  She continued to live on Roosevelt Island into the 1950's, working at the Metropolitan Hospital School of Nursing.  For the most part, the accompanying photo history is hers.

We lived on Cottage Row, Welfare Island. There were six cottages. We lived in the one that was nearest the East River so we had a marvelous view of all the sunsets over Manhattan, for all my childhood. I thought everybody lived like this; it was a lovely place to live.

My parents had once lived in Blackwell Mansion, we called it then, because it had wings on it. The first place they lived in when they came here was the Penitentiary, on the top floor, and my mother was terrified, particularly when a prisoner escaped. My father used to say, "Don't be frightened, they're not going to come to the top floor of the penitentiary... they're trying to escape.

I can't get over how much concrete there is here [now]...

There were fields, trees, hedges, much space... It was living in the country, in a sense, but it was also a life of magic. Because my father had maintenance, we had a big laundry bin, and my mother would put all the laundry in that. The men would come and haul this big thing away, and bring in a bin of clean laundry, and she would check off everything to make sure she was getting it all back... Our name, Schetlin, was stitched in the corner in red of every piece of linen we had, because the laundry was so big - there were so many people, so many institutions, so many wards of hospitals - they had to be able to identify easily what belonged to whom. Anyway, the big bin would come back and it was like magic. We didn't do shopping the way ordinary people did shopping, either. My mother would check off how much she needed of artichokes, or whatever, brussels sprouts, or potatoes, and she sent it off, and a bin would come back loaded with whatever she needed. They'd unpack it for her... Magic!

It was actually a remarkable kind of life... I'm still looking for the magic.

We lived on the grounds of the City Home for the Aged and Infirm. We had very strong instructions from our parents: Never stare at people, be polite, don't make anybody feel uncomfortable, don't ever embarrass anybody... We did have some people who were misshapen, so we learned just to take them for granted.

We also went to the movies. There was a building on the Island... glass enclosed, called "the Klondike." You couldn't see the movies until night fell, because it wasn't dark enough. We kids went up the stairs and sat on a platform around the projection booth. People in wheelchairs came in and sat on the sides; there were benches in the center for the people who could walk in. We saw silent films, the first films I ever saw there. Then, of course, the early speaking things...

My homes on the Island were from 1920 to 1931 in West cottage, 1931 to 1943 at "the Met," and 1943 to 1950 back in West cottage.  In 1943, just after moving away from "the Met," I was appointed to work there, at the School of Nursing.  My family moved off the Island in 1950 but I continued work at the Metropolitan Hospital School of Nursing until it moved to Central Nurses Residence, then closed in 1958.  I continued to work with affiliating nursing students from Plattsburgh State College, who had joined us in Central Nurses Residence.  When the new Draper Hall opened in Manhattan in 1963, the affiliates and I moved there, opposite the new Metropolitan Hospital, and in 1964 I left to earn a doctorate in education.  (After 21 years of working with students, I decided to find out what I should have been doing all that time.)  So for the 1st 43 years of my life, I either lived or worked or both on the Island.

We used the [Queensboro] Bridge to get to the City... It had the elevator building [next to the Bridge].

There were enormous freight elevators on the north side of the building - three of them in a row - and they were slow, slower, and slowest, and they were intended to be because they had to carry weights, and of course the slowest carried the heaviest weights, and so on. They had enormous doors. The men would pull on these big ropes, and that pulled the upper door up and the bottom door down, and trucks could drive in, and then unload to any floor in the storehouse. They would take the stuff right off the trucks and onto the floor. On the ninth floor of this building there was a small hospital called Reception Hospital, and the ambulance could stop there. Somebody could be taken there if they didn't have time to get down to the other hospitals.

At the top [on the tenth floor] there was a big concourse that connected with the bridge. You drove right out of the elevators, across the concourse, across the trolley tracks. There was a little police booth, and the policeman would change the traffic light on the bridge so that you could sail out or in as the case may be.

They had a list at the elevator of who could go first, and it had to be ambulances first, then doctors, and then other passengers, and so on.

To get to the passenger part of it, where we went to school every day... You went to the other side of the building, to the passenger elevator. There were five of them, I think. We took the passenger elevators up to the top. You went along a tiled hall, at the end of which was a turnstile, and you had to show your pass to show that you were legitimately leaving the Island, that you weren't one of the people living in the Home for the Aged and Infirm making a getaway. You had to show it coming in, too.

Then you turned left and you went on to a platform that hung underneath the car platform above you. You were on the 9th floor; they were coming out on the tenth. You went across a little platform.

If you had to go to Queens, you went across this hanging passageway. It wasn't terribly wide, you could touch the sides of it easily. You were underneath a bridge on which traffic was rumbling. The whole thing would shake, and so would you. You didn't have to look down, but every once in a while you could look down because the metal panels only went four or five feet high, so you could look over and see the ground below. For a child it was terrifying. Most people took it for granted, but to feel the reverberations of the bridge was particularly alarming. We got used to it and we simply tramped across.

Then you got out on a platform that was attached to the side of the bridge, that is, there's the traffic on the bridge, then stanchions, then the trolley track, then your platform was beyond them. so you're out over nothing, absolutely nothing, shaking...

Eventually the trolley would come and you'd get aboard...

I took a Civil Service exam to be a Recreation Leader, and, for heaven's sakes, was appointed to the Metropolitan School of Nursing!

The students and I had a wonderful time together. These were young people who were committed to doing the right thing. They wanted to help in the world. They were all going to be nurses.

I was trying to keep them sane, because they lived on Welfare Island, isolated. They couldn't meet people easily. You needed paper clips? You had to spend an hour and half going over to the City. It was an isolated kind of life. They had each other, but that was all they had. Then they had me, and that was all they had. But they also had house mothers, well-meaning and as kind and as good as they could be. But they were nervous about their furniture, and they were nervous about the noise, and they were nervous about... they gave the impression that everything would have been lovely if only the students hadn't been there.

I was something of an intermediary between the two... One of my adventures happened in the Central Nurses Residence [the now-abandoned building just north of the Island subway station], when the Head House Mother - quite a personage - came to me and said, "Would you come with me to help me quiet the students on the seventh floor? They're making a racket." I said, "Let's go to the sixth floor, and walk up, so we appear without their hearing the elevator." I spent my time trying to outwit them, you see. We appeared suddenly in the middle of the corridor, and, leading this conga line that was shrieking at the top of its lungs, was the President of the Students Association, and she was suddenly faced with the two of us - the House Mother and me - the Director of Recreation and Guidance, so they scattered... the doors, all the way down the hallway, bang, bang, bang. But one door opens, and out comes the President of the Students Association: "I'm so sorry. I really know better, but I got carried away. When I saw you, my first impulse was to run in my room and slam the door, and lock it. But then I thought, 'What am I doing? I'm the President of the Students Association!'"

During the war the students carried enormous responsibility. I got there in 1943. The War was on. Students were carrying responsibility for entire wards with one supervisor going from ward to ward. The students, for the most part, were terrified and they were gritting their teeth... They were hoping the supervisor could get to them if they needed help, and they were just almost nervous wrecks. And to this day they say, "If there was anything we learned at Metropolitan Hospital, we learned to improvise. We had to fill in, We had to think up what we had to do and we had to go ahead and do it." So they carried the Hospital, particularly at night, and it was a remarkable responsibility for them, and many of them said they wouldn't have traded it for the world. They knew that they had come through and had done it well.

Anyway, trying to keep them sane... I had a camera club. We had a glee club. I had a softball team, volley ball, tennis... anything that any one of them might be interested in, I developed into an activity. We had a school magazine.

We would have Spring shows, where I would write lyrics, and they would get up and belt them out... We gave marvelous shows. And we would take a theme... like they'd say they want to show the life of a "probie." So I'd sit down and write about the troubles probies have, that they can't pronounce things, and the words you're using... I'd write and they'd sing.

We had a fine mixture of ethnicities, which I was kind of proud of because it was back in the 1940's and we were doing things before other people were, about African-Americans and Caucasians getting along together, and the Irish not killing the Polish, and... whatever. We did well with it. I think these students bonded in particular because they were so isolated. They couldn't say, "Well, I'll run down to the movies..." They were all together and they either had to tolerate each other or give up.

I knew them differently from the way the faculty members did. They'd come to me and pour out their hearts, and you've no idea the troubles some of these young people had... We forget that young people can be terribly burdened with problems, and fears, and terrors, and disappointments, and heartaches.