Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.  Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps...

Had John Steinbeck written one of the most famous opening passages of literature on the East Coast instead of the West, he might easily have been inspired by Welfare Island.  Many of his words would have fit the situation and condition of our home Island when he wrote them, instead, about the home of Doc and Hazel and Mack and Henri the Painter and Frankie and Dora.

One great author did find inspiration here.  Almost a century before Steinbeck's words captured and created the Cannery Row that lives in our minds, Charles Dickens wrote of the retreat for the insane on Blackwell's Island:

Thing is, Dickens would be disappointed in what's happened since.  Had he been inspired on our coast instead of his, Steinbeck would be disppointed, too.  For while London has commemorated the inspired mind that brought the world Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and Monterey and California have provided proper homage to the mind that created The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, New York State and New York City and Roosevelt Island have paid no homage to Dickens or, for that matter, Steinbeck, who once worked in this City as a journalist.

That New York State has failed to acknowledge properly the history of Roosevelt Island is a stink, a grating noise that will not find future forgiveness until there has been some satisfaction of the promise of its past.  On Main Street, landmark Blackwell House sits, still rotting, splintering, a shamble and a shame, standing history gone fallow and falling.  To the North, the Octagon barely stands, embodying an era when this Island was much different and much set apart from the society of its time, yet New York State can find no way to commemorate its meaning and preserve its past except by desperate commercialization.  To the South, opposite the United Nations, Southpoint has remained in rubble and ruination because New York State is so cavalier about its parkland that it has allowed it to be offered for commercial exploitation rather than seizing its proper potential and promise as a park.

Steinbeck would have been disappointed.  Dickens would have been disappointed.  We, on the other hand and in our other time, should be enraged.