Roosevelt Island's history has an ample measure of political
corruption, star power, and civic do-gooding gone wrong.
It is chronicled in Website NYC10044's TimeLine. The
materials here come largely from the collection of the late Rev.
Oliver Chapin, who served as the Island's unofficial historian
over a period of more than three decades, with additional
materials from resident Tim Johns, and the Roosevelt Island
Historical Society, whose president, Judith Berdy, is an avid
collector of all things Roosevelt Island.
From post-Revolutionary times to today, this Island has been
known as Blackwell's Island, Welfare Island (1921 on), and
Roosevelt Island (1970s on).
The prison was south of the Queensboro Bridge, the vantage
point of the photo below. Prisoners can be seen in the yard,
with a younger New York City in the background. City
Hospital stretches across the Island just south of the prison,
but north of the site of this week's Fourth of July Fireworks
viewing.
Most of the Island's early-20th-Century structures were built
of stone quarried on the Island by prisoners. In the photo
below, they're apparently being allowed a break.
A 1934 raid on the Blackwell's Island Penitentiary produced a
haul of weapons that inmates had acquired by smuggling or
hand-crafting. The raid, by Commissioner of Corrections Austin
H. MacCormick under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, was fodder for
sensational press for some time to come, including an article in this issue of Headquarters
Detective. Click on the magazine cover for the article.
The local newspapers had their views on the Welfare Island
situation. When District Attorney William C. Dodge saw no
prosecutable wrongdoing on the Island and announced it, one
editorial cartoonist showed Father Knickerbocker, the symbol of
New York City, lifting a dripping garbage can lid from the
prison, releasing fumes labeled "racketeer control," "moral
filth," "favoritism," and "abuses," while Dodge is pictured as
looking at the Island through the wrong end of a telescope.
The Island's history isn't all prisons. It has been the
home of hospitals, including an asylum for the insane, a home for
unwed mothers-to-be, and, in their time, almshouses for men and
women. The Men's Almshouse below was near the
now-landmarked Chapel of the Good Shepherd.
Once Roosevelt Island 
acquired its Tramway
(originally constructed as a temporary measure while waiting for
subway service to begin, but now the Island's icon and a symbol
of the City as the only commuter Tramway in North America), it
was seen by a Daily News editorial cartoonist as a refuge for
politicians from the City's fiscal crises of the 1970s.
Visit the
TimeLine
