Dinner with Edward Read Online Free Page B

Blackwell’s Island, was crowded with more than a dozen prisons, a smallpox hospital, workhouses, and even a home for “wayward girls.” Municipal leaders in the growing metropolis across the river decided that Blackwell’s Island would be the perfect place to lock away the criminal, the indigent, and the insane, convinced that “the pleasant and glad surroundings would be conducive to both physical and mental rehabilitation.” In 1828, New York City purchased the island for $32,000 and, four years later, the Blackwell’s Island penitentiary and hospital opened.
    When I moved to the island in 2010, nearly fourteen thousand people—many of them UN bureaucrats and émigrés from the former Yugoslavia—lived among the remnants of that sad history. There are still the ghostly skeletons of abandoned hospitals, and even the modern residential buildings, most of them completed in the 1970s, resemble correctional facilities, minus bars and barbed wire fencing. Inside, the stained carpets in the hallways smell of cigarette smoke and stale cabbage. By contrast, Edward’s building is one of the more elegant and well maintained, with a small army of solicitous doormen.
    During the year I lived on Roosevelt Island, there were few restaurants and only a Starbucks and a supermarket that residents referred to as the “antique store” because many of the products were past their “best before” dates. The island, which is about eight hundred feet wide at its widest point, turns into a ghost town after dark. When I invited an eighty-­year-­old friend who had lived in Manhattan for most of her life to visit me, she looked suspiciously around a deserted Main Street at night, and tentatively asked where she might find the wine store.
    â€œAstoria,” I said.
    Returning to Manhattan on the tram, a fellow rider mistook her for a tourist and asked where she was from.
    â€œManhattan,” she deadpanned.
    We had rented an apartment in a sprawling housing complex right past the Good Shepherd Church and the Roosevelt Island Garden Club, with its odd, labyrinthine plots, crowded in summer with a lush tangle of tomato vines, all manner of flowering shrubs, and a jumble of dusty lawn ornaments.
    But where my husband at least at first saw paradise, I began to focus on something entirely different, and I started to pine for the bustling, vibrant streets of Manhattan. There was something about Roosevelt Island that seemed to mirror my own sadness. A legless beggar on a hospital gurney regularly greeted commuters with a tin can when they emerged from the subway station. I was soon to discover that he was part of the community of amputees who were residents of the two rehabilitation hospitals that were somber reminders of the island’s grim past.
    We lived in The Octagon, the site of the former New York City Lunatic Asylum. The apartments were massive, with stunning views of the Manhattan skyline. The building had a tennis court, an outdoor pool, an art gallery, and even a little shuttle bus that ferried residents to the subway and tram stations. In 2006, a Manhattan developer had transformed The Octagon into a luxury rental building, unusual for the island, complete with marble countertops, high ceilings, and designer fixtures in “the dramatic setting of an urban waterfront park.”
    But the brochures said nothing about 888 Main Street’s dark history as one of the most notorious institutions in nineteenth-­century New York—a place that even Charles Dickens found too creepy to spend much time at. “Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful,” Dickens writes in
American Notes for General Circulation
, after a truncated tour in 1842. “The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the