Mr Monkey found that the view towards Queens as he walked towards the north end of Roosevelt Island wasn't quite as attractive as the view of Manhattan from the other side. The island was a nice place to be, though, because of the way it was isolated from the rest of New York. Isolation was one of the things the City of New York prized when it bought the island off the Blackwells in 1828, so there'd be somewhere to build prisons, nursing homes, poorhouses, a lunatic asylum and a smallpox hospital.
Copyright Rik Shepherd and Mr Monkey. This page last modified 29 March 2005