AN AMERICAN PLACE

Roosevelt Island…

…in New York City’s East River, has had multiple monikers. The Lenape tribe said “Minnehanonck;” Dutch colonizers, “Varkens Eylandt.” (), Horn vividly recounts mucky doings on Blackwell’s Island raked into public focus by Nellie Bly, William Rogers, and other crusading newshawks. In 1872, convicts doing time there built a lighthouse at the north tip of what in the 1920s officially became Hospital Island, and which by the 1950s was generally abandoned. In the 1960s the premises underwent redevelopment into mixed-income housing complexes accessible by bridge, subway, and tram. Some 12,000 Manhattanites now live there. The current name, bestowed in 1973, became more pertinent in 2012, when the southernmost four of the island’s 147 acres became home to Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, above. American History