Unearthing the hidden histories of New York's overlooked islands, from buried bodies to heron sanctuaries
Turn on video volume for full experience | Long Island Sound, Chimney Sweeps: The site of big wrecks and small boating mishaps, as in 1935, when rowboaters were hit by a sudden gale. “Seven Marooned in Sound,” ran the headline. Bits of Bronx bedrock, they were once referred to as the Forgotten Islands.
In this minuscule island, roughly 20 city blocks big, you can read the entire recent history of the urban-ecology movement — its ambitions and struggles, its hopefulness and hopelessness — and there are similar stories being told across the archipelago of New York Harbor, if you stop to listen. Buchanan, my Arthur Kill guide, is what I would call a water activist, somebody who believes the harbor should not be fenced off or privatized but recognized for what it is — the largest public space in the city, a living, breathing thing. By his thinking, our survival in a rising-sea-level future depends on watery, sandy-beach edges, on marshes and creeks, as opposed to concrete walls and gates.
Turn the boat back into Rockaway Inlet, enter the Lower Bay just past Coney Island, and in front of you are Hoffman and Swinburne, in the Lower Bay waters off the shore of Staten Island, islands constructed not to attract natives but to isolate so-called foreigners.
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Further up, at the mouth of the East River, sits Governors Island, the city’s historic seat of military control. The Dutch built a fort there while colonizing Manhattan, and when the British began colonizing, they took it for themselves. Ditto the British colonists when they turned into Americans, until, finally, in 2003, the U.S. government, having decommissioned the base and turned it into a monument, sold the island to New York City for a dollar.
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But by the 1950s, several of the institutions had closed and about half the island was abandoned. Eventually, the state hired architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee to draw up new plans for Welfare. The pair designed what amounted to a small town: apartments, shops, parks, a town center, and one main street, which would be low on cars thanks to a central garage.
From the Times: “Then came a grand and thrilling spectacle. The water rose up like a wall of many geysers, separate, yet united, to a height from 60 to 70 feet.” Vibrations from the explosion were felt as far away as Princeton as a small flock of islands disbanded, their names like ghosts: Hog’s Back, Frying Pan, Bald-Headed Billy. Shipping trade reportedly increased by $4 million worth a day.
Some 40 years later, the city has committed to tearing it down , but then what? A city commission proposed extending a runway at La Guardia and building a new terminal, expanding airport capacity by 40 percent. Developers smell housing, though the airport limits building heights.
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The water is clear and beautiful, the sky big. We spot Columbia Island in Westchester, just over the invisible city line: a private island, bought in 2007 by a physician and real-estate developer, Al Sutton, who converted it into a 5,600-square-foot luxury home. The closer you get, the more you see it’s built for the end-times, with a desalination machine, solar panels, rooms with storm shutters, and at the edge of the hexagon-shaped island, a five-foot-thick storm wall. He never lived there.
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