Carter's Review

One of New York City’s greatest landmarks, the Octagon was designed by Alexander Jackson Davis in 1841 as the centerpiece of the New York Pauper Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, subsequently called Welfare Island and known now as Roosevelt Island.  It was the first municipal lunatic asylum in the United States.

In 1893, the institution’s patients were moved to Ward’s Island, further north on the East River, and it became Metropolitan Hospital, which moved to First Avenue and 97^th Street in East Harlem in 1953.

The facility fell into disrepair and in the 1970s two 4-story wings flanking the Octagon building were deemed too blighted for reconstruction and were razed.  In 1982 and 1999, the Octagon Building had fires that destroyed about 90 percent of the building.

In 2006, the 2.5-acre property was redeveloped by Becker & Becker, builders and architects.  The firm replaced the 4-story wings with 14-story wings containing a total of 400 market-rate apartments and 100 affordable units.  The Octagon was rebuilt and serves as an amenity center for the complex.

A “green” project, the development has the largest rooftop photovoltaic array of any building in Manhattan that produces 50 kilowatts of power, which is enough electricity for all of the community’s common areas. 

The development was also built to be 35 percent more energy efficient than comparable non-[green buildings by using low-E argon-filled windows, insulated walls, high efficiency heat pumps and occupancy sensors in hallways and stairs and heat recovery units to capture  energy from exhausted air and heat from waste water.  Kitchen cabinets were made from wheat hulls that are a rapidly renewable material.  The development also has a pneumatic garbage collection system, the only one in New York.

Bottom Line

A grand old cupola flanked by new and very bland and boxy apartments buildings in an the middle of the East River with enough amenities to keep one busy for a 25 hours a day when not contemplating the site’s former denizens.

Description

The original center of this former lunatic asylum did not have an impressive dome and cupola but it did have a very fine spiral staircase and a handsome base of shist quarried by prisoners on the island.

After the asylum moved to Ward’s Island, this site was taken over by Metropolitan Hospital but when that moved sixty years later to East Harlem, this property fell into neglect and ruin.

Becker & Becker finally came to the rescue in this millennium and restored the Octagon building with considerable grace and added a lot of apartments in two flanking and much taller buildings whose grace lies primarily in their bases that have the same very attractive stone faces of the Octagon Building. 

If the exteriors of the new apartment buildings are dreary, the surrounding grounds are wonderful and include an esplanade with memorable vistas of Manhattan and 6 tennis courts, an amenity perchance for most Manhattanites to dream about, fervently. 

Amenities

The project has a doorman, a 24-hour concierge, fitness center, a swimming pool, six tennis courts, a children’s playroom and a daycare center for infants, a general store, an Internet café, a screening room, a club room, a billiards room, a library, two conference rooms, an art gallery, bicycle storage, a garage, housekeeping services, and offices for the Roosevelt Island Historical Society.

Apartments

Kitchens have cherry-finished cabinetry, granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances and many have washers and dryers.

A three-bedroom unit has an entry foyer that leads to a 17-foot-wide living/dining room with an 8-foot-long, pass-through kitchen.

Apartment 15 is a two-bedroom unit with an 18-foot-long living/dining room with an 8-foot-wide pass-through kitchen.

A one-bedroom unit has an 18-foot-long living/dining room with an 8-foot-wide pass-through kitchen.

History

In a January 23, 2005 “Streetscapes” column in The New York Times, Christopher Gray wrote that in the 1830s “although near the growing city, the island was Nimby-proof – it wasn’t near anyone’s backyard, and the surrounding waters were useful as a moat for isolating paupers, criminals and smallpox patients, all of whom were soon housed on the island.”

He noted that its plan was in the shape of “squarish C,” and that “except for the bars on the windows, it could have been a spectacular seaside hotel, or a complex for military officers.”

The 62-foot-high octagon was flanked by double-loaded corridors with 6 by 10 foot rooms and that the 250-foot-long wings and the Octagon “were built  of blue-gray schist – a moody, variable stone – quarried on the island, adding that the Octagon section “had a squat cupola, and the side wings had loggias with Tuscan-style columns.”  “The entire assembly was austere and grand, venturing even on the bleak,” Mr. Gray observed, “but compared with previous examples, the new building was a utopian effort in the use of architecture to improve the human condition.”

In his “American Notes” of 1842, Charles Dickens wrote that “everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful.”  “The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the glooming picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.”

Things improved and Mr. Gray found “an 1866 account in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reported that patients caught lobsters and fish, played quoits, built furniture and few their own vegetables.”  In 1878, he continued, “the city put a new ornamental stone stairway and a slate-covered dome on top of the octagonal building, mitigating the chaste severity of the design.”  Joseph M. Dunn designed the dome.

“A memorandum in the files of the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted an agreement permitting the state to demolish Alexander Jackson Davis’s wings but salvaging enough stone to reface the scars left on what was by then known as the Octagon, with the idea that it would be rebuilt as a sort of folly,” Mr. Gray wrote.

In a November 21, 1988 article in The New York Times, David W. Dunlap wrote that “the wood surfaces of the 10-foot-tall Ionic columns on each landing [inside the Octagon] have weathered to the consistency of elephant’s hide,” adding that “the Octagon’s most spectacular feature is still in place, even if it is no longer navigable….a flying staircase that spirals through the rotunda almost without visible support, still graceful in its ravage state.”

In an August 4, 1994 article in The New York Times, Nadine Brozan noted that the building was mentioned in “The Waterworks,” by E. L. Doctorow that when he visited it to announced a fund-raising drive to save it he said that “the idea is to restore it as a ruin, like the Parthenon, and I like that idea very much,” adding that his impressive of its staircase was “awesome, ghostly, wonderful…I felt I could hear the murmurs of all the dead-and-gone inmates in their sorrow.”