STNMTZ_20140511_11593.tif | George Steinmetz

Roosevelt Island in New York city on a spring morning.

The two-mile long Roosevelt Island in the East River, in the borough of Manhattan, is many things to New Yorkers. It’s a place to live, home to about 12,000 people living north of the Queensboro Bridge. It’s the future of higher education, via a massive campus that Cornell Tech plans to build over the next thirty years on the land just south of the bridge, where present-day hospital buildings will be demolished. It’s a poignant piece of New York’s past, in the form of the romantic ruin of James Renwick’s turn of the century Smallpox Hospital, the southernmost building in this view from the South. And it’s the site, at its southern tip, of one of New York’s most distinguished monuments, long in the making.

Filename: STNMTZ_20140511_11593.tif
Copyright: ©2014 George Steinmetz
Image Size: 5760x3840 / 63.3MB; urban New York City aerial Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park Roosevelt Island Ed Koch Triboro Bridge Manhattan East River skyline
Contained in galleries: New York Air

Roosevelt Island in New York city on a spring morning.<br />
<br />
The two-mile long Roosevelt Island in the East River, in the borough of Manhattan, is many things to New Yorkers. It’s a place to live, home to about 12,000 people living north of the Queensboro Bridge. It’s the future of higher education, via a massive campus that Cornell Tech plans to build over the next thirty years on the land just south of the bridge, where present-day hospital buildings will be demolished. It’s a poignant piece of New York’s past, in the form of the romantic ruin of James Renwick’s turn of the century Smallpox Hospital, the southernmost building in this view from the South. And it’s the site, at its southern tip, of one of New York’s most distinguished monuments, long in the making.