During my graduate school days in New York City I lived along the East River, and at times when I felt like indulging a simultaneous sense of adventure and melancholy I would visit Roosevelt Island. The island is a sliver of land in the river, two and a half miles long, connected to Manhattan by a pleasing aerial tramway. Today most of Roosevelt Island is filled with high-rise apartment buildings. But in earlier times it was the dumping ground for various incorrigible or unmanageable members of society. At the very northern tip of the island are some remnants of those times-- the rubble of a mental asylum abandoned in the first half of this century.
A decade ago it was still possible to climb around in those ruins. You could shin up the banister of a staircase whose steps had long since decayed away, push open creaking metal doors half ...
