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 off their hinges, and enter a room without a roof. You could then tiptoe through a third- floor hallway about to give way and send you plunging through the splinters into the basement (and, you were sure, into a nest of rats the size of pit bulls).
It was impossible to inch through the debris without being moved by the events that must have taken place in this ghost of Bedlam. There were doors marked insulin shock room, rusted gurneys with restraining straps teetering halfway through holes in the floor, and bloodstains on the walls. Even on a warm autumn day with the sun shining on the roofless building, the whole place still felt dank and shadowed, the walls humid with the screams of misery and sadness.
