Roosevelt Island lies only a stone’s throw from Manhattan and Queens,yet it feels distinctly apart.The electric buses puffing down the main street of this elongated island seem infinitely gentler than their equivalents in the city’s other boroughs.The 10,000 or so Roosevelt Islanders rarely appear rushed, and greet one another as if they lived in a small town. Something about their insularity – the fact that they live on an island – induces in them a different sensibility, notwithstanding that Manhattan, of course, is an island, too.

The islanders are fiercely proud of their home, in a way that has no equivalent among the inhabitants of the five boroughs.Their pride is born of a hardscrabble fight for respect, an ingrained (and justified) belief that the rest of the city disparages them or,more often, ignores them. Just as Australians have had to fight the perception that they are all descendants of convicts, so Roosevelt Islanders seem a little touchy about the many hospitals and mental institutions that have been a mainstay of their economy from its earliest days.

The intensity of local sentiment was made clear to me by the islanders’ swift, voluminous, and angry response to a piece I penned in April about Roosevelt Island. What the e-mails conveyed, in varying degrees of politeness, was a genuine affection for the island, a sense of community that is admirable and all too rare in New York. Though the tone I used was no more irreverent than is my wont and I stand by my opinions in the piece, I was perhaps injudicious in comparing the place to “a beached whale tossed up on the shores of Manhattan.”

Some of the more restrained writers urged me to revisit the place and look at the new developments going up there.This I have now done.

The two big developments on the island,Riverwalk to the south and the Octagon to the north, have not passed without controversy in these parts. There appears to be some tension between the inhabitants and the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, whose nine members are appointed by the governor. While RIOC clearly favors development, many of the locals fear it, especially as their Mitchell-Lama covenants, which insured low rent for almost 30 years, begin to expire.

The scarier of the two, from the locals’ perspective, may be the Riverwalk project, which will eventually comprise nine buildings and 2,000 units. Already the first of these buildings, the 16-story Riverwalk Place, is almost complete. Developed by the Related Group, it is the first condominium on the island, with 230 units ranging in price from $400,000 to $1.15 million.

This building, among the first things you see as you emerge from the island’s one subway stop, is architecturally undistinguished, a drably angular affair whose red brick may or may not be intended to suggest contextualism. Its best angle is the one looking east, as the various facets of its staggered facade stack up in fairly dramatic form. The building was designed by SLCE Architects, also responsible for the Metropolis at East 44th Street and the German Mission to the United Nations at East 49th Street.

Somewhat more interesting is the Octagon, a complex of two new residential buildings that irradiate from a massive blue-gray schist rotunda built in 1839 and formerly known as the New York City Lunatic Asylum. This is one of the oldest surviving structures of any size in the city; its four-story base, elaborate porch, and imposing dome surely merit a visit for their own sake. The restoration carried out by the developer and architect of the project, Becker and Becker Associates,has not been entirely successful, however, since the oddly bright exterior seems to have been more skinned than cleaned.

The interior has also been extensively revised, with a spiral staircase that proclaims its value engineering. That said, the structural core of the Octagon remains intact and is still imposing. The northern building, to which it is attached as one half of the 500-unit luxury rental complex, already has tenants living in it. This boxy structure, like its southern neighbor, rises up from a five-story gray stone base to a height of 14 stories. The top eight floors are clad in a lighter stone and have vaguely contextual feels. None of this bears out the “Florentine grandeur” promised by the real estate brochure, but at least it does not rebel against the architectural vocabulary of the Octagon.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the brochure, which correctly draws attention to the complex’s environmentally friendly design, is the fact that it is full of images of Manhattan, glimpsed from the windows of the new buildings. “And best of all,” it enthuses, “the East Side skyline hangs in your living room like a colossal urban fresco.” One can’t help but sense, behind this boast, the thinking that informed Dr. Johnson’s famous quip that, “the noblest prospect a Scotsman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.”

jgardner@nysun.com