The Romance of Ruins
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Renwick Ruins near the southern tip of Roosevelt Island are among the city’s most dramatic pile of architecture.
Commanding a majestic view of Manhattan, the structure is the ghostly remains of the 1856 Smallpox Hospital that was designed by James Renwick Jr. (1818-95), the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, the “English Terrace” row of townhouses sharing a common second-floor balcony on 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and the Smithsonian Institution and Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The hospital was abandoned decades ago, and in January a significant part of the building collapsed. The Trust for Public Land is now attempting, at a cost of several million dollars, to stabilize the remaining portion. The Trust also aims to raise several million dollars more to brace the structure with the aim of opening it to the public.
“The Renwick Ruins are totally wonderful and have suffered terrible neglect,” the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, Peg Breen, said. “The stabilization work is going slowly and a lot more is still needed to shore it up.”
The ruins, which are illuminated at night thanks to fashion designer Arnold Scaasi’s efforts in the early 1990s to make them visible from Manhattan, are a reminder of the 147-acre island’s original use as a site for public institutions. The island was given the moniker “Welfare Island” because it was home to a mental asylum, a prison, and a hospital. In 1969, the state Urban Development Corp. established a plan for a mixed-income residential community in mid-rise buildings on the island, which it renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973.
Ruins are the start of romance, the peeling away to the core, the exposure of the heart.
In theory, at least, from the smallest shard of a building we can conjure its architecture. In reality, that might be a formidable if not impossible task, but one that encompasses a sense of wholeness.
Our simplistic, modern minds want completeness, the full measure of design. Yet our fascination with construction also involves the marvel of transition: While most ruins are seen as historical erosion, there is also a forward interest with incomplete construction in what is yet to come, to be enclosed, hidden.
Mr. Horsley is the editor of CityRealty.com.
