11/01/19 -- Roosevelt Island's History Informs Its Future

SAFE ZONE SIREN

November 1, 2019

NYC SAFE ZONE — It's easy to miss Roosevelt Island when you look out across the east river toward the ruins of what was once Manhattan. Once a thriving community revitalized in the aftermath of the 2006 explosion in Midtown, Roosevelt Island was wiped off the face of New York's maps by a triple-threat of conflict.

The first of Roosevelt Island's woes came when the Dome Incident began on January 31st, 2011. Portions of Roosevelt Island and Brooklyn were entirely cut off from the rest of the world by an impermeable dome of invisible force created by an SLC-Expressive human forcibly manipulated by the Commonwealth Institute as a part of the ongoing conspiracy to defraud and defame Expressives in the early 2010s. Infrastructure damage caused to the island during the time the dome was created were never repaired, cutting telephone and power lines to a large swath of the island.

In February of 2011 during the height of the riots following the Cambridge Massacre a fire that began in a tenement building in the part of Roosevelt Island affected by the infrastructure damage burned out of control. In the tight confines of the island the fire was spread by the wind and rapidly overcame every building from South Loop St all the way to River Road, ending just shy of the Octogon residential building, leaving only the northern-most tip of the island inhabitable. But it wouldn't be long before the end would come in the form of the Second American Civil War.

On December 18th, 2012 the city of Manhattan and everything east of the island into parts of Brooklyn were demolished by a bombing campaign by the Mitchell Administration on civilian targets. Known now as the Scourging of Manhattan, this catastrophic war crime cost tens of thousands of lives, the death toll for which may never be truly calculated. It left Manhattan a walled-off tomb and reduced what was left of Roosevelt Island to a flattened strip of land decaying in the shadow of a sundered bridge, abd Roosevelt Island would sit in that way for eight long years.

Today, Roosevelt Island is being given a new lease on life. Yamagato Industries is two-thirds of the way completed with a full reconstruction of the island. Now when you look west across the river you can see tall cranes, buildings rising, and ground being broken for residential spaces, parks, schools, and a new hospital. Gradually, Roosevelt Island is becoming a new living space for the people of New York and shining example that the past can be moved on from, that change can take affect, it just takes time.

Yamagato Industries' intention for Roosevelt Island is to move from the "proof of concept" design of Yamagato Park to an "active design" that will set the template for the final reconstruction of the NYC Safe Zone. Roosevelt Island will be a neighborhood of the future, a forward-thinking "Green City" designed to be both self-sufficient and a model for changes to come on the mainland.

Construction on the island is expected to conclude in July of 2020.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License