A haunting, distant echo stopped me cold while I walked through the the Met’s big post pandemic show. Alice Neel’s art fills a full wing, and it’s in many ways, a story of her life. It twice touches Roosevelt Island.
By David Stone
As we posted earlier, a friend sent us a photo of Neel’s revealing painting of Roosevelt Island pioneer and literary legend, Alice Childress.
But here was a surprise, this one sad, awaited.
In 1954, just three years before the institution closed, Neel made an ink drawing of her mother in City Hospital during the last year of her life.
With her mother, also named Alice, in a wheelchair in the foreground, you can see the East River and Manhattan skyline, as it was then, out the windows.
Read more about the fate of City Hospital here. Also designed by James Renwick and begun three months earlier than St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it was not saved like the Smallpox Hospital after being abandoned.
The area where it stood is now the north end of Southpoint Park.
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Who Does This?
At the June 18 meeting of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation’s Real Estate Development Advisory Committee, President and Chief Executive Officer B.J. Jones acknowledged that there had been no progress finding a tenant for the long-discussed medical space on Main Street. Hudson/Related Realty LLC had told him that filling the space, along with other vacant storefronts, was proving more difficult than expected.
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