The Community Advisory Group was scoped from the outset to address how demolition could proceed safely, how milestones would be communicated, and how community concerns would be handled. Residents were told the forum was not the place to debate whether demolition should occur, whether adaptive reuse had been considered, or whether underlying engineering and environmental records justified the decision to raze the structure.

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HPD Deputy Commissioner AnnMarie Santiago stated at the CAG that the June 12 DEP inspection had identified additional asbestos-containing materials requiring further sampling, laboratory analysis, and updated filings. Asbestos abatement, which began May 18, was reported as roughly 30 percent complete and expected to continue for another three to four months. Structural demolition of the stacks and main building had no projected start date. Scaffolding around the stacks depended on prior soil remediation and stabilization. HPD committed to a Community Air Monitoring Plan for the demolition phase, with perimeter monitors for dust and organic vapors and work stoppage if thresholds were exceeded.

The Stated vs. the Active Reality

By June 26, according to dated photographs and observations provided by Kalin Kresnitchki of the Architectural Community Alliance of Roosevelt Island, masonry removal and undercutting appeared to be underway on the eastern smokestack. Debris trucks were documented moving material during school pickup hours. A large area of soil south of the visible red separation membrane appeared exposed. The agencies have not publicly clarified whether the DEP stop-work order issued after the June 12 asbestos inspection remained in effect for this activity, was lifted, or was modified. No public notice of the work has been issued.

The photographs and observations Kresnitchki provided do not appear to align with the sequencing and notice conditions HPD described six days earlier. The agencies have not publicly confirmed the permits authorizing the activity shown, the testing performed on stack residue and debris, the engineering controls in place for undercutting without full scaffolding, or the status of community air monitoring at the time.

Questions That Directly Affect Public Safety

The unanswered questions are public-safety questions that directly affect the people who live, work, and move closest to the site. The Roosevelt Island Day Nursery sits directly across from the work and serves children as young as twelve months old. Schools line the Main Street haul route. Older adults with respiratory or immune vulnerabilities live in nearby buildings. The Racquet Club’s air-supported structures draw outside air into enclosed spaces where people exercise. Tram users, pedestrians on public walkways, and visitors to Firefighters Field and the pool are also in the potential path of dust, debris, and airborne contaminants. When permits, test results, air-monitoring records, and stop-work status remain unproduced, those receptors have no verified basis on which to assess their exposure.

Kresnitchki’s June 26 email asked the agencies to clarify several key points raised by the visible activity at the site. Photographs dated March 1, 2026 show an excavator actively demolishing the lower level of the building with substantial rubble already present. Later photographs from June 26 show continued masonry removal and undercutting on the eastern smokestack, along with truck movements removing material. HPD told the CAG on June 17–18 that there was no projected start date for smokestack demolition and that the community would receive five business days’ notice before demolition resumed. The DEP stop-work order issued after the June 12 inspection remained in effect according to the public record at that time. Despite this, material removal continued without confirmation that live community air monitoring was in place.

HPD confirmed at the CAG that stack residue had been tested for asbestos only. In his June 26 email, Kresnitchki asked the agencies to confirm whether the DEP stop-work order remains in effect and what permits authorize the masonry removal and undercutting visible on the eastern stack. He sought clarification on testing performed beyond asbestos, the status of any community air monitoring plan, engineering controls for the sequence shown, and how removed debris is being classified and handled. He also asked what interim protections exist for the area of contaminated soil that appears exposed in the photographs and whether the basement structure visible there had already been demolished during earlier underground oil tank removal work, and under what authorization that structural demolition occurred when the main building demolition permit has not been issued.

As of July 1, ArchRI had not received any response from HPD, DEP, RIOC, DOB, or DEC to the questions raised.

The Record the Agencies Can Still Produce

The agencies announced sequencing, notice, and testing standards in a recorded public meeting. Physical work on the eastern stack then advanced without apparent fulfillment of those conditions. The public record does not yet contain the permits, test results, engineering approvals, or air-monitoring documentation that would demonstrate compliance with the standards HPD itself set. When agencies that establish the rules do not produce the records that would test whether those rules are being followed, the rules become optional in practice. The gap is sustained by the absence of answers.

The fourteen questions sent on June 26 are now part of the public record. The agencies can close the contradiction by producing written answers, the permits in force, the results of testing beyond asbestos, the engineering approvals for the observed sequence, the current status of the Community Air Monitoring Plan, and confirmation of whether the DEP stop-work order remained in effect, was lifted, or was modified for the work shown. Until they do, the clearest fact in the record is the gap between what was stated publicly on June 18 and what appears to have occurred at the site six days later.

Even with the limited information the agencies have chosen to release, some important pieces of the timeline have become clearer. What remains entirely absent is any explanation for why the work proceeded in the manner it did, or why the demolition is happening at all. The agencies have offered no account of why material removal continued while a stop-work order was in effect, why basic safeguards such as community air monitoring were not confirmed during that period, or why the public was left without the notice HPD itself had said would be provided. They have also provided no explanation of whether the decision to demolish the Steam Plant was connected, officially or otherwise, to the land lease extension negotiations between the City and the State. While it is not possible to determine whether this level of secrecy stems from routine institutional resistance or from deeper arrangements to clear the site, the coordinated silence across HPD, DEP, DOB, RIOC, and DEC suggests the full story extends well beyond what has been made visible.

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Update, July 3–6: Post-publication, Kalin Kresnitchki forwarded partial agency responses confirming the full stop-work order was modified to partial. Additional site documentation and slides shared. The core gaps in public notice, sequencing, full testing, and transparent air monitoring records remain unclosed in the public record. We will continue tracking responses to the 14 questions submitted.

What stood out was not what got explained, but what had already been placed off-limits. The meeting had been shaped to stay inside the lines of process and logistics. Still, three women kept steering the conversation toward questions the structure was built to keep out.

It Has Very Good Bones

Zora Boyadzhieva spoke about the building the way some people talk about an elderly relative who still has good legs and will probably outlive half the people trying to get rid of her. She described it as having very strong bones and very strong foundations, built in the 1930s and reinforced in the 1950s. She talked about the steel and concrete the way people used to talk about old New York: it had character, it had history, it could still carry more than it was being asked to carry. Then she asked, as if it were the most obvious question in the world, why it was being demolished at all.

Bryant Daniels, RIOC’s communications director, moved quickly to close the subject. He said this was not the time to question the decision itself. Zora did not argue. She simply noted that it was a public building and that the public had a right to understand why it was being removed. Bryant’s gaze dropped. He stated that the building had largely been found to be unsafe. She corrected him again. There was no structural emergency, she said. That much had already been established. What remained was only the emergency of moving forward without answering questions that had been asked for months.

Her partner, Kalin Kresnitchki, stayed with it longer. He was fighting for a building with actual bones and history while the people who want it gone are probably already designing 300 square foot studios marketed as “cozy” because they couldn’t legally call them what they are: expensive closets with a view of the river or the Queensboro Bridge car traffic. Who needs history when you can get a cheap thrill from the expressway peep show instead?

Who is paying for this?

Later in the meeting, Lisa Fernandez, CBN Director of the Roosevelt Island Older Adult Center, asked the question that had been circling underneath everything else. She wanted to know who was paying for the demolition. Then she went further. She said she assumed the land was being cleared for David Kramer and asked whether he, or whoever would build there, would be required to cover some of the cost.

The question landed with a small, visible reaction. Someone smiled, almost laughed, as if the directness had caught them off guard. Bryant Daniels answered by returning to what could still be safely said. He explained that no decisions had been made about the future of the site. The response was careful and incomplete. It addressed the surface of her question while avoiding the assumption underneath it.

Around the screen, attention shifted in small ways. Some people stayed composed. Others had already begun to look elsewhere. Bryant looked down again like he was checking if his soul was still there. Spoiler: it wasn’t. The conversation moved beyond procedure and into questions of power or money. Lisa did not press further. She had said what she came to say.

What stayed afterward was not the answer that was given, but what it had refused to touch. The work on the site was not framed as stabilization or securing. It was a full clearing, the kind of preparation done when ground is being made ready for something new. By asking whether the party who would receive that ground would help pay for its preparation, Lisa named the arrangement the meeting had been arranged to keep unnamed.

The Weight AnnMarie Santiago Carried

AnnMarie Santiago was the only official who remained steady and visible for the entire meeting. She is the deputy commissioner at HPD whose office is handling the demolition. She spoke in detail about the work already done and what still lay ahead: the soil removal still awaiting final state approval, the additional asbestos areas found during a routine inspection, the stop-work order now in effect, and the extended timeline for abatement. She used the word “emergency” once, even though that framing had already been corrected months earlier by another agency. She did not embellish or soften what she was saying. She also did not claim authority over questions that belonged to other offices.

Everyone else with real decision-making power stayed silent or off camera. She carried what could be carried and left the rest where it sat.

The Ground They Refused to Yield

The building is still standing. The questions about why it must be removed rather than adapted, and who will ultimately benefit from the cleared ground, remain outside the frame the meeting was built to hold. Air monitoring will now include the community air monitoring program during demolition, but residents will only see the results posted weekly by RIOC on a website most people do not regularly check. There will be no live information. You will learn whether something was released only after the fact, if at all. Perhaps in a few weeks, if you feel unwell, or perhaps years later, when you’re too busy dying of something else to bother figuring out which meeting poisoned you.

What remained visible at the end was not the process itself, but the three women who refused to let certain questions disappear inside it. Zora Boyadzhieva brought the forbidden question into the room. Lisa Fernandez named the quiet arrangement beneath the work. AnnMarie Santiago was the only official who stayed present and visible while the rest of the room looked away or turned off their cameras.

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The Nonprofit and the People Behind It

Friends of the Ruin Inc was established in 2018. Its stated purpose is to permanently stabilize the Smallpox Hospital ruins and turn the surrounding grounds into a public “Garden Among Ruins” - a landscaped public health memorial. By early 2022 the organization reported having raised roughly $1.2 million through private donations and some public support. It has commissioned multi-phase studies from Walter B. Melvin Architects, produced renderings, supported a short film, and worked with students from the Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design.

Stephen Martin, an architect who previously served as Director of Design and Planning for the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, is the founder and president. The rest of the board includes professionals with backgrounds in institutional investments, private equity, corporate law at a major firm, academic architecture programs, and medicine. This is not an amateur preservation society. It is an organized effort with access to networks that matter when money is required.

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The organization has moved well beyond advocacy. It has produced stabilization studies, architectural renderings, and educational partnerships, but none of that work can proceed without RIOC’s decision on whether the site will be made available for the project. It has produced concrete technical work and sustained momentum for nearly a decade. That record deserves to be taken seriously.

The Absent Landlord

The ruins sit inside Southpoint Park, which RIOC controls. Immediately to the south lies Four Freedoms Park, run by a separate state entity. Two different governing structures sit side by side, and the ruin falls between them.

RIOC has offered no public position on the nonprofit’s decade-long plan. Nor has it disclosed when it first became aware of the conditions now being treated as an “emergency” at the steam plant. If the same pattern of silence followed by sudden speed is applied to the ruin, the outcome is predictable. Heritage, resident access, nature, and animal welfare would be addressed only after the fact, if at all.

The ruin remains in institutional limbo because RIOC has neither accepted nor rejected the existing proposal. That silence is no longer neutral.

What Happened at REDAC Last Night

The Real Estate Development Advisory Committee is chaired by Howard Polivy, whose long tenure and consistent alignment with management on real-estate matters has been documented across multiple administrations. His cousin Lance A. Polivy now serves as RIOC’s Vice President and General Counsel. RIOC has described the relationship as “distant.” On an island this small, the question is whether the corporation’s general counsel, better known as the “distant” cousin of REDAC chair Howard Polivy, is briefing the chair in private on issues that affect the chair’s own apartment building. No record of ordinary conflict safeguards - disclosure, recusal, or independent review - has been provided.

Last night’s meeting did not address the Renwick Ruin. That is not surprising. These issues rarely appear on the public portion of the agenda until the important work has already been done elsewhere.

What REDAC Is Supposed To Do

A nonprofit, no matter how well organized or well funded, should not be left to shape the future of a public site on its own. That is precisely what the Real Estate Development Advisory Committee exists for. REDAC is meant to give residents and stakeholders a structured way to discuss vision, weigh trade-offs, and advise RIOC on what should and should not happen with island land.

Instead, the committee has said nothing publicly about the ruin. No timeline has been set for public discussion. No criteria have been released for how RIOC will evaluate the proposal. The result is a multi-year, million-dollar effort advancing in the absence of any advisory process. If REDAC is not being used to advise on a site like this, then its purpose is unclear - and the public is left to wonder what it is actually advising on.

The path itself has changed in quieter ways. The railings that once ran along the water’s edge rusted through and were replaced without ceremony. The benches that used to face the wrong direction were eventually turned around, though no one seems to remember when. What remains is the sense that the ground underfoot is still negotiating its own upkeep. The smell of urine-soaked soil rises in patches where the custodians have not yet reached. Small heaps of dog waste sit flattened into the surface. On the Queens-side stretch the garbage accumulates in low, stubborn piles, not dramatic enough to photograph, only persistent enough to become part of the scenery. It is easy to tell oneself that people did not used to throw things down so casually, but that is the kind of sentence every older person learns to distrust the moment it forms. What feels different is not the presence of litter but the absence of the old reflex that once made leaving it feel like a small public failure.

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What the bins reveal is stranger still. There are more of them now than there used to be, yet the ground around them is rarely clean. In Japan the bins were scarce and the pavement stayed spotless; here the bins stand waiting and the debris gathers anyway. The difference is not access but ownership. The mess belongs to no one in particular, and therefore to no one at all.

The Other Stretch

A few hundred yards later the feeling grew heavier. This is the part of the promenade where the Island sends its garbage to die quietly. On the main stretch the trash at least gets noticed before it’s removed. Here it simply settles in, like an unwelcome relative who’s decided to stay.

The path on the Queens side, the stretch that curves away from the tram and the main promenades, was carrying its own evidence. Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind that photographs well for a report. Just the steady accumulation of what people had decided did not require their attention: a flattened cup, a torn wrapper, a scattering of small, unnameable things that had been stepped over often enough to become part of the surface. This is not a tourist stretch. The people who walk here are the ones who live here. There is no one else to blame for the state of it, and that is what makes the mess feel heavier rather than lighter.

I have lived long enough to know that dirt is rarely the real problem. The problem is the quiet agreement that someone else will eventually handle what we have chosen not to. On the main promenades the bins are visible and the foot traffic is constant, so the small failures are corrected before they can settle. On the Queens side the bins stand empty because the people walking past them have already decided this is not their concern. The failures are allowed to remain because the audience is smaller and the consequences feel more private. It is the part of the Island that belongs most completely to its residents, and therefore the part that most clearly reveals what those residents have decided is beneath their notice.

A pizza box, left upright on a bench, appeared to be conducting its own quiet experiment in how long the path would tolerate its company.

The pizza box

It was an ordinary morning. I was walking the Queens-side stretch with the modest intention of checking on the pizza box I had been observing for three days. I wanted to see how it had weathered the night and whether the path had grown any less tolerant of its presence. Three responses had occurred to me when I first noticed it. I could have written a small story about the kind of person who leaves a box behind after enjoying a view. I could have removed it myself. Or I could have continued to note its persistence each morning. I had chosen the third.

Before I reached the bench I saw a Japanese couple ahead of me. The man had already gathered a few scattered wrappers from the edge of the grass. The woman, a few steps behind him, held two empty bottles by their necks. She did not call out. She only lifted her chin slightly in the direction of the bench. He turned, saw the box, and without breaking stride or asking a question, collected it with the rest. Three days. That’s how long it took me to develop feelings for a piece of cardboard. They walked together to the bin. The motion was ordinary, almost absent-minded. No one watching would have guessed that anything of note had happened. The box disappeared. The bench was empty again. They continued along the path as if the small correction had been the most natural thing in the world.

I remained where I was. The judgment I had carried about the box now sat differently, but so did something else. Over three mornings I had grown oddly attached to its presence. That box sat there like it was waiting for me to make a decision. Turns out it was waiting for someone with less complicated feelings about public responsibility. I had chosen to watch. They had chosen to act. The bench was clean, and I was left with the sense that something had been settled without my consent, though I could not say whether the loss belonged to the box, to the path, or to me.

What We Decide to Keep

The couple with the bin had already disappeared around the bend. I did not know their names. I do not know whether they live in one of the northern towers or in The Octagon, which still carries different memories in its hallways. What I know is that they treated the path as if it were an extension of their own floor. That is a particular kind of ownership. It does not require a deed or a vote or a committee. It only requires the willingness to bend down when no one is asking you to.

There is a particular kind of courage required to pick up someone else’s mess in public. The rest of us save our courage for complaining about it later. I kept walking. The light on the water had shifted again, turning the surface into something harder to read. I thought about all the mornings this promenade has absorbed without comment: the arguments that happened while people stared at the skyline, the quiet decisions made while watching the current, the small mercies performed when the only witness was the river itself. The Island keeps its own record of these things. It does not publish the minutes, but it does not forget them either.

Some days the path tells you what kind of place this still is. Other days it asks you what kind of place you are willing to let it become. If you see them, say thank you, not from yourself, but from the soul of the island.

Why did some organizations receive large Public Purpose Fund awards while others received little or nothing? Why did certain nonprofits appear to occupy multiple lanes of funding? Why were some long-standing questions about fiscal sponsorships, eligibility, and repeat recipients never fully addressed?

Those questions remain. David Stone’s latest reporting is a reminder that the Public Purpose Fund story did not end with last year’s awards. But the new round raises a different question: not who received the Public Purpose Fund money, but who decided where it went.

Residents were told the process was independent. The New York Community Trust administered the program. Community reviewers evaluated the applications. Awards were announced. End of story.

Except that independence is not something that can simply be declared. It has to be understood. Who selected the reviewers? What relationships surrounded them? What information was disclosed? And what information, if any, was residents expected to simply trust?

Those questions lead to the same place every transparency discussion eventually arrives: before residents can decide whether the process was fair, they first need to understand who was sitting at the table.

Who Chose the Reviewers?

For the 2026 Public Purpose Fund cycle, residents were eventually told who reviewed the applications. The five advisory committee members were Penny Gold, Deolinda Leitao-Greene, Frank Raffaele, Anna Scaglione, and James Shafer. RIOC and The New York Community Trust described the panel as independent and said the reviewers remained anonymous during the review period to keep the process fair and confidential. That gives residents a roster after the fact. It does not give them the path by which those names arrived at the table.

That missing path matters. Who nominated the reviewers? Were applicants invited to suggest names, as they were in the prior cycle? Did RIOC review or approve the final slate? Were any nominees rejected because of conflicts, relationships, or perceived proximity to applicants? What standards did The Trust apply before determining that these five people could evaluate applications for public money? The public announcement does not answer those questions. It tells residents who the reviewers were only after their work was done.

That is where the transparency problem begins. Independence is not proven by calling a committee independent. It is proven by showing how the committee was assembled, what safeguards existed, and how conflicts were screened before decisions were made. The issue is not whether the five reviewers were qualified. The issue is whether residents were given enough information to understand why those five reviewers were selected to help decide where Roosevelt Island’s Public Purpose Fund money went.

What Did Residents Know About Them?

The sharper questions arise where the public record shows obvious proximity to Roosevelt Island’s cultural and civic network. Penny Gold is not an outsider to that world. She is an active curator of art, engaged in the Island’s cultural life, and her work has added real value to the community. Sources have also told The Lighthouse that her partner is an artist featured at RIVAA. That does not make Gold unethical. It does not erase the value of her work. It does, however, expose the weakness in the word “independent” when it is used without explanation.

If independence means residents with no meaningful proximity to applicants, then a deeply engaged cultural figure raises obvious questions when cultural organizations receive funding. If independence means only the absence of a direct financial interest, then RIOC and The Trust should say so. The public needs to know what standard was applied, what relationships were disclosed, and whether the same standard was applied to everyone sitting at the table.

This year’s awards did not present the same clear RIVAA double-lane question we raised last year, when RIVAA and RIVAA Gallery Concerts appeared as separate funding streams. But the new award list creates a different transparency problem. Several grantees are identified by public-facing names without enough information for residents to easily confirm whether each is a separate 501(c)(3), operating through a fiscal sponsor, or adjacent to an existing Roosevelt Island organization already inside the funding ecosystem. That matters because legal separation and practical separation are not always the same thing.

Frank Raffaele presents a different kind of proximity. As co-owner of The Sanctuary, he has supported, hosted, and sponsored Roosevelt Island nonprofit activity over multiple years. That makes him an active civic stakeholder, not a detached observer. There is nothing wrong with caring about community organizations, but a person who hosts, sponsors, and works alongside local nonprofits inevitably develops preferences, alliances, and favorites. If that is the reviewer model, residents deserve to know what relationships were disclosed before those same nonprofits were evaluated for public money.

That is the standard residents were never allowed to see. Not just who sat on the committee, but what they disclosed before they sat there. Not just who won the money, but whether the relationships around that money were tested before the awards were announced.

The prior cycle offers a useful benchmark. In 2025, Susan Haberman did not score RIVAA because she occasionally volunteered with the organization. The Trust reportedly did not strictly consider that a conflict, but accepted the recusal out of caution. If proximity mattered then, residents deserve to know how it was tested in 2026. Did any reviewer disclose relationships with funded organizations? Did anyone recuse from scoring particular applications? Were connections to RIVAA, RIHS, The Sanctuary, Cornell Tech, Touro, or other Island institutions considered? Perhaps every answer is reassuring. The problem is that residents were never given enough information to know.

The Transparency Gap

This article is not asking:

Was the process fair?

Instead, we are asking:

Does the public have a right to understand why public money was allocated?

Those are very different questions. It’s about a philosophy of government.

The old system was criticized because residents believed too much discretion was concentrated in local hands. The new system was supposed to solve that problem. Instead, it appears to have created a different one. The decisions are now further away, harder to examine, and largely insulated from public scrutiny.

When we sought records explaining how Public Purpose Fund decisions were made, we were told that many of those records were not RIOC’s to provide. We challenged that position. The challenge failed. By the time the matter reached the Governor’s office, the answer remained the same: residents could know who received the money, but not necessarily how or why those decisions were reached.

That is the transparency gap.

The question raised by the Public Purpose Fund is not whether a particular organization deserved funding. Reasonable people can disagree about that. The question is whether residents have a right to understand why public money was allocated the way it was. RIOC’s position has effectively been no. The state’s position appears to be no as well. The public may see the outcome, but the reasoning behind it can remain largely hidden from view.

If that is the standard, then residents should at least understand what it means. Public money can be distributed. Public winners can be announced. Public celebrations can follow. But the public itself may never be allowed to examine enough of the process to determine whether the decisions were sound, consistent, or influenced by relationships that should have been disclosed. That is not merely a dispute about grants. It is a question about whether transparency ends when the money leaves RIOC’s hands.

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If public money remains public when it is awarded, residents should ask why the reasoning behind those awards can become private.

The contested appointment of Lance A. Polivy had already drawn its line through the room before the board returned from executive session. Melissa Wade had read her warning aloud. She spoke of protocol, qualifications, conflict, and the old habits RIOC claims to have outgrown. The public heard her. The board heard her. Yet the appointment still came forward as if the machinery had already decided.

The evening carried two central subjects: whether the steam plant was safe to breathe around, and whether governance was safe to trust. Somehow the steam plant felt like the less dusty question.

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For the Avoidance of Doubt

RIOC loves transparency the way vampires love sunrise: conceptually, from a safe distance. The public had heard Melissa. The board had heard Melissa. The appointment, apparently, had noise-canceling headphones.

President Benjamin Jones reached the sentence that was supposed to settle the unease: “For the avoidance of doubt…” That was where the reading changed. His body gathered inward. The words did not sound improvised. They sounded prepared, agreed upon, and placed in the record for a reason. Jones read them carefully, almost too carefully, his arms crossed close to him, his voice hanging on each clause. Watching him, one wondered whether he believed the language or merely understood why it had to be read.

Lance Polivy, Jones said, had “the same last name” as board member Howard Polivy. He was technically accurate, in the same way the Titanic encountered “some ice”. It was careful phrasing, narrow enough to almost disappear into itself, yet Melissa Wade had already called the relationship by its plainer name when she spoke of lease negotiations involving “his cousin’s building.” The sentence arrived dressed as ethics language, but it walked like legal insulation. The law may permit a relationship. It does not make Thanksgiving less awkward.

On the transcript, the language looks polished, prepared, and official. On video, it seemed heavier than that. I cannot enter President Jones’s mind, but I can describe what was visible: the guarded arms, the careful pacing, the hesitation around words that should have reassured everyone if the matter were as simple as the sentence made it sound. Then came the phrase “prevent corruption.” It was barely given air.

The law may permit a relationship. It does not make the relationship disappear. It also does not make prepared language easier to read when the room already knows why the language was prepared. What was clear was the discomfort.

The Missing Doorway

Melissa Wade’s statement mattered because she did not merely object to Lance Polivy. She objected to the path that delivered him. The bylaws, she said, give the board the power to hire officers upon the recommendation of the CEO. The CEO recommends. The board hires. That distinction was supposed to matter.

By Melissa’s account, it had not mattered enough. She said the first time she was notified of Lance Polivy was after he had emerged as the sole candidate, from a process she did not know and one she believed did not include the search firm the board had approved. His name had already gone to chambers. A background check had already begun. Only then did the board receive the person it was being asked to approve. If the board was the hiring authority, it was introduced to its authority rather late in the evening.

Jones answered with order. He listed résumés, interviews, staff reviewers, and Governor’s Counsel. It sounded extensive. It sounded serious. But it did not answer the question Melissa had placed on the table. The process sounded extensive. So does a diner menu. That does not tell you who cooked the food. Did Lance Polivy come through the board-approved search firm? When was the board brought into the process? Why had chambers and background review begun before Melissa says the board was alerted?

That is the space the meeting never filled. Melissa questioned the doorway. Jones described the hallway. Both things can be true, and that is what made the moment troubling. A process can have many steps and still leave footprints going around the board.

When the Rules Learned to Move

Earlier in the meeting, the Governance Committee offered its own kind of lesson. Three policies had been revised: personally owned vehicle use, travel by personnel, and discretionary funds. Some had not been revised since 2013. They had been modernized, cleaned, corrected, and moved forward. The board approved them with little difficulty.

There was nothing wrong with updating old policies. RIOC needed that work. But the ease of it mattered because of what came later. The institution moved quickly when the work made the machinery look repaired. The old rules could be dusted off. The typos could be fixed. The missing Zoom-era language could be added. Penalties could be inserted.

Mark Block and Conway Ekpo helped give the room the language of compliance and the feeling of restored order. When the Polivy appointment came forward, Conway moved it. The motion did not linger. The vote followed.

That is why the later exchange with Lydia Tang mattered so much. Procedure had been flexible enough to clean old policies, orderly enough to bless a contested appointment, and efficient enough to move the room toward adjournment. But when a resident-safety resolution tried to reach the floor, procedure became a locked door.

Nothing wakes a policy faster than the possibility it might serve the room already in charge. The machinery moved quickly once the machinery itself stood to benefit. Procedure could stretch across thirteen years of neglect, dust itself off, and call it modernization. But it could not, apparently, stretch far enough to reach Lydia Tang’s resolution.

The Recommendation That Disappeared

The Operations Advisory Committee had not merely talked about the steam plant. It had acted. Under the newer governance structure, committees were supposed to do more than listen politely and send concern back into the air. Lydia Tang had raised the need for a recommendation, and the committee unanimously supported moving forward on air monitoring while HPD delayed. The same concern extended to soil testing.

By the time the full board met, President Benjamin Jones had already offered one convenient update: HPD, he said, had confirmed that air monitoring was scheduled to begin Monday. That mattered. But it did not erase what the committee had done. A promise from HPD was not the same as a board resolution. A scheduled start date was not the same as resident oversight. And Monday had not yet arrived.

Then came Fay Christian’s Operations Committee report. She acknowledged the committee’s unanimous view. She reported the committee’s concern so gently it almost needed air monitoring of its own. She even called HPD’s responsiveness “lackadaisical.” But the recommendation arrived softened, folded into a report rather than presented as the resolution Lydia believed the committee had authorized.

That is why Lydia stepped in before adjournment. She was not inventing a new demand from the floor. She was reminding the room of a committee action that had been allowed to fade just as the meeting was about to close. The Operations Committee had authorized moving the matter forward as a resolution if HPD did not act. When soil testing was raised, Lydia added that the committee had unanimously supported that as well.

The resistance did not first come from the state’s representative chairing the meeting. It came from Lydia’s fellow board members. The state did not have to silence Lydia. Her colleagues, Marc Block and Conway Ekpo, got there first. Block pointed back toward Fay’s report, reducing Lydia’s objection to repetition: the Operations Committee had already been reported. Ekpo then supplied the procedural wall, backing the chair’s position that a resolution could not be raised without ten days’ notice. Lydia disagreed, saying the bylaws allowed board members to present resolutions and reminding the room that she had been there when they were written. The machinery did not need Albany to push it. It had local hands. The moment was almost efficient: Lydia brought the committee’s recommendation, and the room produced the reason it could not be heard.

That exchange is the heart of the story. Lydia tried to carry a unanimous committee recommendation into the full boardroom. The lawyer panel helped convert it into a procedural defect. Fay, who had chaired the committee, did not rescue the recommendation. Howard Polivy, seated beside the night’s other controversy, did not speak. The room did not need to shout Lydia down. It simply narrowed around her.

Then Fay moved to adjourn. Howard seconded. Lydia voted no. Dr. Michal Melamed voted no. Melissa Wade abstained. The meeting closed, but the committee’s unanswered recommendation remained behind, sitting in the room like resident safety itself: present, inconvenient, and somehow not on the agenda. That is how a public safety concern disappears at RIOC: not with a denial, but with a motion, a second, and the practiced sound of people leaving.

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Last week, Eleanor Rivers asked RIOC to open the door before the vote. The Board voted anyway.

That is not nothing. After the chaos and contempt of the Haynes era, even the sound of adult language from the dais can feel like progress. Residents have heard him speak about process, professionalism, responsiveness, and public concern. They have heard the polished vocabulary of repair.

But care is not proven by the way a president speaks when the microphones are on. Care is proven by what happens before the vote, before the agenda item, before the public explanation, and before a resident director has to say out loud that the process looks like the old RIOC wearing a cleaner suit.

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On May 14, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Board approved Lance A. Polivy as RIOC’s Vice President and General Counsel. Melissa Wade and Dr. Michal Melamed voted no. Professor Lydia Tang abstained. Howard Polivy, whose family connection to Lance Polivy RIOC has characterized as “distant,” voted yes, along with Meghan Anderson, Morris Peters, Marc Jonas Block, Fay Christian, and Conway Ekpo.

The issue is not whether Lance Polivy has a résumé. He does. The issue is the process used to place him in one of the most powerful advisory roles inside RIOC. A General Counsel does not simply review contracts. A General Counsel helps determine what RIOC believes it may withhold, what it must disclose, what can be moved behind closed doors, how the bylaws are read, and how much public scrutiny the corporation is willing to tolerate.

That is why this appointment matters beyond one hire. It asks whether President Jones understands the resident Board members as governing stakeholders, or as the last stop in a decision that has already moved through staff, Albany, and the machinery around RIOC before they are asked to approve it.

The Board Was Not Supposed to Be the Last Stop

President Jones gave the public numbers meant to signal rigor. More than 500 résumés. Forty-three interviews. Nine second-round interviews. Those figures may be accurate, and they may reflect a serious process. But numbers do not answer the governance question.

The public explanation described senior staff interviews, followed by interviews with President Jones and the Governor’s Counsel’s office. Then Lance Polivy was selected. That is the missing step. The explanation moves from process to outcome without showing when the Board exercised independent judgment over an officer appointment it was later asked to approve.

That distinction matters because the General Counsel is not an ordinary employee. The General Counsel is an officer of the corporation. The Board’s role is not supposed to begin when the final candidate appears on the agenda. If the Board is the hiring authority, the record should show when directors were brought in, what information they received, whether they compared candidates, and whether they had a meaningful choice before the appointment was presented as ready for approval.

President Jones may not have formally taken the Board’s authority away. The more troubling possibility is quieter. The authority may have remained intact on paper while the meaningful decision moved elsewhere. That is how governance gets hollowed out without anyone needing to announce that it has been hollowed out.

Melissa Wade Heard the Alarm

The most important fact in the vote may not be that six directors approved the appointment. It may be that three resident directors did not. Wade and Melamed voted no. Tang abstained. These are not outside commentators. They are the local voices closest to the public promise that RIOC was supposed to change.

Melissa Wade’s dissent should alarm every resident. Not because it proves misconduct. It does not. It should alarm us because it suggests something almost as serious: that a resident director believed the Board’s role had been minimized in the very kind of decision the Board exists to make.

According to public reporting, Wade said proper protocols had not been followed. She said she first learned of Lance Polivy only after he had emerged as the sole candidate. She said his name had already gone to chambers and that a background check had begun before the Board was alerted. That does not sound like a director searching for a fight. It sounds like a director realizing the Board had been invited to bless a decision whose real life had already happened elsewhere.

Then Wade used the phrase that should stop every resident cold: “textbook old school RIOC behavior.” That was not a stray complaint. It was a diagnosis. It suggested that the old culture has not disappeared but has instead learned to present itself with more polished language.

“Distant” Is Not a Disclosure

RIOC’s response to the family-connection concern has been legally narrow. The public has been told the connection between Howard Polivy and Lance Polivy is “distant,” that they do not have a personal relationship, and that the relationship does not make them relatives under the applicable ethics framework.

That may be RIOC’s position. But the word “distant” is doing too much work. The public has not been shown who made that determination, what relationship was reviewed, when it was discovered, whether it was documented, or whether Howard Polivy was walled off from any formal or informal involvement before the vote.

The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse has submitted a narrow FOIL request because these questions should not require guesswork. We have asked when Lance Polivy submitted his résumé, who first advanced him, who discussed his candidacy internally, when the family connection was discovered, who decided it was “distant,” what role Howard Polivy played, when the Board first learned Lance Polivy had become the leading candidate, who decided he was the top candidate, and whether Fusco Personnel or any other search firm actually submitted, screened, ranked, recommended, interviewed, or otherwise evaluated him.

Those are not accusations. They are the ordinary questions a public authority should be able to answer when appointing the lawyer who will advise it on secrecy, disclosure, bylaws, conflicts, and public accountability.

We know the usual FOIL rhythm by now. Acknowledgment. Delay. Extension. Redaction. A templated answer arriving months after the public needed the truth. That rhythm is part of old RIOC. President Jones did not create it, but he now owns the choice of whether to continue it.

This appointment will tell Roosevelt Island something larger than whether Lance Polivy can practice law. It will tell us who President Jones believes he answers to: the Board that is supposed to govern RIOC, the state apparatus around him, the insiders who know how decisions move before the public sees them, or the residents who are usually asked to accept the result after the machinery has already done its work.

On May 8, 2026, another fire came to Roosevelt Landings. This time, mercifully, no life was lost, which is how one is supposed to begin, I think, with gratitude placed neatly on the table before fear is allowed to sit down. The family survived. The building still stands. The official language may therefore remain calm, as official language so often does, having never once had to descend a smoke-filled stairwell with weak lungs and sensible shoes.

I am not as fast as I once was. My breathing is weaker. My steps are slower. I have become, against my better judgment, the sort of person who looks at stairs and performs arithmetic, which is a terrible hobby and not one I recommend to the young. The fear of being burned alive is not theatrical when you live in a long corridor. It is practical, intimate, and rude enough to arrive without asking whether one has already had enough excitement for the decade.

At a recent meeting about the steam plant, B.J. Jones offered a sentence I have not been able to put down: “That’s not a question. We absolutely, absolutely care.” He was not speaking about this fire. He was not speaking about the earlier fire, or about my friend, or about the surviving family members whose lives were left in pieces after everyone else resumed their schedules. That, perhaps, is why the sentence keeps finding me. It is a very polished thing, official care, especially when it does not have to carry clothing, comfort, or consequence down the hall.

After the earlier fire, even the clothing drives meant to help the surviving family members were taken away. I suppose there is a policy somewhere for such things. There is always a policy somewhere. It may even have a table of contents. But tenants learn to distinguish between care as a word and care as an act, between the kind spoken into a microphone and the kind that leaves someone with a coat, a chair, a door, a place to sleep, and the dignity of not being treated as a disruption.

That is why I cannot separate the latest fire at the Landings from the next RIOC board vote. The board is being asked to approve Lance A. Polivy as General Counsel. By the time one finishes saying “General Counsel and Secretary/Vice President for Legal Affairs,” the board has already voted, adjourned, and blamed the tenants for not reading faster. But tenants do not live inside titles. We live inside buildings, and the lawyer in that seat will help decide how RIOC understands its obligations, how it negotiates with buildings, how it handles the steam plant, how it responds to fires, and how it treats residents who keep asking why the room always seems so comfortable before the public is allowed inside.

A title that long should not be approved by a board. It should be inspected by the fire marshal.

The Job Is Not a Courtesy Title

RIOC’s General Counsel is not merely the person who checks punctuation in contracts, although I am sure punctuation has ruined many afternoons. This is the lawyer who sits close to the center of the corporation’s judgment. The title carries influence over leases, real estate negotiations, public authority rules, conflicts, board process, litigation risk, and the quiet legal architecture beneath island life.

That matters because Roosevelt Island is not in a quiet season. The steam plant has raised serious questions about safety, demolition, planning, and candor. The Landings has faced another fire. Long-term tenants worry about the future of their homes, not in the theatrical way officials sometimes imagine residents worry, but in the ordinary way people worry when rent, safety, age, and displacement begin to appear in the same sentence.

A General Counsel in this moment must be more than competent. The person must be seen as independent, and that independence must be shown rather than politely assumed. Public authorities have a charming habit of asking residents to trust them just after they have finished withholding the thing that would have made trust easier. The word “trust.” is so much shorter than “documents,” and apparently much less expensive to provide. “Trust us” is not governance. It is what a magician says before your watch disappears.

RIOC has a wonderful talent for transparency. You can see straight through the promise and all the way to the locked file cabinet behind it. The board keeps asking residents to assume good faith, which is adorable. At my age, I do not assume good faith; I assume calcium deficiency and let Theo, my editor, ask for the paperwork.

The proposed appointment may involve a capable lawyer. That is not the point. The point is that this job will likely touch the very matters residents fear most: building negotiations, ground leases, rent obligations, tax structures, development pressure, emergency decisions, and the future legal posture of RIOC toward buildings like Rivercross and Roosevelt Landings. That kind of role requires daylight before the vote, not explanations after it.

The Search That Was Promised

Earlier this year, RIOC asked its board to authorize a contract with Fusco Personnel Inc. for executive recruiting services focused on two vacant positions: President and Chief Executive Officer, and Vice President/General Counsel. The memo described a process with biweekly updates, collaboration with Human Resources, hiring managers, executives, and the board, and an assessment of candidates’ experience, strategy, outcomes, and integrity. Not perfection, certainly. We are discussing Roosevelt Island governance, not the return of civic Eden. But at minimum, a search suggests that candidates were gathered, compared, screened, and evaluated through something more substantial than proximity.

The President and CEO search was later described publicly as long, thorough, and handled through an executive search firm. The General Counsel position was also posted publicly, which is worth saying because a job posting is not nothing. It is the hat placed on the table. RIOC seems to have conducted the kind of search I conduct for my glasses: I put them on to look for them, then forget what the search was about. The question is who was allowed to reach inside, who watched the hand, and whether anyone thought to mention that one of the names in the hat came with a very visible family connection to the board.

Now the board is being asked to vote on a candidate for General Counsel. The packet provides a name, a résumé, a recommendation, and a salary of up to $230,000. What it does not appear to provide is the story of the search itself. Did Fusco Personnel run the General Counsel search in the same meaningful way RIOC has described the CEO search? How many candidates were screened? How many were interviewed? When did Lance A. Polivy enter the process? Who evaluated the conflict question, and when?

That is the first turn in this story. If public money, or even public authorization, was used to create an independent executive search process, then residents should know what that process produced. Perhaps everything was done properly. Perhaps the firm searched widely, the candidates were compared, the conflict questions were examined, and the best candidate emerged after rigorous review. If so, RIOC should enjoy the rare pleasure of showing its work.

But the more visible the conflict, the more visible the process must be. A clean independent search can, in theory, land on someone with a conflict concern. Life is untidy, and families have been known to produce more than one lawyer, a phenomenon for which society has not yet developed an adequate vaccine. But when the result of an independent search is a family member of a sitting board member, the institution does not get to shrug and call that independence. It must prove it.

The Name in the Room

There is another matter RIOC should not leave for residents to discover through rumor, inference, or the island’s traditional method of governance by hallway whisper. Lance A. Polivy has been identified to us as a family member of RIOC board member Howard Polivy. That fact alone does not decide the appointment. Family relationships do not make a lawyer incapable, and a surname should not be treated as an indictment. Even on Roosevelt Island, where names sometimes enter rooms before their owners do, fairness still matters.

But fairness also requires disclosure. Howard Polivy is not a casual observer of RIOC. He is a board member and has been part of the corporation’s leadership structure. He is also a long-standing Rivercross shareholder, close to figures in that building’s orbit. Rivercross has significant future interests before RIOC, including legal and financial questions that may involve ground rent, taxes, lease obligations, and the broader structure of what buildings owe and what residents may ultimately be asked to absorb.

That is where the appointment becomes more than a personnel item. If the future General Counsel will help negotiate or advise on matters involving Rivercross, and if the proposed General Counsel is a family member of a board member with ties to Rivercross, then the public deserves more than a confident nod from the dais. The dais can nod all it likes. My neck also moves, and no one has offered me $230,000 for legal judgment. It deserves to know what was disclosed, who recused, what conversations occurred, and what safeguards will exist if the appointment is approved.

A Plea to Marc Jonas Block

If you know Marc Jonas Block, ask him to read this before the vote. He is one of the newer board members, and newer members still have the small advantage of not yet being fully mistaken for furniture. No one should assume he came to the board intending to be a rubber stamp. That would be unfair. But appearances do have their little habits, and at the moment, the rubber-stamp theory has not suffered much public embarrassment.

Mr. Block does not need to accuse anyone. He does not need to give a speech fit for marble. Even an abstention, or a refusal to vote until the record is shown, would tell residents that he understands the difference between joining a board and being absorbed by one. It would be a small gesture, yes, but small gestures count when the larger ones have been misplaced in committee.

Mr. Block, you are new enough that this vote can still tell residents something. Ask for the record. Ask how this search was conducted, how the conflict was reviewed, and what safeguards will exist if the appointment is approved. You do not need to make enemies. You do not need to overturn the table. It would be enough to prove you are not being stored under it. A refusal to vote without the record would not be rebellion. It would be hygiene.

Before the Vote, Open the Door

The board should not approve this appointment until RIOC answers the basic questions publicly. Was the executive search firm used for the General Counsel role? How many candidates were considered? What qualifications were prioritized? When was Lance A. Polivy first identified? Who participated in the review? Were candidates with deeper experience in public authority real estate, ground leases, residential affordability structures, or long-term tenant protections considered and compared?

RIOC should also explain the conflict safeguards before the vote, not after residents are told to calm down and appreciate the professionalism of everyone involved. Was the family relationship disclosed to the full board? Did Howard Polivy recuse from every formal and informal discussion? Were there conversations with the President, board members, staff, consultants, or anyone else involved in the process? If Lance A. Polivy is appointed, will he be firewalled from Rivercross matters, and who will enforce that firewall?

These questions are not procedural clutter. They are the furniture of public trust. At the Landings, where fire is not a metaphor, institutional silence does not feel neutral. It feels like a door closing. The steam plant has questions. The fires have questions. The future of long-term tenants has questions. Now this appointment has questions too, and RIOC should resist the temptation to treat questions as bad manners.

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Before the board votes, open the door. Show the search. Show the recusals. Show the safeguards. Then ask residents for trust. Not before.

But the deeper issue is not access to the building. It is access to the rationale. At the April 15 town hall, the public heard a contradiction that should now define the entire demolition fight: agencies leaned on emergency logic to move demolition forward while avoiding fuller environmental review, yet officials also described the condition not as a true emergency, but as a failure to maintain.

That matters. If this is an emergency, the public deserves the emergency record. If it is not an emergency, the public deserves to know why demolition is being rushed while the structural report, environmental testing, remediation plans, community protection plans, and any meaningful air monitoring plan remain outside public view.

The Emergency That Wasn’t

The April 15 town hall changed the frame. Until then, the public had been asked to accept a familiar line: demolition had to move quickly because the Steam Plant was dangerous, urgent, and effectively beyond ordinary process.

Then came the line Eleanor Rivers captured last week. Yegal Shamash, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Buildings, clarified more than once that what brought them there was not a sudden emergency in the ordinary sense, but a failure to maintain. The urgency, as described in the room, was tied to securing the perimeter. The demolition itself sat outside that narrower frame.

That is not a small distinction. An emergency can explain why agencies move fast. A failure to maintain raises a different question: who failed, for how long, and why is the public now being asked to accept demolition without first seeing the documents that explain the claimed necessity?

If emergency action justified moving ahead without the normal environmental review, then the public deserves to see the emergency basis. If officials are now saying the condition is not really grounded in an emergency but in a long failure to maintain, then the emergency shortcut looks less like necessity and more like convenience.

The Elected Officials Did Not Ask for a Favor

On April 22, Congressman Jerry Nadler, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, State Senator Liz Krueger, and Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright sent a joint letter to RIOC President and CEO B.J. Jones requesting that RIOC establish a Community Advisory Group for the Steam Plant project.

This was not a ceremonial note. The letter cited “the scale of this project” and its “significant public health and environmental implications.” It called for a recurring forum that would include city and state agencies, residents, community organizations, and elected officials’ offices, meeting monthly.

That is not a request for better manners. It is a demand for an accountability structure. Because these elected officials sit across federal, city, and state government, RIOC would be reckless to treat the letter as political background noise. They are not asking to be kept in the loop. They are telling RIOC the loop is broken.

The Demand From Inside the Island

The call for a Community Advisory Group (CAG) did not appear out of nowhere. RIOC Board members Lydia Tang and Melisa Wade have already been pressing RIOC from within the Island’s own civic and governance channels to create a meaningful public oversight structure around the Steam Plant.

The demand did not fall on deaf ears. It reached some RIOC board members. It reached elected officials. It reached the people with enough distance from the day-to-day machinery to recognize that the community was not asking for special treatment. It was asking for oversight.

The question is why it has not reached the full RIOC Board in the form that matters: a motion, a resolution, or a public directive demanding that RIOC support a CAG and release the documents behind this demolition.

When board members choose not to take a side on a matter this central to public health, public process, and Island trust, they are taking a side. Silence does not represent residents. It protects the execution arm.

A CAG would not solve every problem. It would not replace the need to release the structural report. It would not substitute for environmental review. But it would force regular disclosure, recurring public questioning, and a forum where agencies cannot disappear between meetings.

When a Community Has to Hire Its Own Eyes

The most important fact now is not simply that ArchRI is organizing. It is that a private community group, operating with limited funding, has done what the public agencies should have made unnecessary: it organized technical review.

That level of civic engagement has not been seen on Roosevelt Island in many years. Residents did not merely complain online. They signed. They showed up. They documented. They pressed elected officials. They raised money. They brought professionals. And now, according to ArchRI, independent engineers are expected to enter the building.

That changes the balance of the story. The public is no longer only asking whether the city’s claims are true. It is preparing to test them.

“If we throw away the past without thought, we have nothing to remind us of our journey. At the very least, there has to be ample and thoughtful deliberation and documented procedure. Even then we have to fight till the very last minute.”

— Consuelo, petition supporter

The Public Health Story Crosses the River

The Steam Plant is on Roosevelt Island, but this is not only a Roosevelt Island story. Air does not have an address.

If demolition dust, smokestack residue, contaminated runoff, or fine particulate matter are part of the risk, then the geography of concern does not stop at the shoreline. Long Island City is across the water. Astoria is nearby. The Upper East Side is across the channel. The East River corridor is not a sealed room.

That is why the elected officials’ phrase matters: “significant public health and environmental implications.” This is not just about saving an old brick building. It is about whether city and state agencies can move a demolition project forward in a dense urban environment while withholding the very documents that would let the public understand the risk.

“Not only should this be a landmarked building, if it’s going to be demolished in our tight community, the potential hazards should be studied and made public.”

— Clifton, petition supporter

After more than 150 days

The demand is now simple: release the structural report. Conduct and release the environmental review. Release the remediation plan, the community protection plan, and the air monitoring plan. Schedule the promised DOB walkthrough before demolition advances further. Establish the Community Advisory Group before the project reaches the point where oversight becomes decorative. Then explain, in public, why demolition must proceed and why the timeline cannot wait.

If the building is beyond saving, prove it. If the smokestacks are dangerous, prove it. If demolition can be done safely without a fuller environmental review, prove that too, before the air carries whatever comes next beyond the Island.

The obstacle is not the petition. The obstacle is not ArchRI. The obstacle is not residents asking questions. The obstacle is the clock. DOB has not yet scheduled the promised review, but demolition is moving forward. The CAG has not yet been formed, while President Jones says coordination with DOB and state officials is still underway. In practice, that means oversight may arrive only after the work it was meant to oversee has already advanced.

At the Governance Committee pre-meeting, a resident put the question to President Jones plainly: “The question is, do you care?”

His answer was equally plain: “That’s not a question. We absolutely, absolutely care.”

Not whether RIOC can say it cares. Whether RIOC cared enough, over the years this demolition was reportedly being discussed, to tell the public what was coming. Whether it cared enough, once the issue became public, to place a resolution before its own board supporting disclosure, oversight, or delay. Whether it cared enough to do what Community Board 8 has already done, and what four elected officials have now done: put its position in writing.

Instead, President Jones is still pointing to other government agencies while the demolition clock moves forward. That is not care. That is deferral dressed as concern.

That is why this story still needs to move. Residents mobilized by signing the petition, but the issue has now crossed beyond Roosevelt Island. It is a city and state governance story with possible public health consequences across the river and downwind.

Share this article with people who do not live on the Island. Ask them to understand what is being decided, what has not been released, and why the petition matters. Public pressure grows when the story travels faster than official accountability.

Over the past six months, questions that once arrived with emotion have become structured. Zora Boyadzhieva, an architect, spoke in terms of load‑bearing walls and reinforced concrete. Kalin Kresnitchki cataloged environmental concerns and insisted on documentation. A resident in the back said simply, “We need engagement now.”

The tone was new. It suggested a community no longer asking to be heard but expecting to be answered. Anger is easy to absorb. You thank it, you wait it out. But clarity? Clarity sits there. It doesn’t go away. It just keeps asking the same question until someone answers it.

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When the answers changed the words

The first substantive exchange revealed a dissonance. Benjamin Jones explained that any assessment of what might happen to the site after demolition would be pursued later and would be “separate from the demolition activity that’s already occurring.” A planning study and community engagement process would follow. When Kalin asked, “So basically, you are planning to develop the site?” Jones hesitated and replied, “Potentially, but that’s an area for further assessment.” Zora pointed out that engagement after demolition is meaningless. You cannot meaningfully plan a future for a building you have already torn down.

Community engagement after the work has started. Feedback on the consequences.

What had been carried into the room as an “emergency” was not. Yegal Shamash, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Buildings, clarified multiple times that this was not an emergency but a failure to maintain. In other words, neglect. And if so, then by whom. The urgency, as it was eventually described, was limited to securing the perimeter. The demolition itself sat outside of that frame, and yet it moved forward with the same urgency. Community engagement was positioned as something to follow. For anyone who follows the island’s rhythms, the sequence will feel familiar.

The quiet sentence

Not all lines were careless. AnnMarie Santiago, a deputy commissioner from the Department of Buildings, read a prepared statement in response to a question comparing the steam plant to the steam tunnel. Residents noted that the tunnel beneath the island, part of the seawall and the base upon which we live, has three engineering reports documenting deterioration and potential collapse, yet no comparable action. Santiago’s reply was precise.

The steam tunnels fall outside of the scope of this emergency action and may be addressed through future redevelopment. One day the tunnel will be safe… probably right after we build something expensive on top of it.

It was, on its surface, a bureaucratic delineation of authority. To those listening closely, it was something else.If the land is being cleared and the emergency is not an emergency, then what, exactly, is being prepared. And who in that room already knew.

Choreography on the dais

You could watch the meeting without sound and still understand it.

Bryant moved carefully between the rows and the table, holding the microphone like something that needed to be managed rather than passed. He held the microphone like it had legal implications. He was polite, deliberate, almost protective of the flow. Questions were allowed, but answers were moderated.

The panel itself spoke sparingly. Rachel Swack did not try to carry the room, nor could she. The rest of the panel spoke in fragments, carefully measured, as if each word carried a cost, offering only what they intended to make public and nothing beyond it. The facts were thin, but they were consistent. Which is comforting, if what you’re looking for is consistency in not saying much. There was no emergency, at least not in the steam plant. There had been a failure to maintain. It is difficult not to notice what sits just beneath it, a quiet alignment of responsibility, cost, timing, and the question of what land is worth once it is cleared.

Two ways of sitting

At the center left of the room, Benjamin Jones stood with the ease of someone who did not need the room to agree with him. Beside him, Marc Block leaned in close, the two of them speaking quietly to one another while residents spoke into the microphone. Not once, not accidentally, but repeatedly. Their attention turned inward, their conversation carrying on as if the voices in front of them belonged to a different meeting entirely. It takes a certain confidence to have a private conversation in a public meeting. It takes something else to keep it going while people are asking you questions.

When Kalin spoke, when Zora followed, when Tibor’s voice rose just enough to reveal the strain beneath it, the room tightened. You could feel it, the kind of tension that does not come from anger but from being unheard for too long. And just behind it, almost out of sync with the moment, there was laughter. It came from Benjamin and Marc. It is a particular kind of absence to be in a room and to actively choose not to hear it.

Not everyone made that choice. Lydia Tang leaned forward, her attention fixed not on the panel but on the community. She listened the way someone listens when the answer matters. Melissa Wade, seated deeper into the audience, was quieter but no less present. There was something in her expression, a visible disappointment, perhaps even a quiet recognition of what was not being said. There was something shared between them, not authority but alignment, a kind that does not need to be announced. Their presence felt like participation.

The contrast was harder to miss. On the opposite side, Jones and Block remained turned toward one another, occasionally glancing down, looking away, their posture unchanged even as residents spoke about environmental risks and uncertainty. The choreography of the room made the distinction visible. Some listened as if accountable to what was being said. Others did not. It is a dynamic the island has seen before, where remaining present does not always mean being engaged, and where the appearance of participation can quietly replace the act itself.

Where power sits

As the evening wound down, the mood remained eerily calm. Santiago’s line about the steam tunnel did not spark a debate. The connection between redevelopment and what had just been described as a non-emergency remained unspoken. Bryant thanked everyone again. The chairs emptied. People filed into the cold night.

If you read David Stone’s thoughts on local governance, you will know he advocates for elections “as local as it gets.” He argues that power should sit close enough to be felt. That night, it did, and it didn’t. Some appointed board members sat with the community, listening as if the answers mattered. Others remained turned away, comfortable in the distance their position affords, secure in the quiet assumption that attention will pass before accountability arrives.

I do not believe the steam plant demolition was inevitable. It was described, more than once, as the result of a failure to maintain. And yet, that was not the thought that stayed with me.

It was Santiago’s line, read from a prepared statement at the start of the meeting, that the steam tunnels may be addressed through future redevelopment. The words were careful. Placed. Meant to be heard. It is difficult not to understand what that suggests. That what sits beneath us will be addressed when something else rises above it. That safety, perhaps, arrives only when it becomes useful.

When a deputy commissioner chooses words like that and places them into a room, they are not accidental. And when they pass without consequence, they do not disappear. They stay with you, in ways that feel uncomfortably close to home.

Power was in the room that night. It simply chose to sit far enough away not to hear anything. For now, whatever urgency was meant to justify the present remains, as ever, somewhere below the surface.

NYC Department of Buildings Deputy Commissioner Yegal Shamash acknowledged that a full demolition report exists. He described its findings. He spoke about its conclusions. But when asked directly whether that report would be made public, his answer shifted.

He suggested it could be obtained through FOIL. Then, moments later, said he would need to “have a conversation in-house” about what could be published.

The information exists. Its release does not.

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The System That Delays Itself

That answer might have carried more weight if FOIL were functioning in real time.

It is not.

Multiple requests for this very material were submitted in February and early March. The current estimated completion dates now extend into late May and mid-June.

That is not access. That is delay.

At the same time, a narrowly scoped request was submitted to RIOC. No documents. No content. Only email metadata. A defined date range. Two keywords: “Steam Plant” and “Emergency.”

The goal was simple: understand when RIOC became aware and how it was involved.

The response arrived on April 14, one day before the Town Hall:

Even here, where the burden is minimal, the pattern holds.

Information is acknowledged. Requests are accepted. Time is extended.

What Was Said, and What Was Not

One detail did emerge clearly.

There were two separate actions:

• An emergency order to stabilize the site

• A separate order to demolish it

It defines both the urgency and the authority behind what is happening. But the most urgent issue raised by residents was not procedural. It was physical. People reported breathing issues.

The response was direct. Air monitoring will be conducted when legally required. Until then, it will not be expanded.

No timeline. No interim measures. No deviation from minimum obligation.

Why Air Monitoring Is Limited

What officials communicated at the Town Hall follows a familiar pattern. Air monitoring is tied to specific legal triggers, not general concern. In this case, that trigger is asbestos-related work.

When asbestos is actively being disturbed, regulations require monitoring because the risk is clearly defined. Outside of that phase, there is no automatic requirement to measure air quality, even if demolition, debris, or dust may still affect surrounding areas.

That does not necessarily mean the air is safe. It means the law does not currently require it to be measured.

Why Not Do It Anyway?

There are a few practical reasons agencies tend to avoid expanding monitoring beyond what is required:

• Liability exposure
  Once monitoring begins, results create a record. If elevated levels are detected, it can trigger obligations to act, delay work, or take on additional mitigation.

• Cost and operational friction
  Continuous monitoring adds expense and can complicate timelines, especially if results require changes to the plan.

• Regulatory posture
  Agencies often default to compliance with minimum standards rather than proactive measures, particularly when no violation has been formally identified.

What This Means for Residents

Air monitoring is not being withheld because it is impossible. It is not being implemented because it is not legally required. That leaves a gap between what is legally sufficient and what residents may reasonably expect, especially when concerns are already being raised.

That gap was not unnoticed. As reported by Eleanor Rivers in “I Can Ask,” RIOC board member Professor Lydia Tang explicitly directed that air monitoring be installed. The response she received, notably, was not a commitment to act, but a deferral.

Bridging that gap does not appear to be happening internally. And when even a direct request from within the board results in hesitation rather than action, it suggests that movement, if it comes, will need to come from outside pressure.

What Comes Next

Information exists. That much is no longer in question. Officials have acknowledged it, referenced it, and in some cases described it. But acknowledgment is not access, and access delayed is access denied in practice.

At the Town Hall, Deputy Commissioner Shamash pointed to FOIL as the path to obtain the report. Those requests have already been filed. No substantive response has been produced. When pressed further, he said he would need to speak with his commissioner about what could be released.

In that same exchange, he stated that a third-party review could be allowed. But no process was outlined. No indication of who would fund it. No explanation of how such a review would begin, or whether it would carry any authority to affect what comes next. At the same time, a critical distinction was introduced: the emergency order to secure the site, and a separate demolition order that did not appear to rely on that same emergency basis.

If the demolition is not tied to an active emergency, then its urgency, and its necessity, become questions that can be examined. Without a report, or an independent review, those questions remain unanswered while the project continues to move forward.

What Advocates Are Saying

Following the Town Hall, we shared our summary with members of the group actively working to halt the demolition, including Zora Boyadzhieva, Kalin Kresnitchki, and Tibor Krisko, to ensure accuracy and invite their perspective.

On the question of the report, advocates cautioned against overstating certainty. As Tibor Krisko noted, DOB “did not overtly confirm a report existed,” though officials did describe structural findings in detail. Kalin Kresnitchki offered a more precise framing:

“DOB described its structural findings orally at the Town Hall but did not provide or confirm the existence of a written report, and no report has been released publicly.”

What was presented at the Town Hall went beyond general statements. Officials described specific structural findings and referenced images associated with those findings. That level of detail strongly suggests that some form of report exists. What remains unclear is its scope, its rigor, and whether it reflects a complete analysis or a partial one. The public, however, has access to none of it.

While no formal commitment to a third-party review appears in the public record, DOB Deputy Commissioner Shamash did offer a more informal next step. As Kresnitchki described:

“He gave us his business card and promised to give us a personal demolition site tour… we have sent him an email… awaiting a response.”

At the same time, advocates raised concerns that extend beyond process and into current conditions on the ground. According to Kresnitchki:

“Demolition is going for weeks… cutting lead paint covered metal pipes… no containment, no negative pressure and HEPA filtration.”

On air monitoring, the understanding remains unchanged. Monitoring will begin when asbestos removal legally requires it. Not before. The result is a widening gap between what is happening on the ground, what is known, and what is formally acknowledged.

Emanuella Grinberg a concerned Roosevelt Island citizen affiliated with ArchRI, the group working to halt the demolition, shared the following message for residents:

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And there are others you learn to avoid, gently, respectfully, with the kind of choreography that only comes from repetition. A turn of the head. A sudden interest in the opposite side of the street. A quiet adjustment of pace that, at my age, is more aspirational than effective.

When I was younger, and my eyesight was more cooperative, I could simply cross to the other side of the street before they ever noticed me. It required timing, but it was reliable.

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Now, I have fewer options. I can try to position myself behind someone taller and hope for the best, or I can avoid eye contact entirely and pretend that my hearing has begun to fade.

Dr. Michal Melamed, on the other hand, does not avoid anyone.

I have watched her stand, patiently, in conversations most of us have already excused ourselves from in our minds. She listens with a softness that feels almost impractical now, like something from another time. The kind of patience you hope your doctor has, but rarely expects anyone else to carry.

I admire it. I do not possess it.

I used to cross the street. Now I pause, calculate, and accept my fate a bit earlier than I once did. She stays.

Why I Take the Tram

I take the tram because I have to.

Not for the view, though I suppose it is still there. Not for the novelty, which seems to renew itself endlessly for those visiting. I take it because it is the most direct way to get to my appointments, and because I would prefer, whenever possible, to buy my own radishes.

There is a pantry in my building, and it is generous. Truly. But pride is a stubborn companion, and it does not always accept generosity as easily as it should. It insists, for reasons I no longer question, on leaving less for my ungrateful children, whom I love very much.

So I take the tram.

What It Costs to Rely on It

There is a difference between riding something and relying on it.

If you are visiting, the tram is a view. A moment suspended over the river, a photograph waiting to happen, a brief inconvenience if the line is long.

If you live here, it’s a calculation. Whether I have the energy to stand today. Whether I can schedule an appointment somewhere between the tourist rush hours, or if I will have to negotiate my way through them. Whether I have the patience to be civil.

Often, I do not.

I find myself wondering how many radishes I can reasonably carry before I start resenting every life choice that brought me to this moment. It sounds small when I say it like that. Radishes. A handful of groceries. But that’s the thing about relying on something. The smaller the task, the more obvious it becomes when the system isn’t built for you.

I adjust. I always adjust, assuming it was decided in a meeting for me.

When Patience Breaks

On April 9, 2026, during the full board meeting of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, the tram came up the way it often does. Mary Cunneen, Chief Operating Officer, announced that there would be necessary work on the tram. September and October. Approximately two months.

Dr. Michal Melamed, not with the patience I have come to associate with her, asked, plainly, why there was no plan for how people were meant to navigate the interruption. Not the mechanics of the repair, but the mechanics of living through it. It was said bluntly.

That was what shifted the room.

Because when someone like her runs out of patience, it is rarely about a single moment. It is about something that has been sitting, unresolved, for longer than anyone is willing to name.

What followed was a brief hesitation, the kind that settles over a room when something has been said more plainly than expected. It did not last long. It rarely does.

The conversation moved on. It always does.

I assume the answer will appear in September.

Projects moved forward even when long-term costs were unclear or likely to exceed what the Island could reasonably sustain. Former insiders describe a pattern where available funds were expected to be spent, driven in part by a persistent belief that any surplus would revert to the State. That assumption, they say, was used to justify a simple approach: spend what you have while you have it.

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The results were visible. Capital projects expanded beyond initial expectations. Operating costs followed. And when the bills came due, the pressure shifted back to residents and users.

The Sportspark stands as a familiar example. Costs ballooned well beyond early projections, followed by attempts to raise rates to close the gap. The logic was not unique to one project. It reflected a broader posture toward spending.

As one longtime observer, David Stone, used to put it, there was always an appetite for ribbon cuttings. The moment of completion mattered. The long-term cost often came later.

That history matters because it defines the baseline. Not a system living within its means, but one that too often treated its means as something to be fully exhausted.

The Shift: Looking Beyond the Island

A day after the vote, the outcome feels almost inevitable. The RIOC Board approved the resolution unanimously, a quiet consensus around something that, on paper, reads like a routine extension.

But unanimity does not make it ordinary.

Beneath the formality sits something more significant: an attempt to change how the Island funds itself.

Not by raising fees or cutting services, but by looking outward. By asking a question that feels obvious in hindsight: why should Roosevelt Island shoulder the full cost of serving a public that extends far beyond its residents?

The idea itself is straightforward. Pursue external funding, state, federal, and agency-based grants, that align with the Island’s infrastructure, environmental, and operational needs. Identify opportunities where Roosevelt Island is not just eligible, but relevant, and then go after them.

This is not a new concept in government. But it is, in many ways, new here. And that distinction matters because it signals a shift in mindset, from managing scarcity to exploring possibility.

The Operator Behind the Idea

At the center of that shift is RIOC’s Chief Operating Officer, Dhruvika Amin. She is not a public speaker. She is not charismatic, and she does not operate as a populist. There is no attempt to win the room. Her approach is different. She is a numbers person.

Her focus is on how a budget holds together, how it breaks, and how to prevent that break from reaching residents in the form of higher costs or reduced services. Where others chase visibility, her instinct is structural: balance the system, protect the baseline, and then find ways to grow it.

Because identifying new revenue streams is not just about opportunity. It is about preventing the cycle that has defined much of RIOC’s past, where spending decisions eventually force difficult corrections on the public.

That instinct has already surfaced. In a prior board discussion, as Eleanor Rivers observed, a request to increase Public Purpose Funds met visible hesitation from some resident board members. The moment did not turn into confrontation, but it revealed a willingness to push when the numbers called for it.

There is no guarantee this strategy will succeed.

The mechanics, including the choice of external partners, remain largely out of public view. What has been presented offers a framework, but not yet a full accounting of outcomes. That will matter.

A Shift Worth Noting

The contrast with the past is what gives this moment its weight.

For years, the Island operated as if whatever it had should be spent. The question was how to allocate, not whether to expand. The result was a pattern of visible projects followed by quieter financial pressure.

This initiative moves in the opposite direction. It starts with the premise that the Island should not carry the full burden of what it supports. That if it serves the city, the state, and a broader public, then its funding should reflect that reality.

It is an attempt to shift the model from consumption to leverage.

That does not make it easy.

Not every grant will be worth pursuing. Some will introduce constraints. Others will require matching funds, reporting, or long timelines that complicate execution. And the choice of partners, along with the discipline to pursue only what makes sense, will ultimately determine whether the idea delivers.

Those details are not yet fully visible.

The Bet

Because RIOC, as it often does, hides in plain sight.

Basic questions about what has been pursued, what has been secured, and what it has cost do not receive direct answers. They require formal requests, filings, and time. Information that should be readily understood instead moves through a process designed to delay it.

We have submitted those FOIL requests. And we will wait.

Not because delay is acceptable, but because it has become the only path to clarity.

The idea itself is worth paying attention to. If it works, it could begin to rebalance how the Island funds itself. If it does not, the costs will surface, as they always do, later.

Either way, the outcome should not remain obscured. The Island has been asked to trust the process. What remains to be seen is whether the process is willing to be seen at all. The idea is clear. What is not clear is everything around it.

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Fay continued, her eyes fixed on the page, reading through the names of staff, some present, others expected to join later, all drawn from the same prepared list. Fay was trying so hard to be fair that she accidentally became inaccurate. It’s like watching someone carefully pour water… next to the glass. I found myself recognizing the improvement from the last meeting, and in that moment, adjusting my own lens in return.

Then CEO Benjamin Jones entered the room and offered a greeting. What stayed with me was that none of the board members or staff turned to meet it. Leadership had entered, and the room did not respond. It suggested a growing distance, not spoken, but felt.

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When the discussion turned to the steam plant demolition, Jones took over as the slide deck came into view and moved through a structured overview of agencies and responsibilities: the Department of Buildings, HPD, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He spoke with confidence, the kind that settles a room, at least at first.

Where the Attention Went

As Jones continued, the room drifted. His remarks moved through process and coordination, outlining a high-level timeline through March. The details were there, but they leaned more toward who he knew and how the work would move than toward what had brought people into the room. The presentation had everything except the one thing people came for, which, in fairness, was only the entire reason they were there. The questions that had drawn island residents there remained untouched.

Most eyes followed politely at first. Then, as it became clear that no substance would arrive, they wandered. Melissa Wade maintained eye contact the way you do during a long story you already regret asking for. It felt less like courtesy, as he seemed to direct much of his attention toward her. On the screen, Tibor Krisko, attending remotely, turned briefly to his dinner.

At some point, Jones handed the meeting back to Fay. By the time Jones finished, the room had learned a great deal about who he knows, and absolutely nothing about what anyone needed or wanted to know.

Lydia Tang stepped in before Fay could fully reclaim the floor, redirecting the meeting away from its prepared rhythm and toward the gallery.

She called on Kalin Kresnitchki, who had been documenting the process in detail.

The moments Before the Cut

Kalin’s images were brought up, not as argument, but as record. Snow marked in ways that did not belong to winter. Black soil exposed beneath it. Nothing clarifies a situation faster than snow that looks like it has secrets. Work advancing without anything that resembled visible protection. He spoke carefully, staying close to observation, letting the details hold their own weight.

Zora Boyadzhieva spoke again, and this time I found myself watching her more than listening. Her words were measured, familiar, grounded in questions the room already knew by heart. But her eyes stayed on Benjamin Jones in a way that felt different from the rest of us. There was no accusation in them, only a quiet expectation, as if she still believed he might step into the role the moment required. While others had already begun to disengage, she remained with him, holding that possibility a little longer. It was not naïve. It was deliberate. But it carried a cost. Hope, in that room, had nowhere to land.

She then asked him directly whether he would introduce her to the head of the agency he had just referenced, someone he had described as accessible, someone he had met with. It was a simple request, grounded in the very relationships he had placed at the center of his remarks. At moments, he attempted to acknowledge her as she spoke, but the shift in his tone was difficult to miss. Her tone never changed. His did. That’s usually where the answer is. Where her voice remained steady, even kind, his carried the edge of someone increasingly aware of the position he was being pulled into, and unwilling, or unable, to fully step into it.

Rick O’Connor chose his moment carefully. Where others had circled the issue, he moved directly into it, raising a doubt that had been sitting in the room without being named. If this was truly an emergency, he asked, how had an order signed two years earlier only now become urgent enough to justify demolition. The question did not carry force, but it carried clarity. He followed it with something more practical, asking whether RIOC’s legal staff would be willing to help reach out, to explore whether the work could be paused or delayed until more information was made public, until an environmental report existed not in theory, but in hand. It was a measured offer as much as it was a question, an indication of how far he himself was willing to go. The room held it for a moment. Then it passed. No response formed. And Benjamin Jones, who had struggled with questions far less direct, did not find one here.

Before the moment could fully settle, another voice entered. An environmental attorney, introduced through his work representing victims of 9/11, spoke with a familiarity that came not from theory, but from consequence. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The room shifted toward him almost instinctively. I noticed Rick first, a small, unguarded “oh” escaping him, not performative, but genuine, as if something had just widened beyond the bounds of the meeting itself. Lydia Tang and Melissa Wade leaned forward at the table, so far it felt as though they might cross it. The air changed. Rick’s question had not been designed to force RIOC into action, but to mark where he stood. Yet this was different. This suggested something forming outside the room, or perhaps already formed. And as I sat there, I found myself wondering, as I still do, who had invited him, and what it meant. Whether this was a signal, or simply a coincidence. Whether RIOC had just been put on notice, or whether this, like so much else, would pass without acknowledgment. The question did not resolve. It stayed.

Whatever had been unfolding inside the meeting, it was suddenly clear it might not stay there.

When Words Stopped Working

Fay Christian tried to bring the meeting back to the agenda. After the long stretch of public testimony, there was a visible shift toward order, toward something resembling the structure the evening had begun with. As the public finished, Lydia Tang asked for one more question, or perhaps framed it as a request, but instead of directing it to Benjamin Jones, she turned to COO Mary C. Cunneen. Lydia did not speak for long. She simply asked whether Mary could coordinate air monitoring across RIOC-controlled land adjacent to the steam plant, so that the community, and she herself, could sleep knowing independent measurements were in place. Before she could fully finish, Benjamin Jones stepped in. He apologized as he did, still searching for footing, but aware that as CEO, the answer had to come from him.

He spoke for a long time, but there was nothing to hold onto. The words came one after another, referencing agencies, processes, possibilities, but they did not connect. They did not build. They never arrived anywhere that could be understood as a complete thought. It is difficult to follow an answer that is trying not to arrive. What did come through, slowly, was something else. He was trying to move the weight elsewhere, toward other agencies, away from RIOC. He needed to avoid saying no, but could not find a way to land without revealing it. And at some point, quietly, the room stopped trying to understand him, because it had already understood what he was trying to do. Everyone understood. That was the problem. Lydia waited through it all, patiently, long enough for the words to begin collapsing under their own weight.

Lydia did not meet his language with more language. She waited until it exhausted itself, then returned with something smaller, clearer, and impossible to misinterpret. She restated the request, shorter this time, without framing, without reference to agencies, just the action itself. Install air monitors around the site. She directed it to Benjamin Jones. It was the same question, stripped of everything that had allowed it to be avoided. What had taken him minutes to circle, she reduced to a sentence that could only move forward or be refused.

He began to answer, and for a brief moment it seemed the pattern would repeat. The same opening words, the same turn toward process. But before the sentence could form, the room broke. The room had decided it was done listening. The laughter came quickly, not with him, but at him. It was not cruel, but it was honest. The kind of laughter that arrives when something has been seen too clearly to continue pretending otherwise.

The Air We Carry Home

As the meeting drew toward its end, I found myself thinking less about what had been said and more about Fay Christian. She let the room breathe. She was not standing with the community, nor fully with her peers, but she was not blocking either. Near the end, she spoke about her granddaughter, about breathing issues that had been getting worse. It was a small admission, almost folded into the larger conversation, but it stayed with me.

The air has changed for me as well. In that moment, I saw Fay again as I had known her before. She has always carried herself with a certain elegance. I remember her from years ago, when she taught my granddaughter. There was care in her then, a real care, but also something else I could never quite name. A restlessness, perhaps. A sense that she was not entirely at ease in the role she held. This newer role seemed to have given her a shape she had been searching for. And yet, for a moment, it was no longer about agencies or reports or timelines. Not for her, and not for me. It was about what enters our granddaughters’ bodies without permission.

And still, she remained where she was, between the room and the institution. At times, a buffer. At times, something closer to a shield. Loyal, it seemed, to the structure that had elevated her. I did not see indifference in her. I saw conflict. The kind that does not resolve in a meeting. The kind that follows you home, in the same air our granddaughters breathe.

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And then, almost inevitably, they leave. No recent CEO has lasted more than two years. Some exits come with press releases; others follow executive sessions. Some trail lawsuits, internal disputes, or investigations that never fully surface. Residents hear about the ending, rarely the process that led to it.

The pattern is not subtle. The job comes with authority, but it also comes with a short clock.

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The Role: Two Titles, One Reality

Ask most residents who runs Roosevelt Island, and the answer comes quickly: the CEO. Others give a different answer: the State, the Governor, what some have long referred to as “the chambers.” That split is not confusion. It is a signal.

The role is not just CEO. It is President and CEO. Two titles, one position, double the expectation. But the reality is tighter.

Some prior CEOs have described, in varying degrees of detail, how control actually flows, often through the State and more specifically through the Chair of the Board. Others have only hinted at it. Those hints tend to travel.

Which raises a quieter question. Is the double title meant to elevate the role, or to soften the reality of it?

Because the title suggests something larger than what the role is allowed to be in practice. The limits of the role are easier to see not in the title, but in how decisions actually move.

The Forces That Shape the Role

Formally, the CEO reports to the Board, but in practice the role is defined by managing expectations between the State, developers, and the public, with occasional input from elected officials. The center of day‑to‑day power tends to run through the Board Chair rather than the full Board. Records and reporting around the interim period suggest regular status check-ins between the Chair, the CEO, and select board members; when asked publicly, that arrangement was denied, and subsequent requests for related calendar records were declined with support from the State. An appeal response indicated involvement from counsel within the Governor’s office. Set against that backdrop, the role sits between three forces:

The State
The Chair of the Board carries real weight. Direction does not come through open debate. It arrives already formed, already aligned.

The Builders
Developers appear when it matters. Large projects. Contracts. Timelines. When they are involved, decisions accelerate and resistance tends to disappear.

The Island
Residents and local advocates are the most visible force. Meetings, complaints, pressure. But attention comes in waves.

When the Island is vocal, elected officials step in, and when they do, the machinery of the State can move quickly. We have seen it before: after tram incidents drew sustained attention, City Council Member Julie Menin pressed for answers and action followed; when bus service faltered, State Senator Liz Krueger reached out to the MTA to coordinate more closely with RIOC and service improved. These moments do not happen in a vacuum. They tend to follow pressure, coverage, and organized advocacy.

The current steam plant effort, led by a growing group of residents pushing for transparency and a pause, has rallied attention, but the odds of a full reset are low given the alignment already in place. That is precisely the point: without sustained pressure that pulls elected officials into the room, outcomes tend to proceed as structured. When that pressure appears, even briefly, it can change the trajectory. When that pressure fades, decisions consolidate among a smaller group with clearer interests and closer proximity to power. Not everyone is operating with the same information at the same time. Some are reacting to outcomes. Others are shaping them. The CEO operates within that reality.

What Actually Happens

The job works. Until it doesn’t.

At first, alignment is easy. The CEO is visible, responsive, engaged. Issues are handled, pressure is absorbed, and nothing rises high enough to disrupt the balance between the State, the builders, and the Island.

In the current moment, that restraint is visible. Faced with growing pressure around the steam plant, the response has been measured, controlled, and largely procedural. Residents are directed to email. Responsibility is framed as external. The issue is acknowledged, but not escalated.

So far, that approach is working. It keeps friction low with the State, avoids direct conflict with developers, and contains the issue within channels that do not force broader action.

Yet pressure is building. More than 1,400 residents have engaged. Community Board 8 has called for a slowdown and greater transparency. Questions are no longer isolated.

Moments like this test the role structurally. As pressure grows, the CEO faces a narrowing set of options: escalate and risk misalignment with the forces above, or contain and risk losing control of the narrative on the Island.

History suggests what comes next is rarely decided in public view unless elected officials step in. When they do not, information tightens, conversations shift, and decisions begin to take shape before they are known.

The Present Moment

The pattern is not only a failure of leadership. It is a function of design.

CEOs arrive with authority on paper and expectations in public. They learn quickly where decisions are actually made, who needs to be kept aligned, and how far they can push before the role begins to push back.

Some try to navigate it. Some try to challenge it. None, so far, have outlasted it. The current moment is not unique. It is simply visible.

The question is not whether this CEO will succeed, but what success actually means in a system like this. And more importantly, what would need to change for the outcome to be different this time. Because without that answer, the next transition is only a matter of time.

There was a time, not long ago, when that pressure had a more constant presence. RIRA, for all its limitations, acted as a steady signal. Not perfect, but persistent. A body that kept attention from fading completely. Today, internal division has reduced that role. What remains is more symbolic than structural, much like the resident board members themselves.

New efforts are beginning to form. ArcRI has emerged around the steam plant, organizing residents and focusing attention. Its success will depend on whether that pressure reaches elected officials.

The longer question is whether it becomes something more. If it grows beyond a single issue, builds continuity, strengthens ties with elected officials, and sustains pressure across decisions, it may begin to fill the space that once existed.

When residents organize, apply pressure, and force visibility, outcomes shift. When that pressure fades, the system returns to its default state.

So the question is no longer about the CEO. It is about whether the Island can build structures that give its residents lasting influence.

Will this moment pass? Or does something more permanent begin here?

On my walks these days I move slowly, not by choice but by necessity. Breathing, for me, has become something that must occasionally be negotiated with my lungs rather than taken for granted. So I pause often. I watch the river. I watch the paths. And as the snow began melting this past week, the Island began revealing what it had quietly stored beneath the white blanket of winter.

But before the ground revealed its secrets, something else caught my attention.

A group of RIOC staff were moving slowly across the lawns and pathways in the north of the Island. Not one or two workers, but several of them, spaced out across the grass as if they were searching for something that had been lost. The whole scene had the seriousness of a forensic investigation. I half expected someone to shout, “Don’t touch anything!”

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They moved carefully, eyes scanning the ground between the patches of melting snow. They moved with the focus of people who already knew what they were going to find and were deeply disappointed about it. One would pause, bend down, collect something in a bag, then move forward again while the others continued their quiet sweep across the landscape.

The way they were searching, I briefly thought perhaps someone had dropped a diamond ring. The methodical search made me wonder if something precious had been lost. Although judging by the expressions on their faces, it was clearly not something anyone was excited to recover. It had all the seriousness of a crime scene investigation.

Only later did I understand what they were looking for.

The Plaza That Quietly Changed

Years ago, residents in the north of the Island had a different complaint.

Motorgate Plaza had become known for its pigeons, and pigeons are not shy about leaving their presence behind. Emails circulated. People grumbled. Visitors would wrinkle their noses as they crossed the plaza.

And then, gradually, the complaints stopped.

Not because the pigeons suddenly developed better manners. Pigeons, like certain public figures, remain stubbornly resistant to self-improvement.

The change came because someone inside RIOC decided the plaza mattered. Dhruvika Amin Patel, RIOC’s Chief Financial Officer, asked that the area be regularly washed and maintained. A small team of staff began cleaning the plaza consistently.

Day after day. Week after week.

The pigeons remained. But the plaza changed.

The interesting thing about work done well is that it disappears. Once the plaza became clean again, the conversation vanished with the problem. No one stops in the middle of a plaza to praise the invisible people who keep it that way. Human nature is wonderfully consistent. We complain loudly about messes and remain mysteriously silent about the people who clean them. People will write three emails about a dirty plaza. They will write exactly zero about a clean one.

The great tragedy of doing a job well is that everyone assumes it was always that way.

The Geese of the Southern Promenade

If one walks toward the southern end of the Island, a different kind of mess greets you.

The geese have claimed that territory with a kind of cheerful determination. The geese approach public space with the quiet confidence of Related scouting the Island for its next tower. Anyone who has walked those paths knows the small green reminders they leave across the grass and pavement.

The geese have never once mistaken the promenade for anything other than their personal living room. The geese, it must be said, behave exactly like longtime residents: territorial, noisy, and deeply convinced the place belongs to them. And yet, oddly, their presence feels different.

Geese possess the rare New York talent of making eye contact while refusing to move. Perhaps it is because the geese belong to the ecosystem here. The wildlife sanctuary has created something rare for a place surrounded by water and skyscrapers: a small living community where animals still behave like animals.

Much of that quiet balance rests on the shoulders of Rosana Ceruzzi, who tends to the animals day after day with a patience that rarely makes headlines.

The geese are messy, yes. But their mess feels natural. It reminds us that this Island, despite its buildings and committees, is still a place where nature occasionally insists on having a say.

What the Snow Revealed

As the thaw continued this week, I noticed something else happening across the Island.

RIOC staff were walking the paths with bags and tools, carefully collecting what the snow had hidden for months. The sort of job that makes archaeology seem glamorous by comparison.

Hundreds of dog droppings.

Not pigeon droppings.

Not goose droppings.

Dog droppings left behind by residents who had walked their pets, watched them finish their business, and then decided someone else would eventually handle the rest.

RIOC has placed bag dispensers throughout the Island. They are there like small reminders of a shared agreement. The dispensers offer bags. They do not, unfortunately, provide motivation.

The tools are available. It turns out the Island has solved the technology problem. The remaining challenge appears to be human nature. The bags are free. The effort, apparently, is negotiable.

Yet this week a group of workers spent their days bending down again and again to collect what their neighbors chose not to.

The Small Decisions That Shape a Place

Communities are rarely defined by their grand debates or their public meetings.

More often, they are shaped by thousands of tiny decisions made when no one else is watching. Neighborhoods are shaped by habits. Good ones build a place. The other kind requires a cleanup crew.

Do we hold the door for someone whose hands are full?

Do we pick up the piece of trash that is not ours?

Do we bend down with a small plastic bag when our dog finishes what dogs inevitably do?

The Island has always prided itself on being a thoughtful place, a place where neighbors know one another and where shared spaces matter.

But walking the paths this week, watching staff quietly clean up after hundreds of small moments of neglect, I found myself wondering a simpler question.

What kind of neighbors are we becoming?

Because a place, I’ve come to believe, becomes what its residents repeatedly decide is not their problem.

A Different Kind of Ownership

Every dog on this Island successfully completes its portion of the task. The failure rate begins immediately afterward.

Perhaps the measure of a community is not how clean the paths look after the maintenance crews have finished their rounds, but how willing its residents are to care for the ground beneath their feet.

The next time we see something left behind, maybe the answer is not to wait for someone else to solve it.

Maybe we simply pick it up.

Not because it is our dog.

But because it is our Island.

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On July 8, 2024, an emergency demolition order was issued for the Roosevelt Island Steam Plant.

That fact alone is not controversial. Buildings age. Infrastructure deteriorates. Safety matters. But emergency authority is reserved for imminent danger. It is meant for collapse risk, structural instability, fire damage, conditions that require immediate stabilization to protect life.

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The Timeline and the Tension

Nearly two years have passed.

In that time, there has been no publicly produced forensic structural report demonstrating imminent collapse. No detailed engineering assessment with measurements, load analysis, mortar testing, or steel evaluation has been shared with the community. What residents have seen instead is oil tank removal, soil disturbance, and an open DEC spill case involving No. 6 fuel oil affecting soil and groundwater.

If a building posed imminent structural danger in July 2024, standard protocol would typically prioritize shoring and stabilization. Perimeters would be secured. Engineers would reinforce compromised elements. Immediate collapse risk would be addressed first.

That sequence matters.

The local Community Board recently voted unanimously to request that demolition be paused until sufficient documentation is reviewed. Community Boards do not have the authority to halt demolition. Their votes are advisory. But unanimity signals concern, especially when the question is not preservation for nostalgia’s sake, but documentation for public safety.

Emergency authority is an extraordinary tool. It bypasses ordinary review precisely because time is presumed to be short.

Which raises a simple question: if time was short, why has stabilization not been the visible priority?

The public record so far does not include a detailed structural report supporting imminent collapse. Focused requests have been filed seeking clarity on when the term “emergency” first appeared in writing and what documentation supported its use. Those answers will matter.

Emergency Power and Long Term Planning

This issue is not about opposing growth. It is not about freezing Roosevelt Island in time. It is about process.

In a recent joint announcement extending the Roosevelt Island master lease, state and city officials described a future of continued investment and planning. The release stated:

In that same announcement, David Kramer, President of Hudson Companies, said:

“We applaud the City and State for working together to ensure a bright future for Roosevelt Island. Since the City and the State first shook hands in 1968, Roosevelt Island has become a very special part of the New York landscape, and this agreement will help safeguard its bright future. Kudos to Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams for making this happen.”

Growth is not inherently controversial. Redevelopment is not inherently suspect. Investment in the island’s future is something many residents support.

But when emergency authority and long term planning occupy the same physical geography, documentation becomes even more important.

Residents deserve to know that the use of emergency power was grounded in detailed engineering evidence. They deserve to know that environmental risks are being addressed with full transparency. They deserve to know that process was followed before demolition became irreversible.

A Call for Clarity

Roosevelt Island was conceived as a planned community. Deliberation was built into its DNA. Emergency power is the exception, not the rule.

If the documentation exists, it should withstand scrutiny.

If it does not, that is not a preservation debate. It is a governance question.

Community Board 8 has asked for a pause. It does not have the authority to impose one.

Residents do have the authority to lend their names to a call for clarity.

If you believe that emergency authority should be supported by transparent documentation before demolition proceeds further, you can add your name to the petition requesting a pause until full structural and environmental documentation is publicly reviewed.

Editorial Note: The petition calling for a temporary pause of demolition pending full public disclosure of structural and environmental documentation can be found here. Residents are encouraged to review the language carefully and decide for themselves whether the request reflects their position.

The word emergency carries weight.

So should the proof behind it.

If one person came to mind while you were reading this, consider forwarding it to them.

The way the wind cuts across the river this time of year. The way older buildings hold heat but never quite hold air. I told myself that was why my chest felt tight again on certain mornings. Age, perhaps. Winter, certainly.

It had been worse once before.

Years ago, when the old Goldwater hospital came down and the land was scraped clean for what would become Cornell Tech, trucks lined up for weeks. The ground shifted. The air felt heavier. People mentioned it in passing. A cough. A residue. A fine gray film that appeared on windowsills by afternoon and returned the next morning as if it had never left.

I remember wiping my own windows and telling myself it was only dust. Progress has its own weather system. We adjust. We move on. Most people did. Construction ended. Buildings rose. The island congratulated itself on the future.

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My breathing eventually steadied.

I learned not to think about it.

Then the façade work began at The Landings. Scaffolding wrapped the building like gauze. Stone scraped. Surfaces sealed. The air shifted again, subtly. The gray returned, not dramatically, but faithfully. I found myself wiping the windows more often. I found myself pausing before a full inhale.

It is strange how rarely we think about breathing until we must.

Thinking about breathing

Lately it has felt less automatic. Something I have to notice. Something I have to manage. I hope it goes away again. I hope I return to the luxury of not noticing my lungs at all. At my age, hope is softer than confidence.

My granddaughter used to distract me from it. The joy of seeing her, the way she runs toward me without calculation, used to dissolve whatever cloud had formed in my chest. Lately even that has not quite done the trick. The cloud lingers.

This morning I was heading to the subway because Dr. Resnick closed his clinic a few years ago, and if you want someone to listen carefully to your breathing now, you must go into the city. I scheduled the appointment reluctantly. Just to check something. Women say that when something feels slightly off but not yet alarming.

I paused catching my breath in a way I did not need to years ago.

There are others on the platform now. Some unhoused. Some struggling. I try, quietly, to see them as people first. To imagine the shape of their days. To remember that no one arrives here without a story. And yet, when my lungs feel tight, I stand a little further away than I once did. I wonder if they notice me the way I notice them. I wonder if, to them, I am just another older woman hovering at the edge, already fading into the background. There is something intimate in that recognition. I do not know whether it comforts me or unsettles me more.

There is an irony in it that I cannot ignore. I have feared becoming fragile. Feared being overlooked. Feared becoming background. And here they are, already living in that space of near-invisibility. I worry about getting too close to the platform edge, about unpredictability, about my breath. But I am aware now that in the quiet arithmetic of progress, they and I may share more than I would have wanted to admit. We are both, in different ways, at risk of being forgotten.

Progress has a way of not caring for the weakest. The elderly. The fragile. The ones who move slower through turnstiles and elevator doors. I sometimes feel I must fight my way to the subway station simply to avoid becoming part of the background, like dust that settles and is later wiped away.

Sitting near the pigeon lady’s old spot on the center bench, it occurred to me that perhaps we are not so different. She was easy to overlook once she became routine. I, too, have become routine. The island changes around us. Buildings rise. Structures fall. Those who cannot keep pace are absorbed into memory.

People as problems to be solved

Later that evening, I watched the recording of the February 2 meeting of the Manhattan Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee, the local advisory body that represents Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side on land use, city services, and development matters. It was held over Zoom and chaired by Paul Krikler.

The discussion turned to unhoused neighbors on the subway platform. Dan Sadlier spoke about affordability and systems straining under rising rents. Sharon Pope-Marshall expressed compassion. Others echoed concern. Rick O’Conor read an email from a parent describing her daughter feeling followed on the platform. The temperature shifted. It always does when someone mentions their child.

Safety and compassion sat side by side, neither dismissing the other.

Dan said something that lingered.

“We get weird when we treat people as problems to be solved.”

He meant it gently. And he was right.

But I could not stop thinking about air.

The Architect and the Excavation

When the agenda moved to the steam plant demolition south of the Tramway, the conversation lifted from the platform below ground to the space above it. Zora Boyadzhieva introduced herself clearly. Licensed architect. Twenty-five years of experience. A practitioner of adaptive reuse. A mother raising her children on this island.

She explained what buildings from the 1930s are made of: heavy concrete foundations, steel structures, masonry load-bearing walls. Strong bones.

Apparently the only fragile thing in the room was the timeline.

The building was decommissioned in 2013. It was maintained for years. The last structural review occurred around 2020. Then, beginning in 2023, violations began to accumulate. It quickly developed a condition called “sudden emergency violations.” Eventually, an emergency demolition order. I love how emergencies here have anniversaries. They wait patiently for the right calendar year.

She never said the emergency was manufactured. She simply laid out the dates like a row of dominoes and let gravity do the rest. It’s amazing how a structure can survive ninety years of weather, but not three years of administrative attention.

Residents asked for the structural report. For documentation of contaminants. For demolition plans. For testing results. Since December, she said, there had been silence.

Judy Berdy followed, urging formal action. Tibor Krisko confirmed that he and Zora had drafted a resolution to move to the full board. Paul guided the discussion deliberately, clarifying process, ensuring voices were heard, and preparing the committee for a vote.

Then Kalin Kresnitchki shared a photograph taken earlier that day from the Queensboro Bridge.

In it, excavation is visible. Oil tanks have been removed. Soil is exposed. Transparency, however, is still underground. The tennis bubble stands nearby. The sports fields are within view.

The emergency, once described in broad language, was no longer abstract.

It had moved from paperwork to earth.

Kalin noted that tanks installed decades ago often sit in contaminated soil. That excavation had already occurred. That whatever testing exists has not been publicly shared with residents. That remediation, if done later, could be costly. That children play tennis and soccer within sight of the site.

“Maybe we should postpone tennis,” he said. Roosevelt Island’s first sport where the opponent might be particulate matter. Then more quietly, Zora added, “But we cannot postpone breathing.” That’s the problem with air. It refuses to follow agenda order. Testing may exist. Sharing it, seemingly, is the real hazardous material.

I do not know what is in that soil.

I only know that my breathing has felt different lately. As it did during the last major excavation. As it did when the island assured itself that dust was temporary and progress permanent.

Zora was not an agitator. She was a professional asking technical questions. Which, on this island, can feel far more disruptive. And Paul was not a bystander. He was the conductor, making sure the questions were heard in full.

The committee advanced a resolution calling for a pause until sufficient transparency and documentation were provided. Paul guided the process calmly. Zora remained composed. The ground, however, had already been opened.

The full board would later vote unanimously to request that the work be frozen pending review. Even so, earth once moved does not return easily to stillness.

I hope I am wrong.

I hope this is winter. Age. Renovation dust that will settle.

But I would like to know.

Because breathing should not require speculation.

And progress, if it is to mean anything at all, should not ask the fragile to keep quiet while the soil is moved beneath them.

Some people move through the day without noticing their lungs at all.

I would like to be one of them again.

Editorial Note: The petition calling for a temporary pause of demolition pending full public disclosure of structural and environmental documentation can be found here. Residents are encouraged to review the language carefully and decide for themselves whether the request reflects their position.

This is the story of how Related and Hudson turned public land into private gold, one signature at a time, and how RIOC, through silence and compliance, became an agent of that transfer.

A Timeline of Concessions

Across more than two decades, RIOC amended the Southtown Development Agreement five times. Each amendment deepened the public’s losses.

The first amendment reaffirmed the original structure but offered early signals of the Board’s deference. The second allowed dormancy to linger without penalty, weakening RIOC’s bargaining position and setting a precedent for compliance rather than renegotiation. The third waived public space obligations and narrowed community leverage, signaling a retreat from earlier commitments to civic benefit.

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The fourth amendment granted Related a full affordable building, Building 8, subsidized through the agreement outlined in the document “Southtown 8 – HDC Regulatory Agreement.pdf.” This deal guaranteed revenue streams and financing through public subsidies while limiting RIOC’s long-term ownership or oversight. While the building was officially designated affordable, its design and isolation from the rest of the Southtown development made it easier for the developer to consolidate all affordability obligations into a single site. This allowed Related to market Building 9 as fully luxury offerings without the perceived “burden” of integrated affordable units. The result was a technically compliant but strategically segregated approach that diluted the original spirit of inclusion and affordability across the full development.

Separately, Building 7 played an even more critical role in undermining the public promise of affordability. Although originally envisioned to help fulfill the 40% affordability goal of the Southtown project, it was instead leased largely to a wealthy private hospital system. This institutional tenancy, secured through a direct deal with the developer, allowed Related to mark affordability quotas as satisfied, without adding a single affordable apartment to the general housing market. As a result, the public received no true benefit. No working family ever applied. No waitlist opened. Just a quiet deal behind closed doors.

Most significantly, the fifth amendment finalized the transfer of value to Building 9.

$3.60 a Foot

Building 9 is the tallest and most profitable building on Roosevelt Island. Yet its tax-equivalency burden is strikingly low. Instead of paying New York City property taxes like most comparable luxury buildings, which typically amount to $10 to $14 per square foot annually, Related pays only $3.60 per square foot in base ground rent, plus a nominal $1 per square foot tax-equivalency fee. That puts its fixed annual burden at just $4.60 per square foot.

But even this number obscures a deeper concession. Rather than collecting tax-equivalency payments annually, RIOC accepted a one-time buyout: $92.33 per square foot, totaling $24.8 million. This payment was positioned as a substitute for 35 years of taxes, yet the decision to lock in that figure, and the assumptions behind it, were never publicly scrutinized. Had Related paid standard tax-equivalency payments over those 35 years, the present-day value would have totaled nearly $83.5 million, meaning the public lost out on approximately $58 million in long-term value.

With more than 350 fully market-rate units, Building 9 is expected to generate close to $20 million in annual rental revenue. Against that backdrop, its combined ground rent and tax-equivalency payments amount to roughly six percent of gross income, a figure that would be unthinkable in a fully taxed building, but entirely permissible under this deal.

Meanwhile, RIOC agreed to lease 7,000 square feet of office space within Building 9 at a market rate. That lease, valued at $180,000 annually, guarantees occupancy and provides a stable income stream the developer can finance against. Combined with the waived obligations, it means the public is now both tenant and underwriter.

The result is that Roosevelt Island pays twice: first, in forgone tax revenue; then, in subsidized tenancy. And while Related locks in profits, the community shoulders the cost, in missed infrastructure, higher maintenance burdens, and eroded trust.

Rubber-Stamped

Every one of these amendments passed through the RIOC Board with minimal resistance. At the center of the oversight process was Howard Polivy, longtime Audit and Budget Chair and key member of REDAC.

REDAC, the Real Estate Development Advisory Committee, was created to provide financial and land-use oversight for RIOC’s largest transactions. Polivy presided over years of approvals with no visible pushback, no call for third-party appraisals, and no public-facing questioning of whether RIOC could secure better terms. REDAC, designed to be a guardrail, became a greenlight.

If there was dissent, it was never strong enough to stop the momentum. The board became a formality. The public was no longer in the room.

The Park That Bought Our Silence

To many, Commons East Park seemed like a gift: a modest patch of green space promised in the final development phases. But it came in place of far more substantial community benefits that were once negotiated, and quietly erased.

The original development plans described Commons East as a vibrant civic space, filled with active and passive features: landscaped lawns, climbing structures, picnic decks, lounge areas, porch swings, hammock spaces, and yes, even ping-pong tables. These were not vague aspirations; they were spelled out in development agreements and presented as public-facing offsets for the density and luxury units coming in Building 9.

But when the time came to build, most of those features vanished. RIOC waived Related’s obligation to fund lighting for Firefighter’s Field and a permanent public comfort station, amenities valued at more than a million dollars, in exchange for a one-time payment. What the public received instead was a trimmed-down Commons East with a few benches and a fenced-in dog run.

A park for people became a relief zone for dogs. And the promise of meaningful infrastructure became a symbol of substitution: smaller, cheaper, quieter.

Eleanor Rivers might call it a “symbolic consolation prize”, a place to sit, so we wouldn’t ask why nothing else came.

What We Could Have Had

At every amendment, RIOC had leverage. Time delays, rising market rates, and inflation meant Related needed action. But instead of renegotiating, RIOC stabilized the deal.

With stronger leadership, the public might have gained a new AVAC facility. It might have secured affordable units in Building 9. A permanent community institution could have been negotiated. And RIOC could have secured office space for public use as a condition of development, rather than becoming a tenant inside a luxury tower it helped underwrite.

Instead, the final Southtown building became something else entirely: a fully open-market asset generating close to $20 million a year in rental revenue, while returning only a small fraction of that value to the public. Against that scale of income, the concessions made by RIOC were not marginal. They were structural.

And now, another chapter appears to be forming.

What began as rumor has hardened into expectation. Planning materials and quiet conversations point toward at least one more building at Southtown. In the Governor’s own press release celebrating recent investments on Roosevelt Island, David Kramer of Related is quoted directly. No RIOC board member is mentioned. No public process is acknowledged.

The contrast is difficult to ignore. The public compromised on affordable housing, on amenities, on tax value. It accepted a dog run in place of infrastructure. And while those concessions accumulated, the developer’s voice rose, now appearing alongside the Governor’s as the future of Southtown is discussed.

So the question is no longer what Roosevelt Island could have had.

It is whether Roosevelt Island still has a say.

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The narrow aisles. The small collisions. The cart that stops too suddenly because someone has remembered they need cilantro. The little cardboard signs that try to sound handwritten and cheerful, even when the price has changed again.

I come here the way many Roosevelt Islanders do, by habit and by gravity. The island narrows your choices in certain practical ways, and the city offers them back to you in fluorescent light.

I was halfway between the bananas and the eggs when I saw her.

Not fully. Not at first. Just the outline.

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A woman in a neat winter coat, hair brushed back with care, hands gloved, posture upright in that particular way some women carry themselves when they have decided, long ago, that dignity is not negotiable.

For a moment, my mind did what it always does when it misses someone. It tried to manufacture a reunion.

My heart said: It’s her.

The pigeon lady.

She used to sit on the Roosevelt Island subway platform as if she had an appointment there. Not sprawled. Not collapsed. Seated. Proper. A woman with class, even in circumstances that were not kind. She fed the pigeons with a kind of ceremony. She never begged. She never performed her suffering. She simply existed, presentable, as though staying put together was the last thing she owned.

I watched her for years without ever learning her name.

That is one of the small embarrassments of city life. You can witness someone daily and still fail to truly meet them.

Then, one day, she was gone.

No announcement. No explanation. Just absence.

It is strange what you miss when it disappears. Not because it was pleasant, necessarily. But because it was part of the place, like a familiar crack in a sidewalk.

So when I saw this woman near the eggs, my mind filled in the missing years. I imagined a shelter that worked. A social worker who followed up. A case file that did not fall to the bottom of a pile. A bed that was safe enough to accept. A door that opened and did not slam shut.

I nudged my cart forward, quietly, like someone approaching a skittish animal.

And then she turned. It was not her. I reached for the eggs anyway.

The temperature

On February 2 at 6:30 pm, the Manhattan Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee, the local advisory body that represents Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side on land use, city services, and development matters, met over Zoom, chaired by Paul Krikler.

The recording opens with Paul in full focus, background blurred. The blur perfectly illustrated how much of public life remains just out of focus. Paul offered a quiet thumbs up to someone off screen before welcoming the community. It is a small, almost private gesture. Everything is working. The meeting can begin. RIOC updates. Library news. Community updates.

Then the discussion turned to unhoused neighbors on the subway platform.

Dan Sadlier of City Relief spoke first, laying out statistics about affordability and systems that cannot keep pace with rising rents. Sharon Pope-Marshall expressed compassion. Mia Haj asked what practical steps residents could take. Others nodded along, each careful to signal empathy, each careful to avoid sounding punitive. There was, at moments, an almost unspoken competition in grace.

And then Rick O’Conor said what many residents have said privately for months.

He read from an email describing drug activity on the platform. A daughter feeling followed. Safety concerns not theoretical but lived. It’s fascinating how quickly grace can curdle when someone mentions their child. Statistics are abstract. Daughters are not.

The temperature shifted.

A women’s shelter.

Not on Roosevelt Island. Not on our platform. But close enough to matter, close enough that the conversation came up at our Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee meeting in February. Close enough that people on the island were already talking about it the way New Yorkers talk about things before they happen. With fragments. With rumors. With the anxious tone of people who do not trust official timelines.

The proposed site is 1114 First Avenue, near East 61st Street. A 200-bed facility, originally discussed one way, then revised, then discussed again. The kind of plan that can feel like it arrived already fully decided, even as officials insist public feedback is welcome.

No one dismissed compassion. No one dismissed safety. The tension remained intact, because it is intact in life. You can want help for someone and still not want your child cornered on a platform.

Dan said something that has stayed with me.

He meant it gently, like a hand on the shoulder. He was right. But I have also learned that the city gets weird when it treats residents as problems to be managed. The weirdness is different, but the result is the same.

Not near my groceries.

I thought about the neighborhood around 61st Street, where people have been shouting at meetings. Booing. Demanding not only safety, but control. I understand the impulse to protect your block. I also recognize the old, familiar reflex that appears the moment the city proposes something uncomfortable.

Not here.

Not near my children.

Not near my eggs.

If this women’s shelter at 1114 First Avenue is going to be built, I want it built with clarity. With honest communication. With a plan that is visible, not rumored. With a structure that does not rely on the public to guess.

Not because the neighborhood deserves special handling.

Because the women inside it will.

And because maybe, somewhere in this city, the pigeon lady is no longer feeding birds underground.

Maybe she is simply buying eggs, like everyone else.

If you found yourself nodding, worrying, or wondering as you read this, someone else will feel exactly the same way. Carry this conversation forward, share this with someone who should see it. That simple step keeps this work alive and strengthens our collective voice.

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