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.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

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.

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

That kind of sharing is how this work survives.

Share

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.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

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!”

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

Subscribe now

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.

This newsletter travels best hand to hand. If you know someone who would read this all the way through, they are probably who it is for.

Share

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.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

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.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

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.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

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.

This newsletter travels best hand to hand. If you know someone who would read this all the way through, they are probably who it is for.

Share

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.

A brief note: This column arrives in inboxes and conversations because readers like you share it thoughtfully with neighbors, friends, and others who care about Roosevelt Island’s future. If someone sent this to you, subscribing ensures these moments of clarity reach you each week without depending on memory or good intentions.

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.

Share

Roosevelt Island had always been governed from elsewhere. Decisions arrived finished, explained after the fact, wrapped in language about inevitability. For years, residents pushed back not because they believed they could control the Island’s future, but because they believed they should be part of it. RIRA was born from the dangerous idea that people who live somewhere might notice things. Not as a protest group alone, but as a corrective force. A way of saying that lived experience mattered.

The fight was not abstract. It was about density, services, affordability, and the sense that the Island was an experiment meant to serve people. It was supposed to be an experiment in living, not a spreadsheet with water views. Representation was the demand because representation promised friction. Someone in the room who might slow things down. Someone who might ask why.

The Moment It Felt Like We Won

When resident board seats became real, it felt like a turning point. Not symbolic, not advisory, but structural. It felt like we won because for once the chairs had familiar names on them. People who lived here. People who had fought battles of their own.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

Howard Polivy. Margie Smith. Fay Christian. David Kraut.

For many of us, this felt like a win. Rivercross forced the state to negotiate, which is impressive right up until the negotiation ends. Its leaders understood power. Elevating them felt like elevating the Island itself. We assumed the hardest fighters would protect the whole because that is how stories usually go.

The room did not change as much as the acoustics did. The assumption held exactly as long as it took to become comfortable.

Rivercross and the Narrowing of Care

Rivercross was meant to be the bridge. The place where resident leadership would prove that self‑governance could extend beyond a single building and begin to shape the Island as a whole. For many of us, elevating Rivercross voices to the board felt strategic. What followed revealed a different outcome.

Once seated, Rivercross leadership focused narrowly on securing privatization for their own building. The work was intense, technical, and inward‑looking. The broader interests of other wire buildings, of shared spaces, of the Island’s long‑term balance, quietly receded. Self governance expanded confidently right up to the edge of the Rivercross property line. Privatization is very demanding work. It leaves little time to notice your neighbors. Support aligned consistently with the state, with major contractors, and with investors whose priorities were no longer ambiguous.

For years, Margie Smith, Fay Christian, and Howard Polivy advocated primarily for Rivercross itself. The fight was framed as communal, but the focus remained fixed on a single building. Other wire buildings, other residents, and the broader Island were rarely centered. That imbalance became harder to ignore when RIRA members, including Frank Farance, began pressing publicly on what Rivercross privatization would mean for everyone else, how it would draw on shared Island resources while leaving the costs behind.

It was around this moment that something shifted. The final Rivercross deal that reached the board appeared markedly watered down from what had been envisioned by Margie Smith and her peers. And just before that vote, Fay Christian stepped down. Margie Smith followed within days. They stepped down right when their presence would have been inconvenient, which is a very efficient schedule.

No explanation fit the timing, but the timing explained plenty. No public accounting that made sense of the sudden absence of two resident voices at the precise moment they were most needed. David Kraut never said outright why they left. He hinted only that the decision was not theirs alone. The fact that their departures came days apart, just before the final vote, was enough to register as something other than coincidence, though few noticed it at the time.

What the experiment ultimately enabled was not broader self‑governance, but confidence. Private capital learned that the Island could be reshaped with resident participation that did not meaningfully resist it. Affordability could be acknowledged, reconfigured, and minimized. Quality‑of‑life arguments could be absorbed without altering outcomes.

When the Room Went Quiet

After that, the room changed.

The coordinated departures at Rivercross did more than thin the table. They marked the only moment when the board briefly hesitated. In that same period, Howard Polivy abstained from a vote aligned with the state’s will, an anomaly in a record otherwise defined by assent. It was the lone pause before a long stretch of unanimity.

David Kraut withdrew from public engagement long before he withdrew from concern. He still walked the Island. He still listened. But he stopped speaking in the way he once had. Some people step back because they are finished. Others because they are not.

Howard Polivy did not step back. His presence grew. Committees accumulated the way furniture does when no one throws anything out. Responsibilities expanded. His votes returned to consistency. Over time, that consistency came to define his role. Power accrued, but only so long as it was exercised in alignment. Every nod reinforced the arrangement.

As that ecosystem solidified, even voices we once believed would challenge it were absorbed into its gravity. Representation remained visible, but its edges dulled. No one announced new rules. None were needed. Certain names stopped being spoken critically. Certain questions stopped being asked. The limits became understood without being stated.

Winning Representation, Losing the Island

RIRA, meanwhile, turned inward.

The organization that had once focused outward, pressing against authority, became a place where residents argued among themselves. We fought over process. Over tone. Over whose version of the Island mattered most. Pressing against authority is exhausting. Pressing against each other is much more sustainable. We had won representation, and in doing so, lost the urgency that had unified us.

Without term limits, representation does not evolve. It calcifies. Without independence from state renewal, representation hardened. The state chose who stayed. The state chose who did not. What had once felt like access revealed itself as permission.

Some people stayed and tried to adapt. Others walked away quietly. A new wave of residents arrived without this history, without the memory of what the Island was supposed to be. They arrived to a finished story and were told it had always been this way. The experiment faded, not in collapse, but in indifference.

Roosevelt Island was once described as a utopia. Experiments require uncertainty. What we have now feels settled.

What followed Rivercross did not require scandals to proceed, even though there were many. Agreements were enough. Southtown came next.

And by the time the public realized what was being negotiated away, representation was still present, but no longer capable of interrupting outcomes.

At the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, committees have increasingly served a different function. Over time, they have become the place where minimum legal requirements are satisfied, language is refined, and decisions already made elsewhere are given a procedural home. Outcomes are not debated into existence. They arrive fully formed.

This distinction matters. When committees stop shaping outcomes and begin ratifying them, oversight becomes performance. Accountability becomes layered. Responsibility moves outward, into consultants, vendors, and third-party partners, each adding distance between decision and consequence.

Howard Polivy’s long tenure on the RIOC board did not create this system. It illustrates it, and shows how long a system can operate without interruption when no one is required to meaningfully dissent.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

A System That Rewards Alignment

Howard Polivy has served on the RIOC board for years beyond the expiration of his original term. He has done so without elections, without a constituency to answer to, and without any meaningful mechanism for public accountability. In that structure, survival is not determined by effectiveness or independence. It is determined by reliability.

Polivy’s record is simple. On every final resolution, he voted yes. Even when votes were not unanimous, his was. Even when concerns were raised, his position did not change. The language accompanying those votes rarely varied either. Year after year, the same assurances appeared: appropriate process, sound judgment, institutional stability.

This consistency was not incidental. It was rewarded.

In systems where outcomes are decided before meetings begin, unpredictability is the only real threat. Polivy did not introduce it. He reinforced the existing logic of the institution. He echoed the priorities of state operators and senior executives while diluting the influence of local concerns that lacked structural leverage.

You do not need a villain for mismanagement to persist. You need alignment.

Audit, Finance, and the Disappearance of Scrutiny

At RIOC, audit and finance have long operated as a unified committee. The structure itself is questionable. The consequences are visible.

Budgets passed year after year without meaningful resistance. Investigations multiplied, often bleeding into operating costs rather than preventing them. Executive turnover accelerated, yet institutional responsibility never settled. Each failure was treated as discrete. Each remedy was temporary.

Major breakdowns did not arrive unannounced. In 2013, the vehicle procurement scandal later known as Motorgate unfolded after years of routine budget approvals and weak internal controls; precisely the domain of audit and finance. In 2019, the Sportspark renovation was approved as a contained capital project, only to balloon into a multi‑year closure with escalating costs and lost public access, again passing through audit and finance without a meaningful challenge to scope, timeline, or pricing assumptions. More recently, tax and lease arrangements benefiting large residential buildings were approved as fiscally prudent, even as they quietly eroded long‑term revenue and shifted the burden elsewhere. Each of these decisions fell squarely within the responsibility of audit and finance to question risk, test assumptions, and interrupt momentum. Each instead was waved through, framed as manageable, appropriate, and unlikely to disrupt operations.

Polivy was present throughout. Not as a dissenter. Not as a brake. As a constant, lending continuity to decisions that repeatedly failed to slow themselves down.

Oversight did not fail loudly. It failed to interrupt.

Real Estate and Exported Accountability

RIOC has spent years exporting responsibility outward. Consultants were hired to advise. Developers were empowered to manage. Legal layers accumulated between the board and the ground.

The deal with Hudson Related is not an exception to this pattern. It is its clearest expression.

Main Street retail was handed over under a long-term master lease. The promise was professional management and revitalization. The result has been vacancy, churn, and a lack of coherent community strategy. Public land became private leverage.

The structure matters. RIOC pays rent to Hudson Related for land it controls. Public purpose funds flow from RIOC to nonprofits, which then use those funds to pay rent back to the same landlord, effectively subsidizing private leases with public money. Public money circulates through layers that obscure accountability while strengthening private control.

This is not conspiracy. It is design.

Polivy voted yes to the structure. Yes to the extensions. Yes to a model that protects the institution legally while weakening its connection to the community it serves.

Operations and Lived Consequences

Operations is where abstraction becomes experience.

Red bus failures. Railings that deteriorate and fail. Infrastructure allowed to slip from routine maintenance into emergency response. Each incident is framed as sudden. None of them are.

They are the predictable outcome of years of approvals that treated degradation as acceptable risk and delay as a neutral choice. Budgets passed. Warnings softened. Responsibility diffused.

When committees function as confirmation rather than challenge, rather than places to help shape outcomes, operations absorb the cost.

Oversight as Illusion

There is a rational logic to institutions insulating themselves from legal scrutiny. Board indemnification exists for a reason. Board members are expected to make difficult decisions, and the risk of being sued is part of that design. Protection is meant to enable action, not replace it. At RIOC, protection increasingly became the action.

But when the state inserts three or four layers of consultants, legal structures, and third-party operators between itself and the public, something else happens. Responsibility is not just protected. It is displaced. Governance shifts from decision-making to risk management. Oversight becomes procedural rather than substantive.

In that environment, the board does not increase accountability. It can reduce it.

Board members who do not face elections do not face consequence. Over time, many retreat from visibility altogether. Remote participation becomes normalized. Presence becomes symbolic.

Some board members remain visible in the community. They attend events. They are seen. They answer questions. That visibility creates friction. It also creates accountability.

Others disappear into the institution, where absence is not punished and questions are no longer expected.

Howard Polivy did not need to hide. The system hid for him.

The Inspector General report made clear that legal insulation has limits. Process does not absolve responsibility when outcomes consistently fail the public.

If a board exists primarily to absorb scrutiny rather than exercise oversight, the question is no longer about individual members. It is about purpose.

What Can Be Fixed

Reform is possible. But only if governance is treated as more than continuity.

Committees must shape outcomes, not receive them. Board service must have limits. Visibility must be expected, not optional. Community structures that once influenced agendas must be restored, not sidelined.

Without elections, residents’ power is limited. Knowledge is the one tool that remains.

That is why attention matters. That is why records matter. That is why questions matter.

A survey opened last week asking a simple question. It will remain open until Howard Polivy decides whether to resign. This is not about punishment. It is about accountability. Continuity without consequence is not stability.

Howard Polivy did not break the system. He enabled it by remaining reliable inside it, year after year, as oversight narrowed and accountability thinned.

When governance becomes indistinguishable from continuity, the question is no longer who stayed. It is what was allowed to happen because they did.

Most of our readers find us through a quiet forward from someone they trust.
If this piece earned that trust, passing it along means more than you think.

Share

If you were to close your eyes and open them again, you might not know whether it was 2011 or 2019 or 2024. The numbers change. The faces change. The chairs around the table change. But for a very long time, one presence did not.

Howard Polivy. Board meetings are like reruns of a show you never liked. New cast, same script, and somehow Howard Polivy was always renewed for another season.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

Subscribe now

He was there when the meetings ran smoothly and when they did not. He was there when CEOs came and went, when governors changed, when priorities shifted quietly behind closed doors. He was there when the tone of the room softened and when it tightened. He was there when others raised their voices, and he was there when they left.

And through it all, the meetings continued to end the same way. With a yes.

Howard Polivy wasn’t just renewed for another season. He was syndicated.

How He Entered the Room

Howard Polivy joined the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation board in 2009, recommended by Mayor Bloomberg and appointed by Governor David Paterson. His term, like many others, was finite on paper. It expired, unlike many others, his presence did not.

Years passed. Governors changed. Board members rotated in and out. Polivy remained seated long after the technical end of his term, a constant through successive administrations. He was not the loudest voice in the room, but he was a familiar one. And familiarity, in institutions like RIOC, carries weight.

He did not build influence by challenging authority. He built it by never forcing authority to react.

From early on, Polivy aligned himself with the structure of the board rather than its personalities. Others raised their hands. Howard raised no objections. He simply positioned himself where the vote would end up, which is a far more efficient use of energy. Over time, that instinct made him useful. And usefulness, more than independence, is what ensures his survival.

The Illusion of Oversight

At a recent committee meeting, the room lingered on a small procedural question. An agenda item concerning needed work on the AVAC pipe had already been added. The substance was not in doubt. The work was necessary. The outcome was clear.

The debate was not about whether the pipe needed fixing. It was about how politely the board wished to take credit for agreeing with an agenda that had already been distributed based on the meeting now underway. Oversight, in that moment, became a matter of presentation. Which was, by then, the usual form of supervision.

Over the years, Polivy occasionally postured to remind the room that he held power. He asserted control when someone suggested he did not. He even made a brief attempt to elevate himself to CEO during one of the leadership transitions that followed the termination of an executive he had helped scrutinize. The attempt went nowhere, which was exactly where it needed to go. The state did not elevate him. It did not need to. It let him stay, accumulating committee chairs and internal influence instead. Time did not move him upward. It let him spread sideways.

As chair of the Audit Committee and the Real Estate Advisory Committee, Polivy wielded influence indirectly, initiating internal investigations that shaped careers and constrained executives. Those actions rarely surfaced in public minutes. His power rarely appeared in the minutes. It preferred the hallways, where decisions are harder to quote. Yet even here, his role was not that of an architect. It was that of an enabler. He rarely hesitated with the room, and when he did, the hesitation never crossed into opposition with the state or with large real estate deals. On every final vote, he aligned with the will of the chair and, by extension, the will of those who held power. Performing authority while obeying it turned out to be a marketable skill that repeated quietly over years. It is also what made him indispensable. Indispensability, in this case, meant never being the problem.

When Staying Becomes the Decision

Of course, everything was not always fine.

Infrastructure aged. Retail thinned out. Trust eroded in small, accumulative ways. The consequences of earlier votes surfaced slowly, often years after the meetings that authorized them. By then, the language that had justified them was long forgotten.

This is how institutional harm often appears. Not as a single failure, but as a widening gap between procedure and experience. Between what is approved and what is lived. Nothing failed spectacularly, which made everything harder to question.

Howard Polivy did not create that gap. But he helped normalize it. His votes did not introduce risk. They removed interruption. Stability proved useful until it outlasted its purpose. He certified continuity at moments when continuity itself had become the problem.

Over time, the meetings grew quieter not because there were no problems, but because the process had learned how to absorb them. Votes passed. Language softened. Responsibility diffused. The board continued to function.

In that system, staying was not neutral. It was the decision.

What the Yeses Leave Behind

Howard Polivy’s legacy is not abstract. It is visible in the decisions that were approved, quietly and consistently, and in what those decisions produced over time.

He voted yes when the board extended the Rivercross ground lease in 2011, a deal introduced mid-meeting without public notice. That vote helped unlock privatization, delivering windfall gains to shareholders while permanently weakening the state’s leverage over one of the island’s largest housing complexes. The affordability protections cited at the time dissolved years later, exactly as critics warned. The vote passed. The consequences arrived on schedule.

He voted yes when the board handed Main Street retail to Hudson–Related under a 30-year master lease, promising revival through scale and professional management. A decade later, storefronts still cycle through vacancy, small businesses struggle to survive, and RIOC quietly subsidizes the deal to keep it afloat. Main Street became leverage for Southtown development, not a strategic asset for the community it was meant to serve.

He voted yes on years of capital plans that emphasized presentation over prevention. The tram elevator took seven years to complete. Blackwell House reopened years late. Eleanor’s Pier closed for safety and remains closed. The Helix deteriorated to the point of emergency repair. Each project had its own explanation. Together, they told a simpler story: maintenance deferred long enough becomes crisis.

He voted yes when Sportspark closed for renovation in 2019, a project pitched as a brief disruption. It remained shuttered for nearly four years. When it reopened, residents were met with fees so high they had to be rolled back after public backlash. The facility exists now, improved and functional, but the cost was years without access and a pricing model misaligned with the community it serves.

He voted yes as Audit Chair while contracts slipped just under board-approval thresholds, including the now-infamous PR contract designed to polish executive reputations with public money. Oversight did not fail loudly. It simply failed to intervene.

Each “yes” was defensible in isolation. Together, they formed inertia. Every decision arrived with an explanation. The outcomes arrived later, without one.

The cost of that inertia is visible now. Not in one broken system, but in many weakened ones. In infrastructure that aged faster than expected. In public spaces managed rather than cared for. In a board that learned how to proceed without fully accounting for where it was going.

Nothing here requires scandal to explain it. It requires only years of assent. Though, over the years, several scandals seemed to wander in anyway.

If the Chair Were Empty

It is difficult to imagine the board without Howard Polivy because for so long, it did not have to. But imagine it anyway.

Imagine meetings where experience is paired with interruption. Where memory produces questions instead of reassurance. Where a vote does not arrive already decided. Where “yes” is something earned, not supplied.

The room might be louder. It might hesitate. And when it finally moved on, it would do so with less certainty than before.

Howard did not need to lead or obstruct. Remaining in place turned out to be enough. And for a very long time, that was exactly what the state needed. Continuity served the state faithfully. Whether it served the island is a newer question.

The island is now left to decide whether that is still enough.

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

Roosevelt Island’s AVAC system is often discussed as if it were either a miracle or a menace. In truth, it is neither. It is functioning infrastructure that has reached a point in its lifecycle where how it is maintained matters as much as whether it exists at all.

The recent shift by RIOC toward planned outages, advance notice, and scheduled repairs is not cosmetic. It is structural. Planned maintenance is the difference between stewardship and improvisation. For years, residents experienced AVAC failures as surprises. Increasingly, they are being treated as projects. That change deserves acknowledgment.

In 2019, RIOC completed a major modernization of the AVAC system, replacing its aging control systems, upgrading turbines and monitoring equipment, and extending the system’s projected operational life by roughly 30 years. That upgrade did not freeze time. It bought it.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

Even with that work completed, pipes will continue to wear. Steel fatigues. Curves take impact. A system designed for the garbage habits of fifty years ago now operates in a world of different materials, volumes, and expectations. The question is no longer whether AVAC can keep running, but how it should evolve as conditions change.

That evolution does not stop at pipes. As Melissa Wade recently suggested during the Operations Advisory Committee meeting, it may also require reexamining the size and design of building chutes themselves. If access points invite misuse, maintenance alone cannot compensate for design decisions that no longer fit how the system is used today.

What maintenance contracts usually do
(and what they don’t)

A standard AVAC maintenance contract is designed to keep a system operational, not adaptive.

Typically, these contracts focus on routine inspections, valve servicing, emergency response, and patching or localized repairs when something goes wrong. They are written to keep systems operational day to day, not to rethink their structure.

What they rarely include is systematic replacement of aging pipe segments, redesigns to accommodate new waste streams, or long-term lifecycle modeling that looks beyond immediate failure prevention. This is not a criticism of RIOC. It is how infrastructure contracts are written almost everywhere. Maintenance contracts preserve function. They do not future-proof systems.

If AVAC is now expected to operate reliably for decades longer, the maintenance philosophy must evolve from repairing what breaks to replacing what will break.

Preventive replacement is not extravagance

Replacing pipe segments before they fail feels expensive because the alternative, waiting, feels cheaper. It is not.

Emergency repairs cost more. They disrupt service. They force decisions under pressure. Preventive replacement spreads cost over time and reduces risk. This is not unique to AVAC. It is how bridges, tunnels, and power systems are managed once they mature.

A larger annual maintenance allocation, used predictively rather than reactively, is not indulgent spending. It is fiscally conservative infrastructure management.

The question for RIOC is not whether to spend more, but whether to spend earlier.

AVAC was designed for “the rest”

When AVAC was designed, waste streams were simpler. The system was built to handle what remains after separation: trash.

Today, Roosevelt Island separates paper, plastics, organics, and what remains. Only that final category enters the AVAC system. Everything else relies on truck-based collection, even though the island itself was designed to minimize exactly that kind of street-level disruption.

This is not a Roosevelt Island failure. It is a legacy design meeting modern policy. Many newer systems were built with multiple waste fractions in mind. AVAC was not. That does not make it obsolete. It makes it constrained.

Could AVAC handle more than one stream by time or schedule?

In theory, some pneumatic systems handle multiple waste streams using time-based controls, tagging, or parallel routing. In practice, retrofitting a legacy system raises real constraints. Contamination between streams becomes a serious risk. Residue left in pipes complicates separation. Cleaning and purge cycles would need to be far more frequent. Sensors and valves may not be designed for that level of precision. Operational complexity increases quickly.

The question is not “why hasn’t RIOC done this.” The question is what would it take, what would it cost, and what would it displace.

That is a planning question, not a blame question.

What airports and newer systems do differently

Airports and newer planned developments often use pneumatic collection systems that were designed from the start to handle multiple waste fractions. They build in frequent access points for cleaning and modular pipe replacement, and they budget for lifecycle replacement from day one rather than treating it as an emergency expense.

Roosevelt Island did not have that advantage. Its system predates modern waste policy. The challenge now is not to replicate newer systems, but to adapt responsibly within existing constraints.

The mattress question, calmly answered

A persistent narrative suggests residents routinely push mattresses into the AVAC system.

Technically, this is highly unlikely.

Residential access points are not sized for full mattresses. Main pipes are accessible only from secured areas typically restricted to building staff or contractors. For a mattress to enter the system intact would require deliberate action, staff-level access, or extreme compression.

If large objects have ever entered the system, the issue is not resident behavior. It is access control.

That distinction matters.

What getting better actually looks like

RIOC is doing something important right now: it is planning.

Planned outages. Public notice. Preventive repairs. These are signs of institutional learning, not failure.

The next step is explicit lifecycle planning. That means defining how the maintenance contract should evolve, budgeting for predictive replacement rather than emergency fixes, and clearly stating what AVAC can and cannot reasonably be expected to do.

AVAC does not need defending anymore. It needs a roadmap.

This newsletter travels best hand to hand. If you know someone who would read this all the way through, they are probably who it is for.

Share

The room was small, almost apologetic in its proportions. A square of tables pressed together, a screen pressed forward, everyone pressed inward. When Mary C. Cunneen, Acting Chief Operating Officer of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, began speaking about the AVAC system, there was very little physical space left for the thing she was trying to explain.

She raised her hands anyway. And I found myself unexpectedly excited, unaccustomed to seeing Mary so vivid, so physical, so entirely at ease inhabiting the explanation rather than guarding it.

Mary reminded the committee that the year before, RIOC had paid to replace a section of pipe at the entrance to the AVAC plant itself. This proposal, she said, concerned a different section. The West Main line, under Main Street, just outside the plant. She explained that certain parts of the system are more vulnerable than others, especially curves, where garbage repeatedly slams into the pipe over decades.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

She demonstrated this by slapping her hands together in quick, rhythmic motions. It was the most animated garbage disposal explanation I have ever witnessed, and unfortunately, almost no one could see it. The slide deck filled most of the visual field, and the gesture existed largely in sound.

The logic itself was straightforward. Curves take more impact. Impact causes wear. Wear eventually becomes failure. The work, she said, needed to happen now. Garbage slamming into pipes for decades is the most accurate metaphor for governance I’ve heard this year.

Mary explained that Envac, the original installer of the AVAC system, would perform the work. She emphasized, carefully and more than once, that this was a single-source vendor. Envac installed the system in the 1970s. Envac maintains it. Envac is the only entity qualified to do this work.

“Given the single source nature of this project,” she said, setting up the number.

Three hundred sixty thousand dollars.

She said it again, this time rounding up just shy of three hundred sixty-one thousand. Even she seemed to feel the weight of it as it landed in the room. It is a lot of money for a pipe. Even if you know nothing about pipes, as I do. Infrastructure often costs more than intuition would allow. Three hundred sixty thousand dollars for a pipe sounds outrageous until you remember it’s underground and therefore immune to common sense.

I found myself suspended between two familiar instincts. One is to trust expertise. The other is to recognize how monopoly language works when it appears fully formed, already justified, already complete. I thought of stories I have read over the years about public agencies that tried to save money by cutting corners, only to discover later that when trains run over tracks, or when systems carry weight at speed, the material matters. The structure matters. Everything matters.

And still, the idea that only one company can replace a piece of a decades old design gives me pause. It sounds odd. It may also be true.

Mary moved on.

In the Middle of It

I have not always been kind to Mary Cunneen in my notes over the years. In earlier meetings, she often sounded guarded, brittle, sometimes condescending. This time, she did not. Her voice was calmer. Softer. There was confidence there, but not the defensive kind. She seemed steadier in herself.

Confidence without defensiveness is terrifying. It means the armor came off because it’s no longer needed.

I have learned, late in life, to pay attention when someone changes how they occupy a room. Mary appears to be doing that. I admire any woman who makes her way into the upper ranks of a system like this one. Men love to call women tyrants. It saves them the trouble of learning how to follow instructions. Men like to confuse structure with cruelty when they are asked to follow it. Funny how structure always feels cruel to people who benefit from chaos.

She is growing in the role. I can see it. And I respect it. You can tell she’s growing into the role because she’s stopped apologizing for occupying space that was never meant to be comfortable.

A Shift in the Conversation

Then Melissa Wade, a member of the committee, asked a question that had almost nothing to do with the pipe being replaced. She didn’t ask about cost, vendors, or timelines. That’s how you know the question was dangerous.

She asked about origin.

We often hear, she said, that residents put the wrong materials into the chutes, contributing to the deterioration of the AVAC system. Would it make sense, she wondered, to look at the size of the chutes themselves. What she implied was that everyone blames residents for misuse, which is amazing considering the system was designed assuming perfect behavior. If buildings have large openings, does that make it easier for large items to be discarded improperly. Would it be worth considering requiring smaller chutes, so misuse is less possible in the first place. Smaller chutes to prevent misuse? That’s called design. It’s very controversial.

It was the most intelligent question I have heard in a committee meeting in years because it suggested fixing the cause instead of funding the consequence.

Mary immediately complimented her. A genuine one.

Alvaro Santamaria, Assistant Vice President of Engineering and Capital Projects, responded next, clearly eager to speak, as men often are when a technical word opens the door. He spoke about pipe diameters and transitions, about how internal piping must match the diameter of the main lines, how funneling can cause problems. None of it was wrong. None of it was unkind. It simply was not what Melissa had asked. Everything he said was correct, detailed, and completely unrelated. He had seized on a word she used and let it pull him away from the essence of her question, not out of malice, but out of habit.

She clarified gently, which women learn to do early. She wasn’t asking about the pipes. She was asking about the hole. The opening where she, personally, drops her bag of garbage. The size of that opening determines the size of what can go into the system.

Alvaro acknowledged the point and added that buildings are often reluctant to invest in modifying their chutes. That is amazing, considering how expensive it gets when they don’t.

Yet, there it was, again.

RIOC blames residents.
Residents can only use what buildings give them.
Buildings do not want to spend the money.

For years, I have found myself caught between two explanations that never quite added up. On one side, David Stone’s writing, which at times made RIOC sound omnipotent, controlling every failure by design. On the other, RIOC’s refrain about mattresses and misuse, which sounded increasingly implausible as a comprehensive explanation. Mattresses became the villain because blaming objects is easier than blaming decisions.

And here, for the first time, someone was pointing to the architecture of responsibility itself. Once you see the architecture of responsibility, the excuses stop fitting through the opening.

Before the Meeting Moved On

Melissa continued, gently, suggesting that if buildings are unable or unwilling to properly educate tenants on AVAC use, perhaps reducing chute size should be part of the conversation. Not to punish residents, but to protect the system.

Mary said perhaps it was something that could be discussed.

Then Howard Polivy jumped in, referencing a discussion with Brian Weisberg from Manhattan Park. Howard jumped in to reference a conversation, because nothing settles a question like mentioning you once talked to someone. Before he could finish the sentence, Fay Christian spoke over him, eager to add that Manhattan Park had already had a large discussion about this issue and that Brian was looking into it.

As best I could tell, the idea that emerged from this overlapping exchange was to lock the chutes during move-outs. At least, that seemed to be the point, though no one quite said it cleanly. It was presented as something already discussed, already considered, already underway.

Neither completed a full thought. They stepped on each other, politely but unmistakably. The eagerness to demonstrate involvement was palpable. It mattered less what the solution was than that it had already been talked about. And as I listened, I found myself wondering what meeting this had been, and who had been in the room for it. Howard and Fay were clearly eager to establish that they had been there.

Nothing stalls progress faster than two people racing to prove they were already thinking about it. I found myself wondering when that discussion took place. And why some committee members were in the room for it, while others were not. These are the kinds of questions you do not ask out loud, but you should.

Melissa, instinctively fair, responded that she was not a fan of penalizing neighbors who are not moving out. Punishing people for staying is a fascinating housing policy, even by Island standards.

The committee then struggled briefly with language around recommending a course of action that had, functionally, already been included in the agenda. They found the words eventually. Or something close enough.

The meeting moved on.

The remainder focused on winter preparedness. Lydia Tang raised concerns about flooding near Westview following the removal of the glass atrium. She and Melissa helped clarify that certain promenade maintenance on the Queens side falls squarely under RIOC’s responsibility. Alvaro outlined recent renovations and plans with a level of detail that felt real. Competent. Grounded.

For a moment, it felt like actual work. No theater, no props, no applause. Very unsettling.

As the meeting wound down, I found myself returning to the suggestion that had slipped out almost accidentally: locking the chutes during move-outs. That, at least, seemed to be the idea. Not debated. Not voted on. Simply referenced as something already discussed somewhere else.

It lingered with me because it explained more than it solved. The solution itself was less interesting than the way it arrived, carried in sideways through overlapping sentences and unfinished thoughts. It mattered that Howard and Fay were eager to signal they had been part of that earlier conversation. Presence was being established, which is the polite way of saying territory was being marked.

And so the question that stayed with me was not whether locking chutes during move-outs is a good idea. It was where that decision-making had taken place, and who had been invited into it. Because maintenance does not fail all at once. It fails when decisions migrate quietly away from the rooms meant to hold them. When decisions migrate quietly, accountability never follows.

As attention shifted elsewhere, I found myself thinking about maintenance again. About how it only becomes visible when something breaks. About how unglamorous it is. About how essential.

We build. We celebrate. We cut ribbons.
And then, quietly, year after year, someone has to show up and make sure the systems still hold. That work does not photograph well. It does not trend. But it is the only thing that keeps a place livable.

When the meeting ended, the room did not change. It simply emptied. The questions lingered longer than the answers. And for once, that felt appropriate.

We do not need viral. We need thoughtful forwards to people who care. If you are one of them, thank you.

Share

What happened at Rivercross shows how early, on-the-record decisions can predetermine outcomes years before the public believes a choice is being made. It shows how conflicts do not need to be hidden to be consequential, only unaddressed. And it shows how accountability can quietly dissolve when the people who shaped a deal are no longer present when its consequences are finalized.

This article corrects the record, documents what the public minutes actually show, and explains why the unanswered questions around process and governance still matter today.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

The Long Run-Up to Privatization

Rivercross, a limited-equity Mitchell-Lama cooperative, entered the late 2000s facing a familiar problem: an aging building, a maturing mortgage, and growing pressure to refinance. Across Roosevelt Island, other Mitchell-Lama buildings were already exiting the program. Privatization was not a sudden idea. It was openly discussed years before it became a vote.

In February 2010, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation board formally discussed ground lease extensions for Rivercross. The minutes show active debate, not procedural housekeeping. The board acknowledged Mitchell-Lama withdrawal and the role lease extensions would play in making that possible.

Most notably, Director Margaret Smith stated on the record that she hoped the Rivercross resolution would be more binding. This was not a neutral comment. It reflected intent.

No recusal was raised. No disclosure was recorded.

The 2011 Vote That Changed Everything

On January 19, 2011, the RIOC board approved a forty-year extension of the Rivercross ground lease. This vote was not originally on the agenda. It was added mid-meeting after management reported that negotiations were complete and materials had already been distributed.

The board framed the decision as necessary to allow refinancing and repairs while maintaining affordability. Embedded in the deal, however, was an arbitration clause that anticipated a future Mitchell-Lama withdrawal and removed leverage from the state if terms later became disputed.

Eight board members constituted the board at the time. Four of them were Rivercross residents, meaning half of the governing body voting on the lease extension lived in the building whose future they were deciding.

Those voting in favor included Fay Fryer Christian, Dr. Katherine Teets Grimm, Howard Polivy, and Margaret Smith. All were Rivercross residents at the time. None recused. None abstained. No ethics guidance is referenced anywhere in the minutes.

Michael Shinozaki cast the sole dissenting vote. His opposition is critical. According to the meeting record, he raised concerns about the financial terms and the process itself, questioning whether the extension adequately protected the public interest and whether the ground rent and related conditions reflected fair value. He was the only director to vote no on the lease extension that embedded the mechanism later used to enable privatization.

It is also important to note how the record was later ratified. When the January 19, 2011 minutes were approved at a subsequent meeting, both Michael Shinozaki and Margaret Smith were absent. The approval was carried by a different subset of directors, meaning the formal ratification of the record occurred without either the sole dissenting vote or one of the vocal Rivercross-affiliated directors present.

What Happened Next Was Predictable

Once the ground lease was extended, the path forward was no longer speculative. The legal and financial framework necessary for privatization was in place.

Publicly, the 2011 vote was framed as a narrow response to mortgage maturity, capital needs, and the goal of maintaining affordability. That framing appeared repeatedly in board discussions and official summaries. But by that stage, affordability itself was no longer the open question being debated. The February 2010 discussions had already acknowledged Mitchell-Lama withdrawal as a real and contemplated outcome, and the lease terms approved in 2011 were structured to survive that withdrawal.

Behind closed doors, the implications were understood. The extended lease provided the long-term security lenders require. It anticipated a full exit from Mitchell-Lama. It set the conditions under which ground rent and fees would be renegotiated once the building converted. The vote did not declare an intent to privatize, but it made that outcome legally and financially possible.

In that sense, what followed was not a surprise. With refinancing secured and the structural barriers removed, Rivercross voted to leave Mitchell-Lama. By 2014, the building had gone private. The arbitration clause approved in 2011 was triggered exactly as designed.

It is also worth noting that Rivercross’s privatization did not proceed without resistance. As early as 2013, residents were publicly raising concerns about governance, arbitration leverage, and the long-term consequences of the deal structure, particularly the imbalance between early gains of Rivercross shareholders and long-term costs to the island as a whole. Those objections did not stop privatization, but they did change the context in which it unfolded. By the time the final settlement arrived, the process was no longer quiet.

Years later, in April 2018, RIOC was asked to approve a settlement resolving that arbitration and finalizing the financial terms of Rivercross’s exit.

The 2018 Meeting and the Sudden Absences

At the April 18, 2018 RIOC board meeting, Director Howard Polivy asked whether he should recuse himself from the Rivercross vote. He did. It was the first documented recusal in the entire Rivercross saga.

Who was not in the room matters just as much.

The published agenda for that meeting listed both Fay Fryer Christian and Margaret Smith as sitting board members. The minutes later revealed, in a single line in the President’s Report, that both had “recently resigned.” No dates were provided. No explanation followed.

RIOC agendas are typically finalized just three to four days before a meeting. In this case, Christian and Smith appeared on the agenda but were gone by the time the board convened, indicating their departures occurred abruptly, in a matter of days.

Board resignations do not require a vote, but context is usually known. Here, none was. Two Rivercross-connected directors were present for the votes that enabled privatization and absent in the final days when the settlement was finalized.

To complete the public record, we submitted a Freedom of Information Law request seeking the exact dates and circumstances of those resignations.

That absence mattered. The 2018 settlement did not simply formalize Rivercross’s future. It resolved arbitration on terms that shifted long-term financial burden onto the building, leaving Rivercross among the most heavily taxed residential properties on Roosevelt Island. While shareholders realized extraordinary value, the building now carries the cost. Yet, that settlement passed.

Correcting the Record about Fay

We need to be clear about what we got wrong, and what the record now shows.

In an earlier reporting, we stated that Fay Fryer Christian and Margaret Smith voted on the Rivercross settlement in 2018. That was incorrect. By the time the April 18, 2018 vote occurred, both women were no longer members of the RIOC board.

The confusion stemmed from the published agenda for the April 2018 meeting, which still listed both Christian and Smith as sitting board members. Their departures were noted only briefly in the President’s Report within the minutes themselves. That distinction was easy to miss, and it led to an error that we are correcting here.

Where the record diverges sharply from Fay Christian’s later statements is on the earlier, decisive votes.

Christian contacted David Stone on September 22, 2017, months before the 2018 settlement vote. Her response reads:

“Nor did I live in Rivercross during the time the vote about Rivercross’ lease extension; I lived in Westview. A reporter checks his data; do not rely on memory. The minutes are public record. Check, and make sure you are correct. If you want residents to think you are reporting truthfully, you should take my advise, check- reread minutes if reporting on a meeting.
Fay”

The minutes resolve that question. There were two Rivercross lease votes that mattered: one in 2010 and one in 2011. In both instances, Christian was a voting board member. When those votes were taken, she had a stake in Rivercross. She voted in favor of the lease extension and did not recuse.

Margaret Smith did the same and was vocal in pushing the process forward.

The documentary record is unambiguous.

The Questions That Remain

Rivercross is not an isolated case. It unfolded under governance structures that remain unchanged, and under a public authority that is once again negotiating land lease extensions that will shape Roosevelt Island’s future for decades. As a new ten-year lease extension moves forward, the lesson from Rivercross is not about the outcome, but about the process that made that outcome inevitable.

The record now shows that privatization was enabled early, without recusal, by directors who lived in the building and stood to benefit. It also shows that when the consequences of those decisions were finally resolved, those same directors were no longer in the room.

What remains unanswered is narrower, and more troubling.

Why were conflicts acknowledged only at the end, after the outcome was locked in?
And why did two Rivercross-connected board members step down simultaneously, in a matter of days, without public explanation?

Those questions remain open. We are still looking.

Most of our readers find us through a quiet forward from someone they trust.
If this piece earned that trust, passing it along means more than you think.

Share

What stayed with me was what happened afterward. People began trying to name that small patch of land that had never really had one. I love that once there’s a body, everyone suddenly wants to name the place. Oh now you care about urban branding? Over the years it collected temporary labels, attempts to anchor memory where none had been needed before. Some tried calling it the subway pier. Calling it the subway pier is perfect actually. You wait there, something terrible happens, and nobody ever wants to acknowledge it again. I did not think about it much either. There was no reason to. Until one day, there was.

The Day the Chairs Arrived

The name returned to me during a RIOC board meeting, years after I had stopped thinking about it. Charlene Indelicato, then president of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, struggled as she tried to say it aloud. She kept defaulting to West Pier, then stopping herself, folding Eleanor into the name mid-sentence. Finally she landed on “West Pier/Eleanor,” explaining that this was a new name she was still learning, one created by Hudson/Related. ‘West Pier slash Eleanor’ sounds less like a place and more like a legal settlement. The phrasing felt contractual rather than conversational, as though the pier were being sponsored instead of named.

A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.

Charlene’s recommendation that we visit the newly rebranded pier sent me down to the water soon after. What I found was not a destination so much as a suggestion. Chairs and tables had been placed along the edge, hinting at a future café that never quite materialized. There was no vendor, no plan, no sense of who was responsible for keeping the place alive once the novelty wore off. Over time, the chairs thinned out. A few disappeared. Then a few more. Eventually there were none at all. No announcement marked their departure. Maintenance rarely does.

That quiet retreat stayed with me, because it was familiar. Places on Roosevelt Island often arrive fully imagined and slowly hollow out when no one is tasked with caring for them. The chairs disappearing one by one is the most honest maintenance policy I’ve ever seen. No memo, no meeting, just quiet abandonment. The pier did not fail all at once. It simply stopped being tended to. What had been staged as an opening became, over the years, an absence.

The only people who seemed to have taken the place seriously were engineers. In 2001, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a comprehensive report on the Island’s seawall, including what is now called Eleanor’s Pier. Structural concerns were already documented then. David told me to read it, which is how I knew I never would. Friendship has limits. Who has the patience to work through two hundred pages of engineering recommendations?

Still, the knowledge settled in. It changed how I moved through the Island. To this day, I avoid walking along the Queens Promenade near my home. When engineers say ‘instability,’ I don’t wait for a ribbon-cutting to confirm it. Most people avoid places because of crime. On Roosevelt Island, we avoid them because of forensic structural engineering reports, or worse, when those reports arrive orally or in unsigned memos. When the name West Pier resurfaces, it brought with it the memory of how easily a place can be declared finished long before anyone commits to maintaining it.

What Lasts and What Doesn’t

When Mary Cuneen presented Eleanor’s Pier to the Operations Advisory Committee on December 2, 2025, it was clear the work had been carefully prepared. She walked the committee through the pier’s history without theatrics: built in 1990 atop an older boat pier, flagged in 2024 for failing railings, then paused at the board’s insistence to allow for a deeper structural review led by Professor Lydia Tang. That review confirmed significant deterioration below the surface, not just cosmetic failure. The resulting proposal, now fully scoped, came in at roughly $1.1 million, with Dockhand Services selected and a capital budget approved. In short, the deterioration wasn’t cosmetic. That’s Island code for: it would have looked fine until you stand on it.

The discussion then turned, as it often does, to materials. Alternatives were presented. Marine-grade wood was chosen as the most appropriate and least expensive option, backed by a fifteen-year manufacturer warranty and two years on the work itself. Someone joked, “So we have the best,” and the room laughed. I laughed too, but not because of Alvaro Santamaria, Assistant Vice President/Engineering and Capital Projects & Planning at RIOC, but because nothing is funnier than rust. Rust tells the truth slowly. It does not rush. It waits until you are comfortable. Rust tells the truth slowly because it knows eventually someone will lean on it.

What unsettled me was not the choice of wood. Wood can last. Steel can last. Concrete can last. Anything can last if someone tends to it. What I heard instead was the language of replacement. Alvero explained that the plan was to replace individual planks over time, as needed. It was reasonable. Practical, yet, that sounds less like a maintenance plan and more like what I did with my first three husbands. Replace them when they expired. By my last husband, I’d learned the lesson. You don’t replace. You maintain. Healthier cooking, longer walks, fewer surprises.

I learned that difference early. My cast-iron pan belonged to my mother. I have been cooking with it for more than seventy years. It has no warranty, no instructions, no expiration date. It lasts because I take care of it. I clean it, dry it, oil it, and pay attention.

Rust has always mattered to me for that reason. When I think about maintenance at scale, I think of how the Eiffel Tower in Paris looks better now than it did when I was a child, repainted again and again without ceremony. I think of the Golden Gate Bridge, standing in fog and salt because someone is always painting it. From a kitchen pan to a global landmark, the lesson is the same. Nothing ruins a landmark faster than thinking the material will handle it on its own. That’s how marriages and bridges collapse. Material does not save anything. Maintenance does.

Still, this was one of the more impressive meetings RIOC has held in some time. Mary, Dhru, and Alvero were coordinated and clear. The work had been slowed down rather than rushed.

A Pier, Returned Carefully

I left that meeting grateful. Grateful that the pier was no longer being treated as a cosmetic problem. Grateful that someone had insisted on asking why before deciding how. But also aware that RIOC remains far better at beginnings than at care. Capital budgets get approved. Ribbons get cut.

Despite all this, hope has returned. The Operations Committee voted to advance the project, which was already slated for the full board agenda. A larger-than-usual contingency was approved, reflecting the complexity of the work. Coordination among staff was strong. The preparation thorough.

In the full board meeting that followed days later, Lydia Tang once again raised the frame beyond the immediate, noting that upcoming roadwork might need to pause if demolition at the Steam Plant was imminent, given how often past construction has undone recent work. It was a small comment, but a consequential one, rooted in institutional memory. Listening to it, I found myself wondering where Howard’s memory of these cycles sits, or whether his role has simply become to move recommendations forward once the institution has decided.

Eleanor’s Pier moved forward, nonetheless. Approved. Funded.

I do not know when I will walk out onto it next. I am grateful that I will.

What keeps a pier standing is never the material or the warranty. It’s whether anyone shows up after the applause with a brush and a bucket.

Rust is funny until it isn’t.

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

To understand how Roosevelt Island arrived at a moment where a twelve-year dormant building is suddenly labeled an emergency, while a structurally compromised tunnel beneath our feet remains politely sidelined, you have to start with what was known, when it was known, and who chose to act on it.

One System, Conveniently Divided

For decades, the steam plant, steam tunnel, east seawall, and hospital complex functioned as a single integrated infrastructure. Steam generated at the south-center end traveled north through a tunnel that also doubled as part of the seawall, protecting the shoreline and supporting what would later become residential development.

When Goldwater Hospital was cleared to make way for Cornell Tech, the City solved the valuable part of the equation and walked away from the rest. Cornell received clean land. The City retained the steam plant and tunnel, at least on paper. The State inherited the land lease and the residents living above it. What no one inherited was clear responsibility.

That decision split an engineered system into political pieces. From that point on, the steam tunnel was no longer an asset. It was a liability. And liabilities, when shared, tend to sink quietly.

Before we continue, it’s important to understand the difference between the steam plant and the steam tunnel. Here is a brief recap:

The steam tunnel runs beneath the island, connecting the former steam plant to Coler Hospital, and stretches along the Queens-facing side of Roosevelt Island. It also functions as part of the seawall, and while it once carried steam, it has not been operational or maintained since around 2013, increasing concern about long-term structural risk.

The steam plant is a decommissioned industrial building that once generated steam for the island’s hospitals and has been inactive since 2013. It shows no visible signs of immediate collapse and is not adjacent to residential buildings, though it sits above the steam tunnel and near other critical infrastructure, including the subway and the Queensboro Bridge.

Twenty Years of Warnings Underground

The first documented warnings about the steam tunnel are not recent and they are not speculative. A federal engineering study from 2001 identified deterioration in the Roosevelt Island seawall, including sections where the steam tunnel is structurally integral. That is the earliest public, technical record we can point to, and it matters because it predates Cornell, predates the plant’s closure, and predates the current emergency language by decades.

Over the years, the tunnel continued to appear in engineering assessments and internal discussions because it posed a real risk. It is underground, expensive, and difficult. Failure there threatens the promenade, adjacent buildings, and critical infrastructure. It also threatens no developer’s timeline in a visible way.

Credit where it is due. Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation raised awareness. It put the tunnel on agendas. It commissioned studies. That matters.

But let’s be precise. The tunnel is not RIOC property. RIOC could not compel remediation. What followed was a familiar pattern on Roosevelt Island: public funds spent on designs that go nowhere because ownership remains unresolved and the bill remains unwelcome. Awareness rose. Action did not.

Meanwhile, development continued above the tunnel.

The Emergency That Surfaced Late

As concerns about its condition accumulated quietly in reports and committee discussions, real estate moved in the opposite direction. Developers were publicly quoted in notices tied to the ground lease extension, and speculative plans for the steam plant’s future circulated for years, long before any hint of an emergency designation. During that same period, the language around the tunnel softened. What had been described in engineering terms as a structural concern gradually lost urgency in public framing, even as the risks remained unchanged. The result was a familiar inversion: the infrastructure with a documented history of concern receded into the background, while land with development potential steadily moved closer to resolution.

Contrast that long record with the steam plant. The plant was decommissioned in 2013 when Goldwater closed. For years afterward, public discussion consisted largely of rumors and reuse fantasies. What it did not include was a comparable forensic drumbeat warning of imminent danger.

The first formal, public movement toward demolition appears only in 2025, when committee agendas and agency briefings began to frame the plant as an emergency. That framing collapsed under scrutiny at the Operations Advisory Committee meeting documented by Eleanor Rivers in An Emergency, Apparently.

A skilled architect asked for evidence. None was produced. The urgency could not be explained. The work, we learned, had already begun.

The tunnel carried decades of documented concern without urgency. The plant acquired urgency the moment timing aligned. . After all, ribbon cuttings are far easier to stage above ground.

Governance Without Evidence

Public narratives do not form by accident. In multiple committee meetings, senior board member Howard Polivy stated that the steam tunnel was not urgent and redirected attention toward the steam plant. Those statements were not accompanied by engineering evidence. They were not challenged in real time. They shaped how risk was framed.

When senior voices downplay one danger and elevate another without substantiation, process follows narrative. Eventually, emergency declarations do too.

This is not about intent. It is about consequence.

The Pattern, Plainly Stated

The tunnel is underground, expensive, and difficult.
The plant is visible, easier, and development-adjacent.
Only one was labeled an emergency.

That is the story. Not a demolition. Not a meeting. Not even a building.

The emergency is underground. Apparently.

Before anything was said about public safety or demolition schedules, Fay Christian breezed past Professor Tang’s credentials as if the word professor might burn her tongue. The contrast sharpened when Mary Cuneen’s name appeared; Fay lingered on “VP” with a kind of practiced warmth, a small elevation that felt almost ceremonial.

Then there was Dhruvika. After a year of introductions, Fay still handled her name the way I once handled my first electric typewriter in the early sixties, with optimism, confusion, and a faint hope no one was watching. But it was the smile that gave the moment away. Not embarrassment, not friendliness, but something far more curated. The kind of smile that travels upward without ever touching the heart. A smile meant to signal who stands above and who stands below.

Only later did I understand why this felt so familiar. Fay’s interactions took me back to my volunteer days on Welfare Island in the early sixties, when a nurse at Goldwater Hospital would whisper certain names with care and let others fall away entirely, depending on who mattered and who didn’t. Some things change. Some things simply trade uniforms.

Words That Sound Like Warnings

When Rachel Swack of HPD took the microphone, the word “emergency” appeared so often it might as well have been punctuation. Every other sentence landed on it, softly and politely, the way some people say “dah” without realizing it has become a kind of verbal wallpaper. Rachel was unfailingly pleasant throughout the night, repeating what others said, making them feel heard, even jotting notes in a small pad. Watching her write, I could almost read the line forming in her mind: “When will this person stop talking?” She hid it well. Too well. If I were anyone else, I might have been fooled.

She spoke as someone trained to absorb a room, to neutralize it with kindness. Yet when asked what the actual emergency was, she could not quite say. No one from her team was there to assist her either, which made her warmth feel both genuine and strangely hollow.

The steam plant has been closed since 2013, but apparently the emergency only began once the question of who pays was settled. It reminded me of other island rhythms of late, where urgency blooms only after the ink is dry somewhere else. Much like the new ten year lease extension that seemed to find its way to the board only the night before the governor’s announcement, long after the real decisions had been made.

If you send information to an advisory committee after the project has already begun, it isn’t consultation. It’s breadcrumbing. A trail left behind so the public can be told, later, that they were advised.

Judy and the Architect

Bless Judy Burdy. She said what every resident was thinking within the first ten minutes, and she said it with the same unstoppable velocity she brings to every room she enters. I adore her, truly, even if she is a fast‑track train with one conductor and that conductor is always Judy. She asked the questions no one else on the committee dared to utter. Why the rush? Why now? Why call something an emergency only after twelve quiet years and a conveniently timed funding agreement? She spoke about Goldwater Hospital’s demolition, how long it took, how careful it was, how nothing about this current pace made sense. She reminded the room of the subway line, the bridge, the steam tunnel underfoot. Judy does not nibble at a point. She bites.

Then came the architect, and the room shifted. She was calm, sharp, deliberate. Her words didn’t flare; they landed. She separated structure from story the way only a trained eye can. No theatrics, no raised voice, just a clear professional assessment that the building showed no visible signs of an emergency. She held the HPD report in her hand without even needing to open it and said what half the room already suspected: forensic work this was not. And when she said that emergencies declared without evidence often look a lot like opportunities, I felt the entire meeting inhale.

Rachel tried to keep her footing, but the architect kept returning to the same immovable question: What exactly is the emergency? And each time Rachel circled back with softness and repetition, the answer dissolved. She didn’t know. She admitted she wasn’t the engineer. She promised to “look into documentation.” Her words were polite, practiced, hollow.

It was Fay who stepped in to rescue her, offering a muddled, well‑intentioned sentence that revealed she did not know much either. Two people answering a question without an answer, trying to steady a narrative that had already begun to unravel. What they had not anticipated was sitting across from an architect who understood both structure and pretense, and who refused to let the word emergency pass without substance.

Pressed again, Rachel finally admitted she did not know the nature of the emergency and could not elaborate. No engineer from HPD was present. No one at RIOC stepped in to help her either, aside from Fay repeating soft reassurances that only deepened the haze. The silence around her spoke more clearly than any of her notes ever could.

Outside the polite script of the meeting, the explanation travels in quieter hallways: the emergency is less about imminent danger and more about timing. A land‑lease extension negotiated behind closed doors, a development window opening, and a parcel that has sat untouched for over a decade now needing to be cleared with sudden urgency. A coincidence so convenient it no longer bothers to disguise itself.

The Process That Already Happened Without Us

It was Melissa Wade who slipped the truth into the room as calmly as a librarian sliding a note across the desk. She began not with accusations or theatrics but with simple, precise questions about the project timeline Rachel was supposedly representing. And with each answer Rachel offered, three truths revealed themselves.

First, the project was already in week three. The community had been invited in long after agreements were signed and work was underway. This meeting was not the start of anything. It was the documentation of something already rolling downhill.

Second, Rachel had no idea what was being done on the site. Each of Melissa’s gentle questions returned the same soft refrain: “I believe that is true.” Not confirmation. Not clarity. Just the verbal equivalent of nodding at a stranger’s grocery list.

And third, Melissa revealed that the next six weeks were not demolition at all but setup and configuration. A slow-building hint for anyone paying attention: if the public hoped to challenge the process, or even understand how to request a pause, their window was now.

Melissa’s questions dovetailed with the groundwork Judy and the architect had already laid, and together the three of them revealed what no one at the table meant to show. They punctured the performance. They exposed that the person presenting the emergency could not describe it, and that the structure of the process had been designed to outrun public involvement entirely. And Melissa connected the final dots: the project was already underway, and if there is any path to slowing or questioning it, the clock is already ticking.

The Bobbleheads

When Lydia Tang asked whether this would go before the board for a vote, the synchronized head shakes of no from Fay, Howard, Mary, BJ, and Rachel looked like a row of bobbleheads in a gift shop. Even Dhru, sweet soul, glanced at BJ first before deciding which way to tilt.

But what struck me more were the still ones. Melissa, Lydia herself, and Lada Stasko did not move a muscle. They watched, quietly and without a flicker of assent, as though they were seeing a script they had not been asked to rehearse. It made me wonder who had been in the pre‑meeting and who hadn’t. Some people seemed to know their cues. Others were absorbing the play in real time.

Fay and Howard felt coordinated, a practiced pair. Mary and BJ moved in the same rhythm as well. And Dhru hesitated, caught between following the pattern or following her instinct. The choreography told its own story: decisions had already settled somewhere else, and the motion in the room was merely the echo.

Of course there would be no vote. When something is labeled an emergency, process becomes optional.

Meanwhile, the real emergency the steam tunnels beneath our feet received the kind of polite, passing interest usually reserved for a distant cousin’s recent gallbladder surgery.

And that, perhaps, is the only honest moment of the night.

Because on this island, danger isn’t what decides urgency. Development does.

I watched the snowfall outside as the topic wound down, remembering the old ferry rides in the sixties when buildings here existed to shelter, not to profit. I thought of the patients I read to in the old hospital, how the steam plant once hummed warm in the dead of winter.

Now it sits cold, and somehow that is when it became urgent.

Sometimes the building isn’t the thing collapsing. Sometimes it’s the public process meant to protect us.

In 2017, during a dispute over reporting, RIOC board member Fay Fryer Christian corrected David Stone. She insisted that during the critical 2011 vote to extend Rivercross’s ground lease by forty years, she was still living in Westview. She framed it as fact and instructed him to “check the minutes” if he wanted to report truthfully.

The public record tells a different story.

According to the ACRIS filing dated December 12, 2008, Christian purchased Unit 308 in Rivercross four years before the vote she referenced. She was already a shareholder when she cast her vote in 2011. She was a shareholder again when she voted on the Rivercross Second Amendment in 2018. The minutes show no recusal, no disclosure, and no discussion of conflict.

On November 17, I reached out to her with two questions. Does she still stand by her 2017 statement. And did she ever seek guidance on recusal for either of the Rivercross votes.

She did not respond.

The public record is not in dispute

The 2007 purchase of Unit 308 is verified through the recorded proprietary lease transfer. The only additional detail in the filing is a secondary address for Christian at 625 Main Street, Apartment LL36. This aligns with what longtime residents recall, including the account from a former Westview task force member and a Roosevelt Island historian, who remembered Christian’s move as abrupt and controversial at the time. Our source’s impressions cannot be treated as evidence, but they fit the timeline that ACRIS confirms.

Christian was a Rivercross owner when she voted. That is a matter of record.

She was not the only one

During the 2011 and 2018 votes, she was one of several Rivercross residents serving on the RIOC board. Among them was Howard Polivy, who remains on the board today. Polivy’s tenure has been marked by recurring questions about influence, judgment, and his closeness to certain Island institutions.

Margie Smith also voted on those Rivercross actions. In the community she has long been held up as a transformational figure. Internally, she was closely aligned with contractors and advisors who shaped many key RIOC processes over the years. That dual legacy is important to understand as the broader story is reconstructed.

Every Rivercross resident on the board voted for the privatization deal.
None recused. None appear to have disclosed their stake in the building.

This article focuses on Christian. The broader Rivercross story will follow.

Margie’s remark, and the gap it exposed

In a recent Governance Committee meeting, Smith mentioned that she had sought guidance from the Governor’s Office about whether she needed to recuse herself from Rivercross matters. This was a public statement, not a documented fact. At this time there is no paper trail supporting that claim.

Her remark still matters. It indicates that at least one board member believed recusal was a live question. It confirms that the issue was known and possibly discussed behind the scenes. It suggests that RIOC was not blind to the potential conflicts.

What we do not know is whether Christian ever made a similar request.
Or whether Polivy did. Or whether anyone did. There is no public documentation showing any of them sought or received formal waivers.

This is why we filed a FOIL request on November 17. Our request seeks any recusal discussions, waivers, or ethics guidance connected to the two Rivercross votes.

If those records exist, RIOC should produce them.
If they do not exist, the absence is its own answer

Middle class advancement, or something more

There is nothing wrong with middle class residents gaining financial stability through privatization. That story is common and often deserved. But in Rivercross, some advanced more than others. Some walked away with multiple units now valued in the millions. Some insiders accumulated opportunities not available to regular residents.

This is where the rumors lived and grew during the privatization era.
Rumors that votes and positions were shaped by the promise of what was coming.
Rumors that certain board members had more to gain than they acknowledged.
Rumors that the ground lease debates were not as clean as they appeared.

These rumors cannot be treated as fact.
But they cannot be ignored either.

Anyone with information, documentation, or firsthand insight can help fill the missing pieces or disprove the claims entirely. That is how community history is corrected.

Why Christian’s silence matters now

Christian’s record contains three points that cannot be argued.
She owned a Rivercross unit during the votes.
She voted on decisions that shaped the building’s financial future.
She misrepresented her residency timeline when questioned about it in 2017.

She is still on the RIOC board today.

The same is true of Polivy. The same shadows fall across his votes, his decisions, and his silence. Their time in leadership is at the end of its arc. Whether they choose to step down now or wait for public attention to make the role uncomfortable is their decision. But the scrutiny is here. The documents are here. And more questions will follow.

If any board member, past or present, believes this accounting is incomplete, they are invited to provide clarification. Facts, not silence, will determine the next part of this story.

Final notes

This article focuses on one angle of a larger narrative. Rivercross did not privatize itself. It moved through a system shaped by policy, influence, private gain, and public indifference. As we continue to document the Rivercross story, the files will speak for themselves.

For now, the most direct question remains unanswered.
Fay Christian was asked to confirm her own recollection.
She chose not to.

I carried it with me as I walked the corridor that evening, unsure where I belonged. Judy’s event had already begun nearby, and word had spread that Lydia Tang and Margie Smith were there. Their presence pulled at me, a familiar warmth from people who understood the weight of this island, while my neighbor’s door behind me still whispered loss.

I knew even then that Lydia was not someone who could be fooled by ceremony. She is one of us, shaped by the island’s sharper seasons. Not like David Krout, who once walked these halls with me like a brother only to vanish the moment a title settled on his shoulders. Titles can hollow people out; his made him feel untouchable until it didn’t. After he was off the board, he asked the community for help getting a laptop so he could stay connected, and the community, forgetful at times yet impossibly warm, made sure he had one.

It is the same community that gathered clothing for Justine’s daughter days earlier, even as PSD discarded the first pile and even as the building itself seemed intent on erasing her mother’s memory in record time. Tape removed. Door scrubbed. Absence absorbed. Names disappear quickly here. Some because of tragedy. Some because they are pushed aside.

Between Warmth and Duty

I stood in that hallway caught between two truths: the people and the institution. Between warmth and duty. Between following the chair I trusted or following the agenda I was expected to witness. After the fire, I found myself craving warmth more than certainty, and I knew I would not find any comfort in the belly of Motorgate. So I turned toward Judy’s gathering, toward Lydia’s steadiness, trusting that the Lighthouse would wait and that YouTube would keep the meeting for later.

Two gatherings on the same night. One held by people who had lost so much, the other held by an institution that had forgotten too much. I turned back toward my apartment in time to watch the meeting unfold, carrying with me the uneasy sense that the building had whispered a truth I was only beginning to understand.

The Empty Chair

The Governance Committee meeting opened with clean angles and tidy frames. Meghan Anderson announced the recording. Marc Jonas Block slipped his coat out of view. BJ Jones sat with practiced calm. And at the head of the table, hands folded, was Conway Ekpo, composed and entirely at ease.

It took less than a minute to notice what was different.

A chair at the table sat occupied, yet empty in the way that mattered. The seat where Lydia Tang should have been. No one asked about her absence. No one explained it. The meeting simply moved forward as though her year and a half of work had been a brief experiment in reform that had already expired.

Conway set the agenda with the confidence of someone who knew the room would follow. Four old documents, untouched for decades. He had reviewed them, annotated them, prepared them. And the others, three lawyers, a CFO, a CEO, and a new board member, fell into an easy synchrony, as if the rehearsal had happened elsewhere. I watched Conway run that meeting so smoothly I wanted to check if he had a teleprompter hidden under the table.

I could not help but think of Lydia’s drafts, delayed and questioned and contorted through months of objections. How every step she took had required explanation. How every sentence had been treated like a breach of etiquette. Outside experts demanded, then dismissed. Every sentence treated like a breach of etiquette.

Yet here, without her, resistance dissolved.

Policies advanced in minutes. Language changed with soft nods. Oversight shifted without debate. Even the difficult questions, executive time commitments, salary visibility, procurement authority, slid across the table as though friction had been quietly lifted. By the time they approved the second policy, I wanted to ask if they planned to marry it too, because no one gets through real commitment that fast.

The Sidelined Voice

The first real shift came when they reached the procurement policy. Dhru walked the committee through the process the way a careful person does, steady but unadorned. Marc asked whether the board-approval threshold had changed. She explained it was still one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars and mentioned past discussions about lowering it to ninety, though nothing came of it. Before the idea had any room, Conway moved the meeting forward, the thought of tightening oversight left behind.

He pivoted to the section on procurement violations. The language placed investigations with the CFO. Dhru said yes, she handled it and involved legal when needed. Conway replied, “sure, sure,” with a softness that dismissed the substance more than the words. Then he offered the alternative: perhaps legal should investigate instead. Dhru tried to hold her ground, but her explanation wandered, and BJ stepped in to support Conway’s move following the structures used at Battery Park.

Conway typed while they spoke: “Lada/Suzanne to check whether the statute required legal to take over”. Harmless on the surface, but the direction was unmistakable. Later, when Dhru tried to offer guidance on investment risk, pointing out that state mutual funds carried more risk than federal ones, Conway nodded without absorbing the point. He read instead from a long, polished sentence about ESG considerations he had written beforehand. No one questioned it. Meghan had nothing to add. The moment when Dhru had spoken had already passed.

Watching from home, I could feel the imbalance. Conway and BJ moved with a quiet, practiced understanding, their exchanges almost too smooth to be accidental. The collaboration was so coordinated I wondered if Beyoncé had choreographed it, as I half expected someone to bring out pom-poms. Dhru was present, yet standing at the edge of their circle, close enough to participate but just far enough to be shown her limits. Conway’s tone stayed pleasant, even warm at times, but anyone listening closely could hear the undercurrent meant for her alone. Each gentle nod signaled that her authority was narrowing, that the decisions would no longer pass through her hands in the way they once had. BJ’s additions reinforced the message, steadying Conway’s position and softening the blow only enough to make it deniable. Lydia, who once would have steadied Dhru, was elsewhere. Fay, who might have thrown the rhythm off entirely, was absent. The people who could have protected her were gone, and the people who knew how to shift power were fully in the room. The machine was not only running smoothly, it was quietly teaching Dhru where she now stood.

A Human Crack in the Room

What lingered with me long after the meeting ended was not a policy or a sentence or even a decision. It was the laughter. Not Conway’s, which surfaced throughout the evening with that polished ease he carries so naturally. His laugh never took the room with it. People smiled politely but did not follow. It was a laugh used to smooth edges, to signal confidence, to remind everyone that he was comfortable in a room he already owned. Pleasant on the surface, but hollow to the ear.

The laugh that mattered came later, and it did not begin with Conway at all. It belonged to Marc.

He said something small, almost nothing. I had to rewind the video again and again just to catch the words, which were barely a joke, more of an unintentional aside. It was not funny. Meghan did not laugh. She barely looked up from her screen, content to move through the evening without needing to soften anything around her.

But the room laughed anyway.

Marc’s dad joke was so bad it could qualify as public service. It single-handedly brought humanity back into the room. It was the first uncalculated sound in a meeting that had been rehearsed in tone if not in script. A genuine moment, accidental and awkward, from someone who had arrived without armor or advantage, responding in real time to a structure he did not yet understand. Marc had no strategy. He had no choreography. He simply reacted as a person would, and the room clung to it like a match struck in a dim hallway.

Conway laughed too, this time more naturally than before, and for a heartbeat the distance between the calculated and the unguarded blurred. But unlike Marc, his laugh carried the faint sweetness of embarrassment, the quiet recognition that someone else had given the room what he could not. A moment of ease that did not originate from control.

And then, as quickly as it opened, the moment closed. Meghan returned to her reading. Marc straightened. Conway slipped back into his role with practiced precision. But for one brief interval, the machinery paused, and everyone reached instinctively toward the only real thing that had appeared all night.

The laugh that swept the room didn’t come from the joke. It was relief. Pure relief. Even my pressure cooker has less pent-up tension. A human crack in an engineered room.

What the Smoke Left Me With

When the meeting ended, I stepped outside for a breath of night air. The smoke from the fire had thinned, but it still lingered in the hallway, the same way traces of the evening clung to my thoughts. My neighbor’s door was quiet now, her name already gone, the building fast at work absorbing what it could not bear to hold. Loss has its own speed here.

I found myself thinking of that empty chair at the table and of Dhru’s shrinking space beside Conway. Power had rearranged itself in plain sight, tidy and practiced, while the people who might have steadied the room were elsewhere. The institution had not reformed. It had simply learned to breathe without the ones who once tried to strengthen its lungs.

As I walked back inside, the faint smell of burnt drywall followed me. It was a reminder that not everything erased is gone, and not everything approved is progress. Some traces stay in the air long after the flames are out. Some truths linger quietly in the corners, waiting for someone to notice them. Some rooms forget too quickly. Some rooms remember only when the smoke insists.

Her name was Catherine Same Mahouve.
A longtime resident of Roosevelt Island.
A former Minister Counselor at Cameroon’s Mission to the United Nations.
A woman whose kindness and quiet dignity were felt long before anyone knew her title.
A neighbor. A friend. A presence.

She died on November 15 inside her home at 560 Main Street.
There are no words that carry the weight of that truth.

She should have been safe.

Her family is now facing the impossible. Her daughter, Justine, lost her mother and her home in the same night. If you are able, this is where you can help.

Hold her memory for a moment. Because everything that follows is about what it means to lose someone who should still be here.

The warnings were everywhere

This tragedy did not erupt in a vacuum.

Residents of Roosevelt Landings have been raising alarms for years. The record is painfully clear.

A year ago, a mobility device battery ignited in the hallway at 540 Main. Fire doors that should have isolated the smoke did not close. Tenants had already reported them broken. Nothing was done.

Residents filed complaints about mold.
About electrical problems.
About dust and debris from construction.
About heat failures.
About security lapses.
About unsafe conditions in stairwells where people with mobility needs could not rely on the most basic infrastructure.

Roosevelt Landings has been trying to warn this island for a long time.
No one with power listened.

The hedge fund years

To understand the present, you have to understand how Eastwood became Roosevelt Landings.

The state built this building with public money.
The state funded it under Mitchell Lama to provide affordable homes for working families.
And when the time came to decide its future, the state handed it directly to private equity.

Urban American took control.
Then Brookfield arrived.
Then the building was packaged into a billion dollar portfolio.
Then sold again.

Across every transfer, the price rose.
And across every transfer, tenant control fell.
Eastwood never became a co-op because no one in power ever offered the tenants what Island House, Westview, and Rivercross were given.

Island House fought for ownership.
Westview negotiated a path.
Rivercross privatized by vote.

Roosevelt Landings was never invited into the room.
It was treated as an asset to trade, not a community to preserve.

This is not speculation.
It is the documented history of a building that deserved better.

The air has a cost. Now we see a life does too.

Two weeks before the fire, Eleanor and I wrote about being priced out of the air we breathe as a metaphor in our last two articles. We did not imagine how quickly our warning would become literal.

At Roosevelt Landings:

The air is metered.
The heat is inconsistent.
The mold spreads.
The doors do not close.
The alarms fail.
And now, a resident is gone.

When a building becomes a financial instrument, safety becomes optional.
Maintenance becomes flexible.
Accountability becomes abstract.
Lives become numbers that never appear in the spreadsheets.

We must name what this really is: a culture of disregard that predates the fire, that shaped the conditions of the fire, and that will produce another tragedy unless someone stops pretending this is normal.

The institutional silence

It has been months since RIOC acknowledged anything we have published.
Maybe the silence comes easily because we speak for the Landings.
Maybe it continues because our work touches rooms where our presence is not welcomed.
Maybe it is because accountability has a cost, and some would rather not pay it.

After the fire, RIOC offered no meaningful public accounting.
No building-wide safety review.
No independent inspection of fire doors.
No examination of submetering failures.
No assessment of past warnings.
No plan to prevent another loss of life.

And within RIOC’s structure sits the REDAC Committee, chaired by Howard Polivy.
Polivy is not a villain.
He is something more dangerous: comfortable.

Comfortable approving projects without asking who is left behind.
Comfortable letting state agencies and private contractors operate without scrutiny.
Comfortable with a board where a majority lives in Rivercross while not one seat represents the residents of Roosevelt Landings.

Nine seats.
More than a thousand Landings households.
Not one voice at the table.

This is not an oversight.
It is a hierarchy.

Roosevelt Island’s quiet truth

This island was planned as an experiment in equity.
Today the outcome is clear.

The buildings with power have representation.
The buildings without power have consequences.

The largest building complex on the island houses the people with the least political influence.
And when a crisis comes, they receive the least protection.

No one should be comfortable with this.
Not after this fire.

Return to Catherine Same Mahouve

Her life mattered.
Her presence mattered.
Her loss must matter.

Her story must not be absorbed into the bureaucratic silence that has already swallowed too much of this community’s pain.

We will keep asking the questions others avoid.
We will keep documenting what the state refuses to acknowledge.
We will keep listening to residents who have been ignored for far too long.

And we will not leave the Landings behind.

That’s the new reality for residents of Roosevelt Landings, the 1,000-plus unit complex formerly known as Eastwood. Once a bastion of Mitchell-Lama affordability, it now finds itself at the center of a long-simmering crisis—one where residents are being billed, quite literally, for the air they breathe. As electric submeters are installed unit by unit, tenants are being introduced to a new line item in their monthly budget: comfort. And behind that comfort? Profit—on the books of a private equity-backed landlord and blessed, implicitly, by the inaction of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC).

A Fifteen-Year Scheme Finally Lands

Submetering at Roosevelt Landings is not a new idea. The push began as early as 2009, when then-owners proposed shifting from master-metered electric (included in rent) to tenant-paid submeters. The Public Service Commission (PSC) approved the plan—until it learned that the building used all-electric baseboard heating, lacked insulation, and subjected tenants to bills nearing $1,000/month in winter. The PSC promptly halted the rollout, citing affordability, safety, and a lack of transparency.

But the idea never died. Instead, it mutated.

In 2011, after a brief procedural reset, submetering was reauthorized—this time with conditions. The PSC required capital improvements, no billing for heat, and automatic rent reductions to offset new tenant costs. Ownership changed hands again in 2019 when L+M Fund Management, through BSREP UA Roosevelt Landings LLC, took over the lease. By 2024, management claimed the conditions had been met and began issuing sample electric bills to residents. Before submetering began, L+M projected what each unit would pay under the new system. But when the actual bills arrived, some tenants were charged more than three times those projections.

Submetering was rebranded as environmental justice. But let’s be clear: this isn’t about sustainability—it’s about plausible deniability. It became an accounting maneuver: taking a known building defect (poor insulation and inefficient heating) and repackaging it as the tenant’s responsibility.

The Math That Makes It Work

Let’s talk numbers. In 2019, RIOC approved a lease assignment to L+M that included a key financial clause: the Tax Equivalent Payment (TEP)—essentially the landlord’s in-lieu-of-taxes rent—was frozen at roughly $6.41 million a year for the remainder of the lease. That’s about $534 a month per apartment if you divide it across the Landings’ 1,000 units. It hasn’t changed since.

Meanwhile, by submetering tenant electricity, the landlord is poised to offload what experts estimate could be $2–$3 million in annual energy costs—about $165 to $250 per unit per month—straight onto residents. Rent reductions exist, yes, but they follow a state schedule and appear to offset only a fraction of actual usage, especially in larger or poorly insulated units.

And here’s the twist: residential electricity is billed at higher rates than commercial service. What might have cost the landlord $250 a month under a master-meter now arrives at the tenant’s door as a four-digit bill in peak months. The same energy—just priced differently—turns from an expense line into a profit strategy.

Add it up: a fixed tax burden for the landlord, a rising utility burden for the tenant. What’s framed as modernization is, in practice, revenue engineering—a steady windfall for ownership and volatility for everyone else.

There’s no cap on the tenants’ exposure, only on the landlord’s.

A Cold Apartment and a Hot Bill

Tenants are now discovering what submetering really means in a building like Roosevelt Landings. Heating is all-electric, delivered through aging baseboard units that are infamous for breaking down—or not working at all. Thermostats fail to trigger heat, forcing residents to turn to space heaters or, in some cases, oven burners to stay warm.

One tenant, writing anonymously to the PSC, described a winter routine of sleeping next to a space heater while wrapped in multiple blankets. “The thermostat never turns on. The heat is broken. Now I have to pay for the space heater too?”

Another resident reported monthly electric bills jumping from $219 to over $700. Even with the promised rent deduction, the math didn’t add up. Not when the air you need to breathe or the heat you need to survive is metered and charged back to you.

To compound the insult, many tenants report poor ventilation, broken windows, and unsealed drafts—deficiencies that magnify energy usage and ensure that conservation tips fall flat. When a building leaks heat, the only way to stay warm is to pay more. Submetering, in this context, doesn’t promote energy efficiency. It punishes inefficiency without fixing it.

Who Let It Happen?

This is where the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation steps in—or doesn’t. RIOC, the state authority that owns the land and leases it to landlords like L+M, has long touted its commitment to affordability and quality of life. But in the case of Roosevelt Landings, it has become a quiet co-signer to tenant distress.

When the 2019 lease transfer was approved, RIOC froze the landlord’s TEP at $6.41 million. It made no new demands about affordability, energy retrofits, or tenant protections beyond what had already been signed. In 2024, as tenant complaints surged and electric bills began arriving, Board Member Ben Fhala and CFO Dhruvika Amin Patel attended a tenant “education session” hosted by building management at the Carter Burden Network center. The session was meant to explain submetering. Instead, it became a public airing of grievances.

“The team was underprepared and overwhelmed,” Fhala later wrote in an email to RIOC’s Real Estate Committee chair. Residents described the session as insulting—an attempt to sell them LED bulbs while ignoring decades of heating failures and fire-prone baseboard units.

His call for transparency went nowhere. Committee Chair Howard Polivy favored quiet diplomacy with the landlord. A scheduled hearing never took place, and the issue quietly disappeared. No formal vote, motion, or resolution addressing submetering at Roosevelt Landings has ever been taken by RIOC’s board.

The Price of Inaction

So what is the cost of RIOC’s silence?

For tenants, it’s measured in dollars and degrees—Metergy Solutions electric bills that eat into fixed incomes, and rooms too cold to live in comfortably. For L+M, it’s millions in shifted costs and frozen payments. And for the island’s broader vision of affordability, it’s another crack in the foundation.

Submetering was supposed to be about conservation. Instead, it has become a weaponized efficiency—leveraged not to save energy, but to save expenses for ownership.

The building’s facade upgrades—still underway—may eventually help. But by the time insulation improves in 2026, the damage will be done. Bills are arriving now. The air is already priced. The heat already costs too much.

RIOC, for its part, says nothing. And that silence is a decision.

In the end, submetering at Roosevelt Landings isn’t just a utility shift. It’s a story about how affordability erodes—not with a dramatic collapse, but with the slow turning of a meter and the quiet signing of a lease.

The residents are watching. And they know who left the door open.