When Representation Was the Promise
How Roosevelt Island mistook access for power and lost both
There was a time when representation felt like the answer.
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.
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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.
Eleanor,
I want to thank you publicly.
A number of people thank you quietly. They say your pieces capture what they feel but cannot quite articulate. Many of them will not say so out loud. Alignment with institutions, power brokers, nonprofit funding, professional proximity to power, it all creates hesitation.
You preserve the original hope of representation without theatrics and without fear. That matters more than most will admit publicly. Each time you have a new draft ready for editing, I find myself genuinely excited. Your steadiness, your patience with detail, and your refusal to rush to outrage remind me why this work matters.