Renwick Wall Falls, Lending Urgency to Southpoint Plans

The cavalry was scheduled to arrive in the spring, or maybe the summer. But the Renwick Ruin could not hold out any longer, and on the day after Christmas, following a brief warm spell that contracted the ruin’s weary joints one time too many, much of the north façade of the former Smallpox Hospital came tumbling down in an avalanche of brick and stone.

"It’s a great disappointment," said Peg Breen, president of the Landmarks Conservancy, which has had architect James Renwick Jr.’s Gothic Revivalist structure on its endangered list for decades. "Everyone knew about the condition it was in. It’s in perilous shape."

Public Safety officers discovered the collapse during morning rounds on December 26 and taped off the area. The New Year has ushered in an almost daily flow of engineers, preservationists, and photographers to begin the task of contingency planning, plus, eventually, numbering and cataloguing any reusable pieces from the extensive rubble.

Earlier this week, a conference call among RIOC President Steve Shane, engineers, and officers of the Trust for Public Land (TPL) resulted in a set of "next steps," the goal of which is to design and hasten an emergency rescue of New York’s only landmarked ruin.

"I’m the one who signs an emergency declaration, but first I need findings," said Shane, describing the special process by which landmarked buildings may receive the equivalent of an intervention. "We need a more finalized plan from the engineers, then to propose that plan to the various agencies involved with antiquities to get their participation and consent—because nothing can be done without them."

That the north wall was nearing the end of its shelf life comes as no surprise. A commissioned photogrammetric study – a computerized "flat" photographic model that looks like architectural drawings come to life – put it bluntly in its April 2004 report:

"The north elevation is the most severely deteriorated portion of the building," said the report. "The entire elevation is in imminent danger of a major collapse."

And collapse it did. The December 26 incident occurred almost 151 years to the day after the structure’s 1856 ribbon cutting, and just months shy of a long-awaited stabilization project, part of the $12.9 million Phase One of the ambitious park that will be built on the Island’s southern tip. Southpoint Park will make the ruins – what’s left of them – a central attraction of "Wild Gardens, Green Rooms," a vast mosaic of landscaped pathways and resting areas.

About $4.5 million of Phase One money had been earmarked for stabilizing the ruins; bids were to be solicited this spring, according to Tom Turcic, RIOC’s engineering chief.

Earlier this week, Turcic gave WIRE reporters a guided tour of the ruins. Although the entire structure leans crazily at all points, with trees growing out of window openings and bricks poised for a vast domino effect, the north wall is a particularly saddening sight.

Piled high on the ground are chunks, shards, slivers, and crumblings – of brick from the walls and of the gray gneiss cladding that had once enveloped the brick to create the imposing stone façade. Somewhere in the rubble are rotted wooden boards from the 1970s that were meant to buttress the handsome, crenellated bay window; it is the crenellations of such windows and along the parapet that give the Renwick Ruin the aura of an ancient castle. (You can see the bay window’s mirror image on the south side.)

The north wall was from one of two turn-of-the-century additions to the building that accommodated the New York Training School for Nurses, only the third such school in the U.S. The northern wing was officially named Rice Hall, after Gertrude Rice, a veteran charity administrator.

"It’s one of the most important medical facilities that existed on the Island," said Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society – and that’s saying a lot, considering that the Island’s history is full of infamous or groundbreaking facilities, including the insane asylum where journalist Nellie Bly went undercover (now the Octagon rental apartments) and the Strecker Laboratory, the first pathology lab (now an MTA electrical substation).

The deliciously spooky Renwick Ruin – more of a shell of its former self than a structure – has been threatening to keel over for decades. And for decades, it has failed to garner enough political clout to raise the millions of dollars necessary just to shore it up, let alone renovate it into the tourist attraction that has sometimes been envisioned for it: a café, a visitor’s center, a recital hall, a refuge of wild tranquility.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its supporters, and they are outraged.

Its fan base extends beyond wonky preservationists and architecture buffs. It was an anonymous donor who arranged, in 1993, for those floodlights that still cast an eerie nighttime glow on the façade for the benefit of Manhattan’s East Siders. And the ruin will surely be one of the great selling points of the future Southpoint Park.

Still, treasuring the ruin has not translated into funds for reversing over half a century of water seepage, freeze-thaw cycles, and mortar erosion.

"It will take a combination of engineering skill and political pressure to make this happen," said Breen. "The State has to realize that although these problems started long before this administration, the building will fall down in full view of an awful lot of voters who have an attachment to it."

Breen said there is no other landmark in New York that comes close to the Renwick Ruins in terms of age, the terrible shape it’s in, "and the prominence of an architect such as Renwick, and again the fact that it is so visible to such a wide population."

Engineers hired by TPL have been visiting the site and were expected to deliver preliminary findings to Shane last night. Shane has indicated that he is more than willing to sign off on a declaration of emergency, which would mean that RIOC could sidestep the usual delays involved in bidding out the work. Even so, "emergency" in a case like this does not mean "today"; there is no proposed time frame yet for "jumping procedural timelines," as Shane puts it.

"It doesn’t happen overnight," said Shane. "I’m pushing [TPL] every day. They themselves are preservationist engineers; it’s in their heart to do this."

An emergency stabilization would have little or no effect on the Phase One plans for Southpoint Park.

"We see Phase One moving along," said Andy Stone, the New York City director of TPL, which is under contract with RIOC to oversee the park’s design and funding. "Our hope still is to break ground this summer."

Berdy, who was preparing a special photo exhibition of the ruins for display in the information kiosk by The Tram, noted that there have been many warning signs over the past two years: a collapsed cornice here, a degraded west wing there.

"As a preservationist, I feel that the preceding RIOC administrations treated the building as if it was a nuisance," said Berdy. "I hope we will get a permanent stabilization plan now so I will not be apologizing every time I take visitors to see the building, telling them, ‘The people who run the Island don’t know how to take care of James Renwick landmark structures.’"