Islanders' Blogs Becoming Popular Medium of Self-Expression
by Jami Bernard
Rick, 49, has lived on Roosevelt Island for nine years, hating virtually every minute of it. "Never enchanted here," as he says. But when he and his wife recently moved from Manhattan Park to a rental in the newest Southtown building, Rick celebrated – if you can call it that – by starting up Roosevelt Islander, a blog where he chronicles everything he’d love to fix about the Island he once likened to East Berlin.
"I knew we were moving to Southtown, so I started Roosevelt Islander because if we were going to stay here after all, I wanted to improve everything I think is wrong with it," said Rick, who prefers to keep his opinions on display and his last name to himself. (Clue: He looks like a younger, taller William Hurt.)
"I was just so sick and tired of nothing getting accomplished or improving here, and how the communication between RIOC and the people who lived here was so horrible. I thought this might be a way of improving dialogue in the community."
The new blog has been noticed and bookmarked by The New York Times website and by such neighborhood-oriented blogs as Curbed, which makes Rick, already tall, stand a bit straighter.
The first post on Rick’s site – http://rooseveltislander.blogspot.com – went up on July 4. He was so new to the blogosphere that his initial posts were in capital letters. That, according to the rules of netiquette, is worse than wearing white after Labor Day. All-caps is considered "shouting," and Rick means only to enlighten, not bludgeon. He has released his capslock key.
Since then, Rick has blogged about everything from Red Bus schedules to child window-guards, from locked public restrooms to the Verdant Power project. He tries to post five times a week. The Louis Kahn memorial? He’s against it. The hot-weather sprinkler outside Blackwell House? He’s for it.
"It’s better here since Steve Shane," admits Rick, referring to Island relations with RIOC since Governor Eliot Spitzer’s appointee took the helm earlier this year. Even though he and Shane have butted heads on occasion over the tone of his blog, Rick is finding a lot to like about the Island these days.
Indeed, as Rick enjoys a Starbucks coffee al fresco on a recent sunny afternoon, it looks like the move to Southtown has mellowed Mr. Cranky. He’s giddy with delight at his mention on the Times blogroll, he’s hopping the F train to a midtown Kinko’s to have business cards and promotional items made for his website, and – let’s face it – he just signed a two-year lease on an apartment. He would have bought the condo right over Starbucks if it hadn’t been overpriced.
But, Rick, didn’t you just say that Main Street reminded you of East Berlin? "Yeah, what it must have been like before the Berlin Wall fell, when people were looking over to freedom. Manhattan represents freedom, and I was blocked from getting there by the long walk" from Manhattan Park.
Rick’s wife, Barbara, a corporate real-estate lawyer, was already living on Roosevelt Island when they got married, so Rick moved here initially to please her. But his gaze kept wandering to not-so-distant shores.
"I wanted to move off Roosevelt Island a long time ago. I didn’t like living here. It was very debilitating. I wanted to move back into Brooklyn or Manhattan, into a real neighborhood, one with restaurants and services."
Rick is particularly attuned to those amenities because in his day job he is a real-estate consultant for what is known as location-based entertainment – plunking down amusement-park attractions into urban environments. If Roosevelt Island had its own ferris wheel, Rick might not have suffered here so much.
These days, Rick has a shorter walk to the subway, and the thought of the new Duane Reade and the forthcoming pizzeria in Southtown has got him wound up like a kid on Christmas morning. But his good spirits may have another cause: People who maintain what is known as "micro-real-estate blogs" tend to become seriously entrenched in their communities.
Rick isn’t the only one in that position. Several blogs about Roosevelt Island have sprung up over the last couple of years; here is a taste:
- The MySpace blog (myspace.com/rooseveltisland) that The WIRE chronicled earlier this year has since gone from 70 "friends" (frequent visitors) to 232 friends.
- The man behind http://rooseveltisland360.blogspot.com adds video and images to the traditional blog format; we know he’s a "he" because he was recently spotted patiently affixing promos for his site to lampposts along Main Street.
- Islandcats.com is the virtual paw-print of the Roosevelt Island Princess YinYang Project (RIPYY), which was formed in 2005 to help the local feral cat population get along with the two-legged critters who share their space here. The original Princess YinYang met an unkind fate in 2004 on the service road near the subway station; since then, RIPYY has stepped up efforts to find home for strays (in addition to their longtime Trap-Neuter-Return program). Though it’s technically not a blog, you can click on the "adoptable cats" link and get updated thumbnails of featured felines. (The current featured cat is Fiona, and the entry on her reads like a bio for match.com: Gentle and affectionate, enjoys attention but is frightened if chased by other cats.)
- The Island’s residential buildings tend to have their own websites and chatrooms, such as The Octagon’s octagonri.com and the spanking new www.lifeat.com/riverwalkplace for 455 Main Street. You have to be registered to use the forums and items-for-sale areas, but anyone can access the food-delivery and merchant directories, where residents offer ratings and comments.
- The website for the Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) maintains a blog (http://blog.rira-council.org), although its only posts seem to come from Common Council member Frank Farance, with only one comment posted, that from RIRA president Matthew Katz: This is an exciting technology that has great potential for the Island, he writes. One can hardly argue with that, even in all-caps.