[Name Redacted]’s Reviews > Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, & Criminal in 19th-Century New York > Status Update

Geez... It's amazing how much has changed since I left Roosevelt Island. Almost everything is gone/replaced. Even the Coler-Goldwater building apparently. And the dreadful "Octagon" apartment built for hipsters & yuppies (which got all the attention & service & its own bus line) was actually just a refurbished version of the worst part of the old insane asylum of the same name... Amazing to think they elected me.

In NYC, a riot resulted in a mob of crazed people using axes to chop down the doors of an orphanage for "colored" children. They tried to burn the building down while the children & their caretakers fled. Remembering the self-righteousness of certain "progressive" New Yorkers, I sometimes wonder if they might not be trying to justify themselves in the face of their past.

I know it's early, and I'm biased because I lived & held political office on Roosevelt Island, but I'm really enjoying this so far. Really unputdownable -- only my work & child-rearing are getting in the way.