I took the bridge over from Queens (easy to do), and rode my bike around the entire perimeter of the Island. At the Southern tip there is a lighthouse and a lovely casual park, where people bring barbecues. There were lots of families and kids, and old guys fishing. It’s hard to believe that Roosevelt Island is so close to Manhattan. It has a lovely peace to it. When I was a kid, my cousins lived here, and we roamed around unsupervised, as though we were in a small town. The playgrounds are great, and weird. They don’t just have swing sets, they have abstract art for climbing. There used to be a really scary abandoned Mental Hospital almost underneath the Queens Borough Bridge, and our cousins told my brother and I ghost stories about it. It has been torn down to build condos since (of course), but there is still a strange collection of dilapidated octagonal connected buildings that seem to have some medical purpose. When I pedaled by last week, the patients were all sitting out by the water on benches underneath the cherry trees, which were in full bloom and stunning. Maybe this is where people go when Manhattan drives them crazy?