How Roosevelt Island Got a Pneumatic Garbage Collection System

1960
The Largest Tract of Undeveloped Real Estate in New York City

In 1828 the City of New York purchased Blackwell’s Island, renamed Welfare Island in 1921. It became home to a variety of charitable and correctional institutions including a penitentiary, an insane asylum, a smallpox hospital and an orphanage. By 1960, however, most of the island was abandoned except for two hospitals and a fire department training grounds. Access to the island from Manhattan was limited to an elevator from the Queensboro Bridge.

In 1960 industrialist Fredrick W. Richmond looked out from his Sutton Place apartment at Welfare Island, and saw a tremendous real estate opportunity. He hired architect and urban planner Victor Gruen, inventor of the indoor shopping mall and author of urban renewal projects around the country, to develop a plan for a car-free community of 70,000. Together they proposed covering the two-mile-long island with a concrete platform to create a vast communal lobby, with moving walkways for residents and conveyor belts for goods.

1961
Victor Gruen’s Car Free Community for 70,000

In 1960 industrialist Fredrick W. Richmond looked out at Welfare Island from his Sutton Place apartment and saw a tremendous real estate opportunity. He hired architect and urban planner Victor Gruen, inventor of the indoor shopping mall and author of urban renewal projects around the country, to develop a plan for a car-free community of 70,000. Together they proposed covering the two-mile-long island with a concrete platform to create a vast communal lobby, with moving walkways for residents and conveyor belts for goods.

The plan was presented to the City Council, studied by the Planning Department, and discussed on the front page of the New York Times, but never adopted.

1962
Subway Announced

In 1962 the transit authority announced the East 63rd Street rail tunnel, which would extend subway service on the 6th Avenue and Broadway lines into Queens. Welfare Island suddenly emerged as the last great undeveloped tract of New York City, touching off a heated debate in urban planning circles.

1965
The Next Major City Park

While some saw the island as an efficient way to add dwelling units just as the City was experiencing a major housing crisis, architectural historian Lewis Mumford and the American Institute of Architects lobbied for a new waterfront Central Park. Landscape architects Zion and Breen modeled the entire island after Tivoli Gardens, a celebrated urban amusement park in Copenhagen. To emphasize their direct opposition to the Gruen plan, Zion and Breen appropriated the photomontage from the East Island proposal, shifting the buildings to Long Island City.

1969
“The Island Nobody Knows” Exhibition

Mayor John Lindsay announced the City’s intention to develop Welfare Island in 1966, and two years later he convened a commission to decide its fate. In early 1969 the commission issued a report—a compromise between Gruen’s megastructure and Mumford’s urban oasis—mandating a mixed-use community for 20,000 that would preserve historic buildings and provide new recreational areas for the whole city. Architect Philip Johnson sat on the committee and Johnson and Burgee Architects was commissioned to prepare the master plan. The plan was unveiled six months later in an exhibition entitled “The Island Nobody Knows,” sponsored by the Mayor and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1969
UDC Selected as Developer

At the exhibition Lindsay announced that the developer would be the New York State Urban Development Corporation or UDC.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller had created the UDC in 1968 after seeing urban renewal projects like Boston City Center and downtown New Haven carried out under Development Administrator Edward J. Logue. Rockefeller courted Logue to lead the UDC, working with him to grant the agency the right to acquire land through eminent domain, issue bonds and operate outside of local zoning ordinances.

Like Fredrick Richmond, Logue could see Welfare Island from his Upper East Side apartment window. He saw a waterfront showcase for the progressive developments the UDC would build around New York State.

1969
Residential Refuse Projected to Double

By the late 1960s New York City was confronting a major garbage crisis. In 1969 assistants to Mayor Lindsay drafted a white paper describing the problems:

In the last 10 years, we New Yorkers grew fond of TV dinners, grocery store tomatoes wrapped in plastic trays, and nonreturnable milk cartons and telephone books. As a result we increased the refuse load to be collected by the Department by over 40 percent…We more than doubled the number of bulky items, such as beds and refrigerators, to be carried away. We found junkmen giving us worse prices on our old cars, and we increased the rate of illegal abandonment by more than 17 times as manufacturers created products and packaging that promoted convenience such as plastic wrap and disposable beverage containers.

In 1965 the Sanitation Department’s fleet was old and out of service 40% of the time. The Department had no jurisdiction to remove abandoned cars, which further hindered street cleaning and access to curbs.

As the amounts of trash grew, the City’s means to absorb it diminished. At the peak of their use in New York, incinerators burned refuse in 17,000 residential buildings. Efforts to improve air quality led to a series of incinerator bans and the additional refuse had to be collected manually.

Trash on the streets exacerbated the perception of urban decline as middle class residents and corporations left New York City for the suburbs. A nine-day sanitation workers strike in 1968 left 100,000 tons of garbage piled up in the streets before collection was resumed. In the summer of 1970 residents of Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood began burning the trash piled in front of their buildings to protest insufficient service in what became known as the “Brownsville Trash Riots.”

1970
“Welfare Island: An Interim Report” Exhibition

One year after “The Island Nobody Knows” the UDC and its subsidiary, the Welfare Island Development Corporation (WIDC), sponsored a second exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, “Welfare Island: An Interim Report.” The exhibition presented the architects’ progress on the different zones of the project as described by the Johnson and Burgee master plan:

The development of Welfare Island is the first attempt in the United States to create for all income levels an urban environment where the primary consideration is the quality of the urban environment itself….When completed, the development will demonstrate that new approaches to the organization of public resources, which in turn lead to new approaches to planning and design, can restore to its inhabitants many of the lost pleasures of city life.

1970s
Explorations in Public Transit

The engineering firm Gibbs and Hill was responsible for infrastructure and transportation on the island. They produced a series of research reports from May 1970 to April 1971 in which they compared alternative strategies for transportation, energy and refuse collection. They weighed the costs and benefits of monorail versus shuttle bus transport around the island, and ultimately concluded that the cost of a fixed transport network—as well as the need for a flexible, phased project—made shuttle buses more attractive. Brochures and feasibility studies from self-transit systems and monorails in the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC) archives show that Roosevelt Island was on the cutting edge of transportation design.

Roosevelt Island Advertised

1975
First Phase Roosevelt Island Open

1975
AVAC System Inaugurated

Vacuum collection was known in the New York City planning community as early as 1969. A press release from October 12 that year quotes Mayor Lindsay: “[the pneumatic tube system] could one day replace garbage cans and household incinerators.” Also in 1969, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced plans to build a pneumatic collection system into a new 500-unit housing project in Jersey City. The project was one of nine sites chosen by HUD for “Operation Breakthrough” a research and technology program devised to shift the focus of the housing industry toward advances in building systems for multifamily housing. When Summit Plaza, as it is now called, was completed in 1974, it boasted the first pneumatic collection system for residential refuse in the US.

Roosevelt Island’s much larger network, however, would be the first urban scale system in the US. Plans to use an automatic vacuum collection system (AVAC) on Welfare Island were made public in the 1970 “Interim Report” exhibition in a panel entitled “A System for Island Refuse Collection.” The panel described the technology and the plan to collect all refuse from the Welfare Island’s apartments, hospitals, and commercial and community facilities using the system.