The ruins across the river: Roosevelt Island under Blood Across the River

Book Two is called Blood Across the River, and the river is the East River, and the thing on the other side of it is Roosevelt Island. If you have only ever seen it from the Queensboro Bridge, a thin strip of apartment towers with a red tram sliding past, here is what you missed.

An island with three names

It was Blackwell’s Island for most of the nineteenth century, when the city used it for the things it did not want on Manhattan: a penitentiary, an almshouse, a workhouse, an asylum, hospitals for the contagious. Then it was Welfare Island. It has been Roosevelt Island only since 1973. Two miles long, a few hundred yards wide, and for a long time the place New York sent people it preferred not to look at.

That history is the ground under Maya Wu. She works at a blood bank in Queens, which is to say she spends her days close to blood, close to death, and close to systems that punish people for needing help. When she gives clean blood to a starving vampire named Leo Lian and the old door across the river opens, it opens onto an island that was built for exactly that kind of bargain.

The ruin that is lit at night

At the southern tip stands the Smallpox Hospital, a Gothic shell of grey stone finished in 1856 and designed by James Renwick Jr., the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It has been a ruin for decades. The city stabilized it, landmarked it, and lights it at night, so that from the Manhattan side you see a roofless cathedral floating on the water. When the book talks about the old ruins on Roosevelt Island, that is the building. I did not have to invent it. I only had to decide what lived in it.

What else is real

• The tram. It has run between Manhattan and the island since 1976, over the river rather than under it, and it takes about three minutes. A vampire who dislikes tunnels would approve.
• The lighthouse at the northern tip, built in 1872 out of the island’s own stone, by, according to the plaque, the inmates of the asylum.
• The Octagon, the surviving entrance of the old lunatic asylum, now the lobby of an apartment building, which tells you something about how New York treats its ghosts.
• Four Freedoms Park, the white granite memorial at the southern tip, finished in 2012, a short walk from the ruin.

What is mine

Maya. Leo. The door, the debt, the blood magic, and the thing the island has been keeping since before it had its second name. The content note in the front of the book will tell you how dark it gets. The island itself is darker than anything I put on it, which is usually how this series works.

If you go, take the tram over at dusk and walk south until the ruin lights up. Then, if you want the rest, Book Two is here.