Looking down over the East River from the Roosevelt Island tramway, I watch the New York City skyline shrink in the distance, its whooping sirens and rattling subway cars slowly fading away. The aerial crossing is a fitting start to my search for quiet in one of the loudest cities in the world, a quest that will bring me to the southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island, where 1,500 trees grow on a piece of land the size of a tennis court.
Located parallel to the East River Esplanade, the newly planted Manhattan Healing Forest stands juxtaposed against its Goliath steel and concrete counterpart. As I round the corner to Southpoint Park on an atypically warm March afternoon, the birdsong of chickadees and orange-bellied robins signals that the forest is near.
I soon catch sight of Christina Delfico, my guide for the day and the founder of iDig2Learn, an environmental nonprofit that gathers local students to plant urban gardens throughout the city. She hops between plants, teasing soil and cooing to the blossoming buds and growing branches—seemingly mirroring the peckish robins nearby. Two years ago, Delfico submitted an application to the state requesting permission to plant New York City’s first-ever micro-forest. And just over one year ago, its first trees were planted by over 400 volunteers.
Hopping over the garden’s stone wall to join her, I feel as though I’ve crossed an invisible border worlds away from the chaos of New York City. The wind rustles the leaves of 47 native species, including beach plum, white oak, and sweet birch. Even the blue tags from the US Forest Service identifying each plant as a wild strawberry or shagbark hickory or wild black cherry jingle along like a wind chime.
The human noise here sounds different than in Manhattan, too. Around the forest, people are curious and congenial—the usual unspoken rules that conduct life on the other side of the river momentarily tossed out the window. “We’re going to see lots of blueberries this summer!” Delfico excitedly informs a Public Works team upon our crossing paths, and the city crew dances to the good news.
This mini-retreat from urban living is just the type of let’s-see-what-happens project Roosevelt Island is known for. Walking the island is to tour a menagerie of New York City’s out-there experiments, from the 19th-century smallpox hospital, to Cornell Tech, to the Healing Forest’s next-door neighbor, Strecker Memorial Laboratory, the first lab in the country dedicated to pathological research. “Out of sight, out of mind, a lot of the shunned were put up on Roosevelt Island,” says Delfico.
The tucked-away green space also serves a utilitarian purpose, doubling as a living seawall to help curb flooding, erosion, and pollutant runoff, all increasingly relevant concerns for the island. Being seated in the middle of the East River leaves Roosevelt Island especially subject to sea-level rise and extreme weather conditions due to climate change.
“The Manhattan Healing Forest is like urban acupuncture,” says Ethan Bryson, the lead forester from SUGi, a conservation organization that served as a lead partner on the project. “In its concentrated form, it’s rooting the island, improving the water quality, and accelerating the habitat restoration of the land from decades down to years.”
