Filming on Roosevelt Island, Manhattan

Roosevelt Island is two miles long and about 800 feet across at its widest. It sits in the East River between Manhattan and Queens and belongs to Manhattan. Main Street runs the length of it and is paved in red brick. It was the island's only road until 1989.

The city bought the island in 1828 and put its institutions on it. A penitentiary and a lunatic asylum came first. Hospitals followed, and at one point there were 26 institutions here. It was Blackwell's Island until 1921 and Welfare Island until 1973, when the state began rebuilding it as housing to a 1969 plan by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.

That housing is most of what stands now. The blocks along Main Street are concrete and brown brick. Some come right down to the water.

Several of the older buildings are still there. Blackwell House was built between 1796 and 1804. The Chapel of the Good Shepherd of 1889 sits on a brick plaza with the apartment slabs directly behind it. At the north end the Octagon of 1839 is all that is left of the New York City Lunatic Asylum. It is part of an apartment building now.

Four Freedoms Park opened at the south end of the island in 2012, to a design Louis Kahn made in 1974. Just north of it the Smallpox Hospital of 1857 stands as a roofless ruin of grey gneiss, fenced off and braced with scaffolding.

The tram opened in 1976 and was meant to last only until the subway reached the island, which it did in 1989. Both still run. A red bus goes up and down Main Street, and parking at the kerb is held to 20 minutes.