Is Rikers Island part of New York City? Geographically, the jail sits on a hunk of landfill where the Long Island Sound narrows into the East River, just before you reach the Hell Gate, a narrow strait whose penchant for wrecking the ships, bodies, and plans of mariners prompted the hardening of Hellegat, a Dutch term of murky derivation, into its more evocative Anglicization. A narrow bridge from the mainland, reachable only by bus, reinforces the sense of apartness, the sense that one is crossing a threshold. The geographical history of New York City is the story of the knitting together of island territories, of making movement feasible. Rikers is different. Rikers exploits the capacity of islands to act as barriers, as machines to arrest the movement of people, to reduce human abilities. In the years following the Bolshevik seizure of power, revolutionary Soviet architects referred to their projects as “social condensers,” buildings designed to facilitate the transformation of byt, or everyday life, in the direction of comradeship and cooperation. Rikers acts lik…
Andy Battle read Race Traitor when he was sixteen and has never been the same.
This article is the second in a series called PANENKA dedicated to the memory of Leijia Hanrahan. The term refers to a penalty situation in soccer when the shooter coolly arcs the ball down the center while sending the keeper in the wrong direction. It’s a show of bravura, a quality that Leijia, an avid footballer, brought to her critical practice and which the series will continue to spotlight. NYRA thanks Kip and Nancy Hanrahan for their support.
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