Sarah Jessica Parker's Early Years on Roosevelt Island - Utopia or Penal Colony?

Image from the Independent

Sex and the City, HBO's hit TV series and current weekend box office winner, is an urban New York City fantasy for a certain type of shoe loving, cosmo drinking, smart, independent working woman. But, as reported in the British Independent, for Sarah Jessica Parker the series star and a Roosevelt Island pioneering resident in the 1970's:

her New York, like that of many New Yorkers, is one that is no longer quite there. "You know, when I arrived in the city in 1976, New York was, financially, a wreck," she remembers. "But, to me, it's the New York that Matthew and I literally try to find every day of our lives. It was the best place in the world. It was literature. It promised everything. And for someone who loved food and smells and stimulation, who was rocked to sleep by the sound of taxis -- well, there's just so much money now, and the city is so affluent, and all the colours, all the shops, the look of a street from block to block is just terribly absent of distinguishing coffee shops, bodegas. All of that stuff that made it possible to live in New York is gone." Even Brooklyn is "very chic" now, she adds. "I guess there are places in Queens that are affordable."

Regarding Roosevelt Island:

Her family camped out on Roosevelt Island for a time: "It was meant to be a Utopia," she says. ("It was slightly like a penal colony," recalls her brother Pippin, a playwright and director.) But it was Woody Allen's "rarefied and special" Manhattan that Parker was seeking, a fantasy she had picked up from a mother who kept up her subscriptions to New York periodicals even when they were living in the Midwest.

Roosevelt Island - Utopia or Penal Colony - still the same question thirty years later. Take a look at this 1980 video of what life was like for early Roosevelt Island residents.

You Tube video of Roosevelt Island: An Island Place