Just a few hundred feet away from Midtown and Queens, there is a food crisis happening, and chances are excellent that you have never heard about it. We certainly hadn’t, when we took the 59th Street tram over to Roosevelt Island last week, intending to write a post about food in the ‘Little Apple,’ as it is fondly known by many of its 12,000 residents. But what we found was a much bigger story, one that surprised us with its scope and magnitude–and it is all part of what we firmly believe is probably the worst ongoing commercial disaster in New York City today.

Technically part of Manhattan, Roosevelt Island is a pencil-shaped, 147-acre strip of land in the East River that has quite a checkered past. Until the middle of the last century, the island was home to an sanitarium, a prison, and several residential hospitals, all of which helped earn it the saturnine name of Welfare Island. Quite frankly, until the 1960’s, Roosevelt Island was not a place you would have wanted to visit. Then, with the demolition of the asylum and the prison, and the construction of dozens of high-rise cooperative residential and mixed-use buildings, things began to change rapidly. Then, in 1969, the city signed the island over to the State of New York for 99 years, in a long-term lease deal reminiscent of the one that saw Hong Kong rented out to Great Britain for a few centuries. And for a while, the deal worked well for everyone involved: a tram was built to connect the island with Manhattan, a subway stop opened, and new residents and businesses moved in, swelling the population from about 5,000 to more than double that number.

But the past seven years have been cruel ones to Roosevelt Island, especially when it comes to food. Once home to a bakery, a pizza parlor, a fish store, and several small, mid-priced eateries, the town has witnessed a slow erosion of its eating options. Some, like the fish store, shut down because they were unable to afford to repair water damage from the state-controlled residential buildings that sit atop their storefronts. Others, like the bakery and the pizza restaurant, closed because the state authority that manages the island’s affairs, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC), refused to extend anything but a month-to-month lease to these long-operating, financially successful businesses.

And today, there are exactly two restaurants left on the entire island.

Nowhere else in New York City is more underserved than Roosevelt Island, and because RIOC operates all of its mixed-use buildings as state-run facilities, potential new businesses must submit to agonizingly lengthy approval processes that entail requests for proposals, open bidding, documentation of customer base and proof of financial and stakeholder gain to the island before they are even allowed to occupy a shop. And worse, if the previous tenant owed fees or back-rent, the arrears become the responsibilty of the new business. The upshot is that when a restaurant shuts down on Roosevelt Island, a new one does not spring up to take its place.

All of this leaves residents with an almost Soviet set of food choices: China 1, a carry-out and delivery business, or the one sit-down restaurant on the island, Trellis. After talking with several Roosevelt Islanders, I decided to eat lunch at Trellis, which is essentially a neighborhood diner that sits next to the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. According to the restaurant’s staff and its patrons, the best dishes on the menu are its challah-based sandwiches. On the recommendation of a Trellis regular, I ate a quite respectable, if slightly charred portobello and cheese challah open-face ($7.45) and drank a decent cup of coffee ($0.90). Full disclosure: had my meal been terrible, I would have not written about it, for fear of causing further damage to the fragile Roosevelt Island dining ecosystem. Fortunately, it was solid, hearty diner fare. Nothing more. And sadly, that qualifies it as the best restaurant on Roosevelt Island.

After my meal, I walked around Northtown, the commercial center of Roosevelt Island, interviewing residents along the way, and eventually stopping for a long chat with a man working his allotment plot in the Roosevelt Island Community Garden. He gave me a guided tour of the gardens and showed me row after row of herbs, vegetables, and fruits growing there, even gesturing to a mature fig tree as he told me, “People here really do know good food. They want it, and they go ‘off-island’ or they just grow it to get it. These plots with the figs are owned by a woman who used to run a café in Manhattan. But she just grows for herself now. She tried twice to start something here on the island, but she was denied both times…and she is hardly the only one like that.”

Dick Lutz, editor and reporter for Roosevelt Island’s community newspaper, The WIRE, told me similar stories of businesses making attempts to open on the island, only to be stonewalled by RIOC. “It comes down to this, ” he said, “Can a state government that runs out of Albany operate a small town at a distance?” If the shameful paucity of restaurants and retail shops is any measure of RIOC’s success, the answer is clearly no.

But there is another option. Starbucks opened a tiny storefront on the ground level of Riverwalk, a development jointly owned by the Hudson and Related Companies, and while some residents (including one who lives in Riverwalk) suspect that Starbucks opened on Roosevelt Island as part of an exclusivity deal with other Related Companies properties, the very existence of the business in a privately-owned facility offers evidence that there is another route. Undoubtedly, rents are higher in private buildings than they are in RIOC-managed sites–the recently-shuttered fish store paid less than $880/month for its storefront as recently as March 2007. But if Roosevelt Islanders are to be believed, they are willing to do their part to make a new restaurant successful, regardless of where it opens. “I hate Mexican food, but I would eat tacos every night for a year if we had a Mexican restaurant on the island,” a bus driver told me as I made my way around Northtown. Another resident put it this way, “We have nothing here. Nothing. My kids want pizza, and I have to go to Queens or wait 2 hours to get it delivered. That is insane. The next [restaurant] that opens here is going to be a big deal to everyone, and there is no way we will let it close.” And after hearing a few dozen stories about how tired island residents are of Kung Pao chicken and chopped egg platters, it is hard not to believe that they take these promises very seriously.