A Metrocard swipe buys you a trip on the subway, this we all know. It also lets you board a lumbering bus. Woo hoo. But your Metrocard, thrillingly, can also sweep you into the sky for a bird’s-eye perspective of the East River, Manhattan, Queens, and the 59th Street Bridge.

The Roosevelt Island Tram gives a whole new meaning to the concept of “commuting.”

Portia’s good friend Niv, who happens to live on Roosevelt Island, has one of the coolest ways of getting to and from school a kid could have.

He points out some of the sights to her.

Portia doesn’t generally think of NYC public transportation as magic-carpetlike.

On Roosevelt Island, Portia heads to the southern end, past the old abandoned Smallpox Hospital. NYC’s only “landmarked ruin” looks like something out of an animated horror movie: Gothic, eerie, precarious, and also weirdly whimsical. It captures her imagination and she kind of just wants to stare at it, but it also scares her a little and there’s no good place to sit. So she doesn’t stop for a photo, but you can, and might want to, Google it.

Just a little further south is Four Freedoms Park, so pristine and bright that, after the dark dilapidation of the hospital, it’s almost blinding.

The park is a 4-acre memorial to FDR named for the Four Freedoms set forth in his 1941 State of the Union address.

The relevant excerpt of the speech is set in stone at the end of the park, but Portia is equally interested, at the moment, in having that island experience of being surrounded by water. She sometimes forgets you can have that experience without being subjected to LaGuardia.

And, of course, there are the views.

From The New York Times in 2016: “The Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City — a dazzling swirl of red curlicue letters that evokes innocent days of summer, heavy industry in Queens and a spectacular disregard for the waterfront in the mid-20th century — is now an official New York City landmark.”

And Midtown Manhattan isn’t looking half-bad, either, on this rare, long-awaited, lovely spring afternoon.

Where else in NYC can you get such crowd-pleasing views without the crowds?

On Roosevelt Island, Portia enjoys a little refreshing distance from Manhattan, without having to actually leave it.

Coming back across the river into Manhattan’s tumultuous heart, Portia finds herself floating above the traffic on the 59th Street (Queensboro) Bridge. For just the cost of a subway ride, you can have an out-of-body experience.

Portia is a cousin of the three necktie sisters who made their appearance on this blog this past fall. She, like her cousins, is made exclusively from neckties that belonged to Niv’s great-grandfather, as is all her clothing. Again, it was a lot of fun to see what could be done with these exuberant silks. And I’m thankful that there were a couple of knit ties in the stash as well.

Her necklace and her purse strap are made from jewelry odds and ends from Ellen.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt