David Gallagher does a great job of pointing out the real-life locations for some scenes in Spider-Man. The thing that intrigues me is how much of the action takes place on Roosevelt Island, a little sliver of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens that is, nominally, part of Manhattan.

I’ve had a lingering fascination with the place for years because it’s (somewhat deliberately) harder to get to from Manhattan than from Queens, and it still has a great deal of open space, some of which are populated by those rarest of New York residents, Actual Trees. We just put up a fewstories at work that mention the island, but I couldn’t convince them to go with the headline “Roosevelt Island is the new Roosevelt Island”.

Too meta, perhaps. Such is my burden.