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A Tiny Island Off the Coast of the Bronx Can Be Yours

We’ve all indulged in the fantasy before: Winning the lottery, buying your own personal tropical island, building a beachfront dream home, hiring a crew of sexy naked servants, stocking plenty of booze, and living out the rest of your life in sun-soaked bliss, far away from the stresses of modern life, and also the Contagion disease.

Now, even without millions of dollars, you can realize a small part of that dream. Not the tropical part. Not the dream-home part. Probably not the sexy-naked part. But the island part — that can be yours.

This island happens to be off the coast of the Bronx, by the way. It’s owned by a retiree named Red Brennan, and it’ll go up for auction on October 2. Brennan has been trying to sell this island for $250,000, but without any luck, for a number of reasons.

First of all, it’s pretty small — just 2.5 acres. It’s fairly barren. It gets completely submerged in high tide during storms, so, that will probably be an issue. Finally, it doesn’t have the most alluring name: Rat Island. It’s not even inhabited by rats — according to a 2009 Daily News story, the name may have come about because prisoners, known as “rats,” stopped to rest on Rat Island after escaping from the nearby Hart Island — but that name is just awful, from a sales perspective. If Brennan wants to unload this thing, he should give it one of those bullshit monikers the real estate industry uses to make undesirable places seem hip, like BeHICI (between Hart Island and City Island) or OffCoBro (off the coast of the Bronx).

You can buy your own New York City island [Malcolm Carter via Gothamist]

A Tiny Island Off the Coast of the Bronx Can Be Yours