An Abandoned Island in The Middle of NYC

An Abandoned Island in The Middle of NYC

#1 The Mysterious North Brother Island

Ghosts? Zombies.. Brad Pitt? This forgotten isle in the East River between Bronx and Rikers Island, NYC would make for a perfect film backdrop! Recognizable are its abandoned buildings from the late 19th century including the remains of Riverside Hospital, which quarantined those suffering from infectious diseases. The site also held experimental drug treatments and was a detention home for wayward youth.

#2 The ‘Life After People’ TV series

North Brother Island was featured in a TV fiction series on the History Channel. Scientist, structural engineers, and other experts speculated what would happen should humans instantly disappear? The Riverside Hospital made a good example for the deterioration of the built environment without humans.

#3 The Auditorium Theatre

Photographer Ian Ference captures the remains of an auditorium in the School & Services building. The theatre supplied seats with a small stage for incarcerated students. North Brother Island was rather self-sufficient, and although it required food and water to be ferried in, it provided its own steam, electricity, and an eventual telephone and fire alarm system.

#4 Post-WWII

To remedy a housing shortage after the war, the island housed veterans and their families. The quarantined hospital had stopped functioning before the government allocated surrounding homes for vets attending local colleges on the GI Bill. After the nationwide housing shortage ended in 1952, the vets left the island mainly because the ferry service was “inefficient and expensive”.

#5 The Drug Rehabilitation Center

The final phase of the hospital’s facilities was its conversion into a juvenile rehabilitation center. Young drug addicts were forced to undergo withdrawal symptoms without medications or assistance. They were locked in a room alone for days with a bare mattress and a mess bucket until withdrawals were complete.

#6 Typhoid Mary

North Brother Island’s Riverside Hospital housed the infamous ‘Typhoid’ Mary Mallon, who was sent against her will in 1915 for 3 decades until her death. She’s believed to have infected 51 people, three of whom died, while she was employed as a cook. Mallon was the first “healthy typhoid carrier” to be identified by medical science

#7 The Morality of Confinement

North River Island saw patients undergoing life threatening diseases such as: typhoid, diphtheria, venereal disease, heroin addiction, tuberculosis, smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever, yellow fever, and even leprosy. The isolation seemed a good answer for removing extreme contagions from society. At times the hospital had state-of-the-art therapies, yet it courted controversies and according to Ference, “the death rate among patients was high and the recovery rate low.”