North Brother Island

(Library)

This past weekend, my friend Ryan and I kayaked over to, and explored, a small island near the Bronx. On this island sits an abandoned hospital. The hospital opened in the 1880s as a quarantine facility, where New York City shipped and shut away the sick. Unlike today’s hospitals, the island essentially served as its own city. At different points in its existence, it had a functioning morgue, a public school, even tennis courts. The buildings housed patients with yellow fever, measles and tuberculosis. Typhoid Mary, the institution’s most famous patient, was quarantined here for 28 years, until she died in 1938. After Mary’s death, the hospital closed, but was reopened for WWII veterans and their families. Then, in the 1950s, the hospital was converted to a drug rehab center for heroin-addicted teens. Addicts were confined to this island and locked in a room until they were clean. Many of them believed they were being held against their will. By the early 1960s, widespread staff corruption and high costs ended the program and forced the facility to close. The patients, the staff, everyone, left... And the island has been abandoned ever since. Abandoned and off-limits to the public, the island now serves as a migration stopover for herons and other wading shorebirds. Most of the original hospital’s buildings still stand, but are heavily decayed, in danger of collapse. A forest of kudzu and poison ivy have consumed the ruined buildings, and pretty much the entire island.

(Nurses' Quarters)

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