At first encounter, North Brother Island is among the most
unexpected of places: an uninhabited island of ruins in New York
City that hardly anyone knows, existing today almost in secret. But
in some fundamental sense it is also quite ordinary, for just as
they have in other parts of the city, people have lived, worked,
studied, healed, and died here for centuries. The island has been
bought and sold, used and re-used many times over. For a while,
though, it was famous: In 1885, it became the home of the Riverside
Hospital, which had been established to isolate and treat people
with infectious diseases. By 1895, the hospital had grown to such
an extent that the social reformer Jacob Riis wrote that there was
nothing like it in the world. Later, the island's reputation grew
mostly in infamy: In 1904, the passenger steamship General Slocum
caught fire in the East River, leaving more than a thousand souls
dead on the shores of North Brother Island, the single greatest
loss of life in New York City to that time; in 1908, the hospital
received as a patient Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary,
who would die on North Brother in 1938.
North Brother Island is both part of the City of New York and a
world apart from it. Its twenty acres sit low in the East River,
just north of Hell Gate, with twenty-five or so buildings in
various states of decay. As there is no public access, it's most
easily seen as you lift off the tarmac at LaGuardia. Look to the
west for a brown smudge stuck in the blue-gray East River, close up
against Rikers Island and not far from the Bronx shoreline. That's
NBI.
Photographer Christopher Payne, renowned for his work at abandoned
state mental hospitals, received permission to visit and photograph
the island over a period of years, and this book, North Brother
Island, is the result of that work. His collaborator and co-author
is Randall F. Mason, Chair of the Graduate Program in Historic
Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the
island and its history as a unique example in the annals of urban
planning and policy.
North Brother Island features an essay and more than 80 large-scale
color images by Christopher Payne and a highly illustrated study by
Professor Mason, including images from throughout the island's
history, official documents, and other supporting graphics.
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