The New York City Parks Department would probably want me to start this way: North Brother Island is a ruin. It hasn’t been occupied, nor used for anything by anyone except nesting herons, since the early 70’s. Thus, it’s dangerous.
At best, you’ll probably walk away with a case of poison ivy. (We were spared somehow.) At worst, you could fall down an open utility shaft. The disused hospital where the city used to isolate tuberculosis patients is crumbling and may be rife with asbestos. Same with the other former medical buildings on the north end of the island. Even walking around is a chore. The whole place is choked with kudzu and porcelain berry. North Brother Island is what will happen to the whole of our civilization when humanity is dead.
Sean on North Brother Island
But I’m actually going to start this way: North Brother Island is more fascinating by accident than most intentionally fascinating places are. It feels as though one day, everyone living and working there just dropped everything and left. It feels as much like that day was yesterday as it feels like it was 100 years ago. The hospital smells medicinal, maybe from all of the x-ray film piled up on the floor of the x-ray room. Random fire hydrants and lamp posts stick up through the thickets and weeds – but soon you realize there’s nothing random about it. There are roads under all that thick overgrowth. And curbs. A curb is so urban a thing this place can’t have ever claimed one, but it did. Roofs and basements should never meet each other, but they do here.
A collapsed building on North Brother Island. Mary lived in a cottage near this spot while under quarantine.
We visited this island for our story on Typhoid Mary. She was quarantined here and we wanted to find her cottage. (It doesn’t exist anymore.) North Brother Island is so close to the city I figured you could just canoe to it. And you can. If you want to be arrested. To visit the island you must:
1) Contact the parks department. They don’t even let themselves visit the island most of the time. March to October is off limits. That’s when the herons nest.
2) If the parks department gives you permission, you have to charter a boat, which can be really expensive. To make it more affordable, find other folks who need to visit and split the cost with them.
3) Thing is, a big group requires a big boat and a big boat can’t dock on the island. There’s no dock. We had to tie off on a rotting piling, motor over in a smaller boat, three by three, and beach ourselves onto the sand. In short, to get to North Brother Island, you have to mildly shipwreck yourself.
We think these quarters were used by nurses on the island.
What to do first:
If you’re pressed for time, explore the buildings first. From the spot where you beach, the hospital is straight ahead and to the left. (Ignore the broken, tilted awning above the entrance that says “Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope.” It’s a practical joke/art project.) But the hospital isn’t even the creepiest place. The creepiest place is (what we think was) the “Nurse’s Home.” Bullet holes perforate an outer door – all exit wounds. All the theater seats in the entertainment hall have collapsed. The curtain runner above the stage would still work were there a curtain. The wall switches still move up and down, with that loud, mid-20th century “tock.”
The abandoned theater.
A porch in disrepair.
Still, the hospital is pretty incredible. We walked through the wards where TB patients were quarantined. Private rooms were available too, including one with bars on the windows and a door slot through which maybe food was delivered. Whoever was treated in there can’t have been very stable. In one of the offices, there are mimeographed handouts strewn across the floor as though a receptionist had an apoplectic fit and quit on the spot. “STUDIES ON ADDICTION FROM RIVERSIDE HOSPITAL,” they say. After this was (in essence) a leper island, it was a drug rehab facility.
Sean inspects a hospital room.
The view from the hospital room.
What to do next:
Walk south toward the lighthouse, past the smooshed chapel that looks like the house that landed on the witch in the Wizard of Oz. Keep an eye on the water until a sparkling view of Manhattan emerges. Seeing the city from this remove is a little like seeing Earth from the moon – especially if you imagine you’re Mary Mallon and aren’t allowed to go home, no matter how much you plead or cajole the doctors who are constantly testing your stool. It doesn’t feel like any place in the East River should ever have been so built up and inhabited, let alone so abandoned and allowed to melt down like this.
View of Manhattan through a broken fence.
Whatever you do, remember you’re one of a rare breed of people who have seen North Brother Island. So count yourself lucky. Oh, and take lots of pictures. Like our producer Lynn Levy did. This is Lynn:
Lynn Levy braving the ruins.
Thanks Lynn.
Comments [19]
I am very interested in making a short documentary on the history of North Brother, I have called about a dozen different parks department offices and no one seems to think obtaining a permit is a possibility. A friend of mine works for a boating company and we have everything we need except the permit... any advice would be a HUGE help!
@Mike W. from Denver...would you consider putting your photos online? It would be so interesting to find photos of the buildings when they were new, then see your pictures and compare to the haunting, evocotive ruins they are now. I haven't been able to find many photos of the buildings when they were new. Does anyone have a source they could share?
Showing people forbidden fruit is different than giving them the map to the tree.
What a hero! Share the secret with everyone!
Blame yourself when you can't go back.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2094823/New-York-leper-colony-Eerie-pictures-inside-abandoned-world-lost-island.html
A fantastic article on this place from one of our papers in the UK. Thought you guys might be interested :)
The pics and description make me think of another island very similar, and almost as hidden. In Boston Harbor there are islands, and most inhabitants have never visited them, some actually don't know they are there. One in particular, Peddocks Island, is the site of a former military base/ POW camp from WW2 era. They have pulled down a lot of the buildings for public safety reasons at this point but you can still see roads, lampposts, crosswalks etc if you visit. When we camped there (with a permit) in the mid 1980's I was around 10 yrs old. We weren't supposed to go past a certain spot without a tour guide, but according to the law, anything below the high tide line is public property. My dad and I used to use that loophole to walk around on the beach and then climb up a bank and explore the roads. The buildings were still standing, although you'd have to be a moron to go in one. The floors had deteriorated to the point that many clawfoot bathtubs were now on thhe first floors, because they'd fallen through the bathroom floor upstanirs. You could still see the detailed craftsmanship of the tin ceilings. There was everything you would expect a small self sufficient town to have,
On the other side of the island there is a portuguese fishing village that is dying out, as the ownership of the cottages can't even be passed through families. When the person who owns a cottage dies, it becomes state property. It's a very cool place. Too bad they are flattening it slowly....
i want to know if its still open or if they closed it done thanx hope to have an answer
I would really like to visit the island can you explain the legal process to gain permission? thanks
I visited North Brother over twenty years ago. The building with the auditorium was a NYC public school, PS169, (I'm almost positive that I can't remember the number correctly) that by number designation was a remedial school of some kind, in this case, obviously for the recovering drug addicts.
The island has gone through three histories, the first as a hospital and tuberculosis pavilion, the second as a location for veteran's vocational training, and finally as the drug "rehab" island.
Rehab is a rough word for what happened there, it was described by an occupant as a "pathological zoo" with unauthorized testing that didn't fall under the eye of the health inspectors because they could barely visit the place. After it was closed, many of the angry teenage "inmates" swam across the East River and ripped parts of it to shreds.
The location of Mary Mallons old house is almost directly beneath the old Chapel, which still has the remnants of a cheap piano or organ in it, on the West side of the Island.
I have lots and lots of photos of the place before it had decayed as much as has today. There was also a morgue, power plant, several training buildings, doctor's houses, nurses housing, a garage, workshop, the public school, the main pavilion and several other buildings. The spine of the island is riddled with steam tunnels that are now flooded with oil and grown over with vines, so walking there is dangerous.
This story doesn't mention that it was also the site of one of the worst maritime disasters in U.S. history, where over 1,300 people died when the Steamship General Slocum caught on fire and beached. Until the WTC disaster, it was the worst in NYC history.
GoogleMaps satellite appears to have captured a day of visitors, with a boat seemingly moored at the the wharf.
lived there for almost 2 years in 1949-1952 it was for veterans and familys .there were tennis courts ,baseball field handball, and a very unreilable ferry. It was govenor Deweys" gift' to veterans. single veterans in the large building and a very expensive little grocery store.
I'm another one of those weirdos who loves old abandoned hospitals. Check out www.opacity.us - they have a great page on North Brother Island/Riverside Hospital. Great episode, you guys. Keep it up.
2 questions: If you do get permission from the Parks Dept. to visit, can you then go on your own, eg. via kayak?
Next, if you go and get injured, can you sue the city?
Want another island of obscurity (besides S.I.) to report on among the borough's of N.Y.? Try Hart Island, where all the unclaimed are buried. Located between Queens, Bronx and Rikers.
It's the ultimate in decay...
That's for sharing the photos --very cool to see!
Awesome episode and great to get to see photos from the story. Helps put it in an even more real context. I love watching nature reclaim what we have built also
all my abandon space/building pictures are here shawngilheeney.com
Also, for more on the history of the island and some photos, check out: http://kingstonlounge.blogspot.com/2011/01/north-brother-island-riverside-hospital.html
Actually, the building with the bullet holes in the side door and the theatre was not the nurses's residence; the nurses' residence is the building pictured in the fourth photo from the top - it was constructed in three sections, and each wing has distinctive characteristics.
The buildings with the bullet holes, theatre, gymnasium, printing press, etc, was built in the 1930s as the Services Building, and when they converted the island in 1952 for use as a drug rehab, they added partitions to build the theatre, gym, and classrooms.
Typhoid Mary's cottage was bulldozed and the rubble removed days after her death - it was piled with junk and likely a health hazard.
this is crazy - i love abandoned buildings as well. loved the book (the world without us) and we also have a coffee table book called (asylum) which documents closed mental health hospitals aka insane asylums. i lived on the upper east side for a while and didn't even know this was there.....jealous you got to see it. crazy pictures. creepy, creepy, creepy....
Excellent photos and text, and a great episode.
I would love to visit this island some day. I love old, abandoned, decaying buildings. Watching nature reclaim what we have built.
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