The Renwick Ruin and the Reporter Who Faked Madness

The roofless Gothic ruin on the island's southern tip ahead was once a working hospital, built between eighteen fifty four and eighteen fifty six to quarantine New Yorkers sick with smallpox. The architect, James Renwick Junior, who later designed Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, gave the hospital pointed arches and dark gray stone more fitting for a church than a quarantine ward. It served smallpox patients until eighteen seventy five, then spent decades afterward training nurses, before it was finally abandoned.

The island itself, then known as Blackwell's Island rather than Roosevelt Island, had a darker reputation than the hospital alone. It also held the city's Women's Lunatic Asylum, a facility notorious enough that in eighteen eighty seven, a young journalist named Nellie Bly deliberately got herself committed there to see conditions firsthand. Writing for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, Bly acted disturbed in a boarding house until police had her evaluated and shipped by boat to the asylum. Once inside, she found patients, many of them poor immigrant women with limited English, mistreated and neglected. An attorney for the newspaper secured her release after ten days, and her account, published that October and later as the book Ten Days in a Mad House, caused a sensation, embarrassed the city into reforms, and made her famous at twenty three years old.

The smallpox hospital building survived long after the asylum closed, and in nineteen seventy six it was named New York City's only landmarked ruin, preserved deliberately in its decayed state rather than restored. Part of its north wing collapsed in two thousand seven, and stabilization work has continued since, holding together, rather than rebuilding, this quiet reminder of the island's grim institutional past.