The Forgotten Strip.

Roosevelt Island: Asylum, Smallpox, and the City's Strangest Address

For most of its history, the narrow strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens served as the place New York City put the people it didn't want to see. Originally called Blackwell's Island — after the farming family that owned it from 1686 until the city purchased it in 1828 — the island became home to a penitentiary, a lunatic asylum, a workhouse, a charity hospital, and a smallpox hospital, all operating simultaneously by the mid-19th century. The New York City Lunatic Asylum opened in 1839 in a gothic stone building whose domed central tower — the Octagon — is the only section that survived into the present day, now incorporated into a residential complex. The building that housed thousands of patients in brutal conditions looked, from a distance, like a Renaissance palace. Up close, the conditions were something else entirely. In 1887, journalist Nellie Bly had herself committed to the asylum and spent ten days inside, documenting freezing bathwater, rotten food, and attendants who beat patients. Her exposé in the New York World, published as "Ten Days in a Mad-House," led to a grand jury investigation and significant reforms — and changed American investigative journalism forever.

At the island's southern tip stands the ruin that stops every first-time visitor: the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, completed in 1856 and designed by James Renwick Jr. — the same architect who designed St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and Grace Church in Greenwich Village. The hospital was built to isolate smallpox patients arriving on immigrant ships during the epidemics that swept New York throughout the 19th century. It was decommissioned in 1875, after which it served briefly as a nurses' training facility, and then was simply abandoned. The city stabilized the ruin in the 1970s, reinforcing the walls while leaving the building deliberately unroofed — what you see today is a Gothic shell open to the sky, with arched windows framing clouds. It is one of the very few preserved ruins in New York City and one of the most visually striking places in the entire five boroughs. At the northern tip, the Blackwell Island Lighthouse was completed in 1872 — reportedly built by a single inmate named John McCarthy, an Irish patient in the asylum, who carved an inscription into the stone: "This is the work was done by John McCarthy who built the light house from the bottom to the top all ye who do pass by may pray for his soul when he dies."

The island was renamed Welfare Island in 1921 and Roosevelt Island in 1973, when the city began developing it as a planned residential community. The Roosevelt Island Tramway, which opened on May 18, 1976, was the first urban aerial tramway in the United States — built as a temporary measure while the subway station was under construction. The subway arrived in 1989, but the tramway never closed. Today it still runs every fifteen minutes, carrying passengers 250 feet above the East River for $2.90 — the same as a subway fare — on one of the most dramatic two-minute commutes in any city in the world. A StoryHunt on Roosevelt Island walks you past the Octagon, the lighthouse, the smallpox ruin, and the FDR Memorial — a place designed by Louis Kahn in 1973 that wasn't built until 2012, nearly four decades after his death at Penn Station. Every site connects to a story of people who were erased, and then slowly remembered.