North Brother Island The Last Unknown Place in New York City

by Payne, Christopher; Mason, Randall; Sullivan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780823257713
• ISBN10: 0823257711
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-05-01
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

From a quarantine hospital to a juvenile drug treatment center to an uninhabited island of ruins--this magnificent photographic survey that brings North Brother Island to life.

Few people today have ever heard of North Brother Island, though a hundred years ago it was place known to--and often feared by--nearly everyone in New York City. The island, a small dot in the East River, twenty acres slotted between today's gritty industrial shores of the Bronx and Queens, was a minor piece of the New York archipelago until the late 19th century, when calls for social and sanitary reform--and the massive expansion of the city's population--combined to remake NBI as a hospital island, a place to contain infectious disease and, later, other societal ills.

Abandoned since 1963, North Brother Island is a ruin and a wildlife sanctuary (it is the protected nesting ground of the Black-crowned Night Heron), closed to the public and virtually invisible to it. But one cannot mistake its abandoned state as a sign of its irrelevance to the city's history and culture. Traces of the extensive hospital campus remain, as do sites linked to notorious people (it was the final home of "Typhoid Mary") and events (the steamship General Slocum sank by its shores). It has stories to tell.

Photographer Christopher Payne (Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals), was granted permission by New York City's Parks & Recreation Department to photograph the island over a period of years. The results are both beautiful and startling. On North Brother Island, devoid of human habitation for fifty years, buildings great and small are being consumed by the unchecked growth of vegetation. In just a few decades, a forest has sprung up where once there were the streets and manicured lawns of a hospital campus.

North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City includes a history by University of Pennsylvania preservationist Randall Mason, who has studied the island extensively, and an essay by the writer Robert Sullivan (Rats, The Meadowlands), who came along on one of the rare expeditions.

Author Biography

Christopher Payne, a photographer based in New York City, specializes in the documentation of America's vanishing architecture and industrial landscape. Trained as an architect, he has a natural interest in how things are purposefully designed and constructed, and how they work. His first book, New York's Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway, offered dramatic, rare views of the behemoth machines that are hidden behind modest facades in New York City. His latest book, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, which includes an essay by the renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, is the result of a seven-year exploration of America's vast and largely abandoned state mental institutions.

Randall F. Mason teaches in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Associate Professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning. He leads the Center for Research on Preservation and Society, which undertakes applied research projects on site management and on social, economic and political aspects of historic preservation. His books include The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (edited with Max Page).

Robert Sullivan is the author of The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, Rats, and, most recently, The Thoreau You Don't Know. He has written for magazines, such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and Vogue. His latest book, My American Revolution, is a consideration of the Revolutionary War and the landscape of New York City.