FANTASY ISLE
Crumbling past, new nature at E. River site
GETTING TO North Brother Island has all the trappings of secretive exclusivity. You’ve got to get invited, sign a waiver, meet in an out-of-the-way spot in the Bronx, and charter a boat just to get to the 20 acres of abandoned, overgrown city parkland in the East River.
But City Councilman Mark Levine believes the city should change that.
“North Brother Island is the most magical place in New York City. It’s where history meets nature meets legend,” he said. “And most New Yorkers will never have a chance to see it unless we can find a way to open it up to the public.”
Located between Port Morris in the Bronx and Rikers Island, North Brother Island has been at turns a complex of hospitals for infectious diseases; the involuntary home of Typhoid Mary, the infamous cook who didn’t display symptoms of the deadly disease but kept spreading it to her clients, and a complex of housing for veterans after World War II, as well as a rehab for young people addicted to drugs.
But since the 1960s, it’s been abandoned — its streets and tennis courts invisible beneath vines, wooden buildings disintegrating, and its massive brick structures doing their best against the elements, which have crept inside them in the form of out-of-place plants and crumbling floors. It’s quiet, save for the cries of a hawk and the drone of airplanes overhead, and feels far from the industrial stretch of Hunts Point where the tour, organized by Rocking the Boat — a nonprofit that helps kids build boats and sail them in the Bronx River — launched.
The decay and overgrowth is a fascinating window into what happens when people disappear and nature takes over — but it means the island isn’t exactly the kind of place where you can gallivant. Tours, like one the Daily News took Friday with Levine (D-Manhattan), parks officials and other elected officials, are rare. Visitors aren’t allowed to enter or even get too close the aging buildings — once the nurses’ quarters, men’s dormitories, and the towering but uninvitingly named Tuberculosis Pavilion.
And yet it’s the meeting of crumbling history and new nature that makes the island so enchanting to people like Levine.
“We’re not looking for hot dog vendors and food trucks. We’re thinking of very ecoconscious, environmentally sensitive, curated tours that allow people to see the island in its natural state,” he said.
But even that will be a heavy lift. There’s no dock. Visitors on Friday got off boats that were pulled up against an old gantry crane landing. Some of the structures would have to be shored up to prevent people from being hurt by falling bricks.
“That’s no small undertaking,” Levine said. “But it’s an investment that would pay off with what would be a spellbinding experience for most New Yorkers.”
First Deputy Parks Commissioner Liam Kavanagh (photo inset) said being open for more frequent curated tours was certainly a possibility “at some point in the future.”
“From a Parks perspective, from a management perspective, it’s still a pretty rough site. And to bring people here is challenging,” he said. “It’d just be very difficult to keep people safe while they’re enjoying the kind of experience that we did today.” And giving them more than that — freedom to roam without minders — would be even more difficult and cost “an enormous amount of money.”
“But it’s one of those wonderful things to think about,” Kavanagh mused. “Because if you look at the city, 30 years ago people were looking at Brooklyn Bridge Park and seeing the old piers that were abandoned there and what could possibly be done. And today we have one of the most beautiful parks in the city if not the world.”