19th century horror in middle of the East River
ROOSEVELT Island, a skinny strip of land in the East River, became known by many names across the centuries.
To the Native Americans, it was Minnehanonck; to the Dutch, it was Varkens Eylandt — Hog Island. Early English colonists called it Blackwell’s Island. It was dubbed Welfare Island in 1921, for the city hospitals within its 147 acres. Look at it now and you’ll see a tramway and modern apartment buildings.
But in the 19th century, the land between Manhattan and Queens was known to its inhabitants by a more menacing name: Damnation Island.
Historian Stacy Horn’s “Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York” looks deeper at how difficult it was to be any of those four things 200 years ago.
Because for the poor, sick, mad and criminal, Blackwell’s was the place you were likely to land. Permanently.
Like some of the world’s worst things, this incarnation of the island started with the best of intentions. The city’s ill and indigent had previously suffered on the streets.
Then reformers promised those unfortunates could find shelter and medicine in the island’s new charity homes and hospitals. Petty criminals would be rehabilitated in a modern penitentiary.
The truth: Convicts doubled as hospital orderlies in a house of horrors where doctors performed gruesome medical experiments. Unsupervised inmates rampaged through the asylum’s halls. New Yorkers whose only real offense was poverty lived in filth and died en masse.
The island did serve one purpose: It swept the city’s poorest and most despised citizens out of sight from the rest of the population.
Particularly unfortunate New Yorkers could spend their entire lives traveling from one part of Blackwell’s Island to another.
The able-bodied poor could start in the workhouse, established in 1852 for minor criminals — mostly drunks and prostitutes.
With joblessness itself a kind of crime, the indigent were arrested regularly and charged with vagrancy. Hauled before police courts, without lawyers, most were quickly sentenced to a term on the island.
A steamboat left regularly from E. 26th St., delivering new arrivals.
Once there, they took a quick bath — in water still wriggling with the vermin from the dozens of people who went before. Then you were off to work. Private companies used prison labor to make everything from cigars to hoop skirts.
Others sewed straitjackets for the island’s asylum, or crafted coffins for its dead.
If you were hearty enough to survive your sentence — and regular epidemics made that a challenge — you were shipped back to the city, just as penniless as when you arrived.
If you weren’t a thief before, you were likely to be one now.
Even the good-hearted landed on Damnation Island, often through no fault of their own.
Women were swept up just for strolling innocently down the street. Some immigrants never even knew why they were arrested; a missionary assigned to Blackwell’s Island found bewildered inmates who spoke nothing but German.
And if you were arrested again? Now it was off to the penitentiary. Built in 1832, it was intended for those serving sentences of up to two years — although some men served up to 10 and some women did life.
After arrival, you received another revolting bath and a set of rough, striped clothes.
Infamously corrupt politician Williams (Boss) Tweed (photo inset opposite page) arrived in 1874 to serve a year’s sentence for his sins; he landed a private room and a soft hospital job.
Less connected convicts — some as young as 14 — shared tiny, windowless cells and worked under armed guards.
Imagine that you survived this sentence, too, and left the island again. Once again you