Cruelty, degradation the norm for poor & sick N.Y.ers

arrived in Manhattan — penniless. Even if you avoided arrest this time, poverty had other ways of taking you hostage.

You might develop a chronic disease. You might go mad.

Either one could return you to the island, maybe for good.

The unluckiest weren’t sick or crooked — just inconvenient.

One woman, identified only as Aunt Delia, was dispatched to the island because her relatives wanted her money. They found a doctor willing to commit her. By the time the fraud was uncovered and Aunt Delia released, her small savings were gone.

On assignment for the New York World, newspaper reporter Nellie Bly went undercover at the Lunatic Asylum in 1887. The resulting article, “Ten Days in a Mad House,” detailed inedible meals and unheated cells.

Inmates shared a wooden bucket for a bathroom, and had only a thin shawl to ward off the biting cold.

The cruelties were relentless. Nurses choked inmates who gave them trouble, or beat them with broom handles. The doctors’ therapeutic treatments included massive enemas and swaddling patients in wet sheets.

At night, particularly restless inmates were locked into coffinlike cages.

After the World secured Bly’s release, her exposé garnered national attention. Hearings led to reforms. The amount spent on each inmate was raised 8 cents a day — to 31 cents.

But Bly never stopped thinking about those who stayed when she exited the island. “I left them in their living grave,” she said.

If anything, the asylum was a step up from the charity hospital, which provided doctors with a steady supply of human subjects for experiments.

In 1894, one physician decided to use hypnosis in place of anesthesia. While the doctor managed to put the patient into a trance, the man later reported he had felt the surgeon’s every agonizing cut.

Other turn-ofthe-century doctors, more suited to horror films than hospitals, experimented, too.

One, looking for a new tuberculosis treatment, injected a patient with milk. Another surgeon, seeing a boy with a malformed limb, tried to do a bone graft from a living dog — encasing both patient and suffering animal in plaster.

Unsurprisingly, none of the experiments worked.

So what if, as an impoverished New Yorker, you survived all this — the workhouse, the penitentiary, the various hospitals? You probably had nothing to look forward to at that point but the almshouse, built in 1848 for the seriously disabled and the very old. As these inmates were already deemed hopeless, their conditions were perhaps worst of all. People slept on the floor, and were fed spoiled food. One man was put in his coffin while he still gasping for breath. And yet, at a time when as many as 2,500 New Yorkers arrived each year at the almshouse, one 1882 survey listed exactly four black women, two black men, one “brown” man and one “red” woman. It may have been a cesspool — sometimes literally — but it was still basically whites-only. Reforms came eventually, if slowly.

In 1895, the longstanding Department of Public Charities and Correction was split in two, finally drawing a distinction between the poor and the criminal.

New investigations were launched, and changes were made. Hospital facilities were combined and updated. The state took over care of the mentally ill, and the inmates were transferred to other facilities.

Finally, in 1936, the island's fearsome penitentiary — where the bullying of brutal guards had given way to the rule of vicious gangs — was torn down.

It was no longer needed, replaced by a newly completed, modern jail with a $10 million price tag.

This would be, the city announced, “an institution designed to return the prisoner to society better than when he entered it, not worse, as is the case today.”

They called it Rikers Island.