Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th Century New York.
By Stacy Horn
Initial planners for Blackwell’s would have been mortified at how wretched and deadly conditions there had become. When the island was bought by the city for $32,500 in 1828 (they would end up paying $20,000 more to settle a lawsuit), their goal was to relieve the crowded conditions at Manhattan’s Bellevue, which in addition to being a hospital, was also the location of the city’s Penitentiary, the Lunatic Asylum, an Almshouse for the poor, and the Workhouse, a prison for people convicted of minor crimes. As the city had grown, so had the number of the poor, the lunatic, and the criminal, all of whom had to be treated somewhere when they got sick.
While this may have been an opportune time to read this volume, I ended up more frustrated than enlightened by it. While Damnation Island is loaded with gory and depressing anecdotes regarding our ongoing inability (or refusal) to care for the needy, its lack of organization or context made much of the information less meaningful and the effect was actually boring. Rather than being a history of Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) that tells the story of its evolution from farm land (owned by the Blackwell Family) to its century as a complex of city institutions for the sick and destitute and then to its new 20thcentury life as an attempt at model middle-class living, the book is organized around the institutions that were housed there in the 19th Century.
While these were several and diverse, the use of them as an organizing principle comes across as random and confusing. Most of the work centers on the period from the 1873 economic collapse through the 1890s. This seems to be driven by the existence of the diaries of a Reverend William French, who commuted to the island daily for thirty years to minister to its sick and impoverished residents. That would work better if French had made distinctions between the institutions, but he viewed his calling to work with all of the residents. Horn makes it clear that this was a rational decision on his part, since the staffs and the residents were often moved from one institution to the other as space was needed. A shocking piece of information but one which means that the island will require a different organization to illuminate it. In its current form the reader is swimming through a vast array of horrific anecdotes that seem interchangeable. There are several exposes written during this time that attempt to show the need for improvement but there is very little discussion of what set these apart from one another (possibly nothing) or what effect they had (possibly none). A substantial number of these anecdotes follow people who are suffering official neglect in other institutions, not even those on Blackwell’s.
However, there is a valuable lesson in this history. Just as Blackwell’s institutions are each developed to reform the failures of what came before them, they are replaced by institutions that fail just as miserably. The New York City Lunatic Asylum is ultimately replaced by a series of psychiatric hospitals, some on Long Island that included farms, with their opportunity for healthy manual labor and fresh air. (Reformers are frequently of the opinion that the poor need more hard work in the fresh air.) When I was in high school, my health teacher – an otherwise unenlightened man – took us on a field trip to one of these institutions – Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital. It was a gigantic castle-like warehouse structure. I remember huge, high ceilinged rooms with stone walls and stone floors. There were drains on the floor surrounded by puddles because the only cleaning ever done was hosing these unfurnished caverns down. I remember dozens of people standing or wandering around the room, talking to themselves, crying, rocking in the fetal position. Some were dressed in shabby street clothing (perhaps what they were wearing when they arrived, whenever that was) and others were simply covered with white poncho-like tunics. What I remember best is the echo – every sound rang like a drum in the giant empty space, and the cold.
Similarly, in an important reform stretching from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, the wretched, overcrowded penitentiary is replaced by a larger, more modern and civilized complex on neighboring Riker’s Island. As the city finally closes Riker’s – long since labeled the worst jail in America (not a low bar) – we might do well to remember that Rikers was the solution before it became the problem. While modern facilities are important, it seems there is an element of humanity required to help people that may be more important than bricks and mortar.
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