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- [00:00]
Greg Young
There are more ways than ever to listen to History Daily ad free. Listen with Wondry plus in the Wondery app as a member of Noiser plus at noiser.com or in Apple Podcasts. Or you can get all of History Daily plus other fantastic history podcasts at IntoHistory.com we here at History Daily have it easy in a way. We we have the entire scope of human endeavor to investigate Ancient Egypt, medieval Europe, Dynastic China, colonial America, the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution to the Industrial, the Bronze Age to the Information Age. We can cover it all whenever it happened and wherever it happened. But what if you had to pick one place, a single city to dedicate a podcast to? One location that is old enough, important enough, interesting enough to go back to over and over, A place where the stories never stop? A great candidate would be the city that never sleeps, New York. On today's Saturday matinee, we bring you an episode from the Bowery Boys, a podcast that's been exploring the history of New York City for more than 18 years and still has more stories to tell, including this one about two small islands near the Tidal Strait known as Hell Gate, a once dangerous whirlpool that wrecked hundreds of ships. But the islands are just as dangerous and mysterious.
- [01:24]
Tom Meyers
I hope you enjoy.
- [01:26]
Greg Young
While you're listening, be sure to search for, for and follow the Bowery Boys. We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you.
- [01:41]
Lily Chiu
Oh, hey.
- [01:42]
Jamie
Hey. Thanks for meeting me here on such short notice. This place isn't bugged, is it?
- [01:45]
Tom Meyers
Bugged? Wait, Jamie, what's going on?
- [01:47]
Jamie
It's just you're my only lawyer friend and I need your professional opinion. You see that brand new Hyundai 2 song out there?
- [01:52]
Tom Meyers
Yeah.
- [01:55]
Jamie
That's all I paid for it.
- [01:56]
Tom Meyers
Ah, I think I need to get back to you on that.
- [01:59]
Jamie
Do you know what you want?
- [02:00]
Tom Meyers
Yeah, I do now.
- [02:02]
Philippa Soo
Deal. So right it almost feels wrong. Get the car or SUV you've always wanted plus America's best warranty at the Hyundai Getaway sales event. The guilt is real, but so is the savings.
- [02:13]
Tom Meyers
Listen, I don't want to get in your business, but if that's all she.
- [02:16]
Jamie
Paid for it, I'll have what she's having.
- [02:18]
Philippa Soo
It's a great day for a new Hyundai at the Hyundai Getaway sales event going on now. Get 0% APR for 60 months plus 0 payments for 90 days on all Hyundai Palisade, Santa Fe and Santa Fe hybrid models. And check out our other great deals at your Hyundai dealer today. Offer end September 2 Call 562-314-4603 for details.
- [02:38]
Jamie
Searching for a romantic summer getaway Escape with Rich Girl Summer the new Audible original from Lily Chiu the exquisitely talented Philippa Sue. Returning to narrate her fifth Lily Chiu title, this time Philippa is joined by her real life husband, Steven pasquale. Set in Toronto's wealthy cottage country, a.k.a. the Hamptons of Canada, Rich Girl Summer follows the story of Valerie, a down on her luck event planner posing as a socialite's long lost daughter while piecing together the secrets surrounding a mysterious family and falling deeper and deeper in love with the impossibly hard to read and infuriatingly handsome family assistant, Nico. Caught between pretending to belong and unexpectedly finding where she truly fits in, Valerie learns her summer is about to get far more complicated than she ever planned. She's in over her head and head over heels. Listen to Rich Girl Summer now on audible. Go to audible.com richgirlsommar There once was.
- [03:33]
Tom Meyers
A lighthouse on the western end of North Brother island which shone a fixed beam of white light to guide ships through the treacherous waters of the East River. On the morning of January 3, 1884, the lighthouse keeper was watching a flotilla of canal ships sail sail past the island on their way through the Long Island Sound. But in the wake of these passing ships he observed something bobbing up and down in the water. The keeper jumped in a boat and rowed to the spot where the object was seen. It was the body of a lifeless woman. He took the body to shore where he then noticed that the flesh was still warm and that blood flowed from a wound to the head. A message was sent to officials in Long Island City and the body was taken to the coroner who identified it as that of a 45 year old woman. Studying the condition of the body, the coroner made an ominous conjecture that this woman may have been victim of foul play. Newspapers ran with this belief the following day and many New Yorkers on that day first became familiar with the presence of this place called North Brother Island. A German mechanic named Charles Meyer, living in Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood, also took note of this report and hurried to Long Island City. The unidentified woman was his wife. From a report in the New York Times, the body of a woman found floating in the east river below North Brother island proved to be that of Miss Matilda Meyer. For some time past, since the death of a son, she had suffered from melancholia, which was aggravated by the financial troubles of of her husband. Ms. Meyer left her home at 6:00 on Wednesday morning, without telling anyone where she was going. Her friends think that after leaving her home, she wandered down 75th street to the east river and jumped overboard. North Brother island is over three miles from 75th Street. For the lighthouse keeper, Daniel Kelly, nicknamed Lighthouse Dan, these types of troubling discoveries were unusual, but not surprising. Many months later, in August, Kelly pulled another lifeless body from the waters of North Brother Island. A young swimmer who had apparently gone off course and drowned. Unlike Mrs. Meyer, this individual would never be identified. Lighthouse Dan was the custodian of North Brother Island. He remained the keeper here for almost 20 years, living with his wife, grazing cows and sheep, far from civilization. Their only means of leaving the island, a small rowboat. But as the crow flies, he was technically only 3 miles from central Park. Every night, Daniel Kelly manned the lighthouse, illuminating the dark waters, guiding vessels through the churn of the Hell Gate to prevent a great tragedy from ever visiting the shores of of this isolated and lonely place. The Bowery Boys Episode 366 North Brother Island New York's Forbidden place hi there. Welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. Now New York's hottest club is Little Island. This place has everything. Trees planted in geofibers, a 700 seat amphitheater, the ghosts of Titanic passengers, and a price tag of $260 million. Okay, so it's not actually a club. Feels like a club, actually. But it's an island, an actual island, an artificial island which opened in May of 2021 along Manhattan's Western Shore near the site of Pier 54, most famous for receiving the survivors of the titanic sinking in 1912. That's true. Little island itself has no historical mooring to the city. However, it's fresh, new, almost alien, like with a million perfect angles for flawless selfies. A glamorous companion to the neighboring High Line. It's also the natural evolution of New York's changing relationships with its islands. Little island is strictly for recreation, but many historic islands have become respites for city dwellers in recent years. Places like Governor's island and Randall's Island. And changes are even coming for those islands with more troubling purposes. For instance, Hart island, which is the city's official potter's field with more than 1 million burials and ones completely off limits. Well, it's opened up for visitations by individuals with close ties to those that are buried there are. And the correctional facility on Rikers island is slated to close down by the year 2027. But just a short distance west from the Shores of Rikers island is a pair of islands that are completely restricted. Two places with a human population of zero. North and South Brother Islands sit in that jagged and twisty end of the east river as it opens up to the Long Island Sound. It's not too far from the Bronx shoreline, and planes from LaGuardia Airport zoom loudly overhead. They are surrounded by so much activity, and yet on these islands, time has essentially stopped. The smaller South Brother island has seen scant human development in its history. But North Brother island, at around 20 acres, is dotted with a rotting gallery of architectural ruins. The island has been consumed by a forest rooted to shallow soil covering old roads and sidewalks. How is it that a city so driven by new development and in such a constant desire for expansion has somehow left these islands alone? What happened on North Brother island that would cause people to shut it down completely? Why is it forbidden? A well known Native American legend suggests that the islands at the mouth of the Long Island Sound were placed there by the devil. The native inhabitants of this area had run the beast from the mainland, driving him back to Long Island. But in anger, the devil turned to begin throwing massive boulders which ended up scattering through throughout the waterway, creating new little islands. For this reason, old colonial maps sometimes called the Long Island Sound the Devil's Belt. The early Dutch explorer Adrian Block is said to have named the islands Degaselen for companions or brethren during his travels here over 400 years ago. But of more urgent consequence for Bloch was the tidal strait in the east river, which he also named a place called Hellgot, which the English language morphed to become Helgate. And for good reason. It was an essential but dangerous passage for over three centuries. A whirlpool formed by the clashing waters here claimed thousands of shipping vessels. Any wrecks not taken to the river floor or washed out into the ocean were flung upon the shores of the surrounding small islands, including those of north and south brother Islands. In 1869, the North Brother Island Lighthouse was finally constructed to guide vessels through the channel at night. And for many decades, the U.S. army Corps of Engineers blasted the channel with dynamite in efforts to smooth the waters. In 1885, an obstruction named Florida Flood Rock was obliterated with 300,000 pounds of explosives, believed to be the largest planned explosion before the coming of the atomic bomb. The lighthouse and lighthouse Dan and his wife would be the only residents of North Brother island for quite a while. Until the early 1880s. North Brother would share the fate of so many islands during this period, becoming a location for necessary public facilities, in this case, a quarantine hospital. With the growth of New York in the mid 19th century, by way of immigration, came the dangers of cramped urban living. Raging epidemics in an era when the root causes of such pestilence were rarely understood. At the same time, New Yorkers did not want to live near such dangerous places as quarantine hospitals. For instance, in 1858, the residents of Staten island burnt down a quarantine after years of neglect by the state. Only islands with little or no residential presence seemed safe for such institutions. Many of the largest were constructed on Blackwell's island, that narrow east river island which separated Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens. In 1854, construction began on a new smallpox hospital at the southern point of Blackwells. Despite there being an effective smallpox vaccine in the United States, by then, most newly arriving immigrants were not vaccinated, and those infected needed to be isolated from the general public. This new hospital, which opened two years later, was designed by renowned architect James Renwick in a gothic revival style. By 1875, the smallpox hospital was renamed Riverside Hospital due to the grim fact that it was now treating several communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis and new threats like typhus fever. Blackwell's island was the bleak destination for most of the city's ills in the 19th century. In fact, it was also home to the city's mental institution, A workhouse, an almshouse, and even a penitentiary. Having a central hospital for epidemic patients meant risking a possible outbreak throughout the entire island. Riverside Hospital needed to be isolated. And so in 1881, the City of New York purchased North Brother island, and despite the protests of lighthouse Dan and his wife, A new Riverside hospital facility would be built there. Meanwhile, the old smallpox hospital here on Blackwell's island, the one designed by James Renwick, well, it became a nurse's school. And then in the 1950s, this building was entirely abandoned, and its ruins remain standing to this day. Now, on today's Roosevelt island, they are sometimes called the Renwick ruin, A rare New York City landmark preserved in a ruined state state. The new Riverside hospital opened in 1885 and was a radical transformation for North Brother island, With an appearance almost of a college campus. According to the New York Times quote, the grounds were laid out in lawns and gardens, ornamented in trees and shrubbery, and intersected with gravel paths and roadways. Finally, the island was then connected to the city's sewer and water supply at great cost, and a ferry dock was also built. North Brother island was now a part of New York. An ominous refrain then appears throughout the daily newspapers as health inspectors swept through tenement houses in poor neighborhoods, clearing out the suspected sick and removing them to North Brother Island. Each day's newspaper featured several examples that sounded a little bit like this one from February of 1886. Henry, male, age 18, and his little brother August, seven years of age, were removed to north brother Island from St. Ann's Avenue yesterday suffering from smallpox. They caught the disease from their sister who had been taken from the house a week ago. Uninfected parents were not allowed to join their children, and they were very rarely allowed to even visit them. Their children were removed to an isolated place. In many cases, they died there. Sanitary officials were given an almost unlimited power to take people from their houses and impose a forced exile on North Brother island until such time as they could be deemed healthy. What makes this especially chaotic are the different languages spoken by patients in the 1880s. Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Chinese. Newly arriving immigrant families could be torn apart the moment they arrived in New York harbor. Those settled families, faced with the possible outbreak of disease, often prevented their children from being treated for fear of them being taken away to this far off place, never to be seen again. The transition to this isolated nature new island home could be stark. Most possessions were burned, including all clothing. There was little communication with the outside world. In 1892, the island gained the interest of social reformer Jacob Riis, author of the landmark social study how the other half Lives. He wrote on visiting days twice a week, a few scattered collars come sometimes to see friends in the hospital. With the exception of an occasional inspector of the health department, these are the only new faces ever seen on the island. Literally faces only. For no visitor is permitted to go far beyond the ferry dock without having enveloped him or herself in the ugly Mother Hubbard gown and high rubber overshoes that are the uniform of the island, worn always in the sick wards. And yet, for Jacob Riis, North Brother island was actually a great improvement over Blackwell's Island. He wrote, quote, the isolation secured in New York is absolute. It must ever be the chief defense of our city against this enemy that is forever knocking. But Riis speaks for the needs of the many. Those with singular afflictions ranging from measles to leprosy were isolated in small tents or huts on the outskirts of the island, away from even the regular hospital population. The anti immigrant prejudices of late 19th century society were often magnified here in isolation. The culture of North Brother island was dictated by by women. While doctors, all men, were allowed to leave the island, the nurses, all women, lived here year round. Riverside Hospital benefited from the late 19th century Golden Age of nursing, allowing women to pursue a noble profession when they did not yet wish to pursue a more culturally expected domestic life. The nurses of North Brother island were especially unique to, devoted to a life of care and freed, perhaps, from certain expectations. One example was a woman named Katharina B. Holden, a matron and supervising nurse for several years at North Brother Island. To quote from her 1915 obituary quote, Ms. Holden performed the duties of physician, nurse, matron and undertaker when no ordained priest or minister could go to the bedside of dying patients. And she prayed with them and for them. She worked through every episode of contagious disease which swept through the city from 1880 to 1909. She herself lived isolated on North Brother island in a private cottage and died here of tuberculosis at age 50. On North Brother island, children could play with toys donated by charitable organizations, while sheep grazed nearby, maintaining the lawn. The fresh breezes were unlike anything experienced in the city. The hospital grounds sometimes resembled a campground, with patients enjoying the unencumbered sunlight. Outside the island, things changed that were barely perceptible to the patients. In 1898, with the consolidation of New York, the mainland on either side of North Brother island became boroughs of New York City, Queens and the Bronx. And then came the events of the morning of June 15, 1904. They first would have seen the smoke, the awful black smoke belching into the sky about two miles south from North Brother island, in the watery corridor between Queens and Randall's Island. Attendants and nurses were soon on the lawn for a moment forgetting their duties as they saw a ship on fire headed in their direction. As the boat approached, the screams of passengers grew louder. The flames became visible from shore, the terrible sound of splashing as adults and children jumped or hurled into the water. Convalescing patients ashore could see the crackling of the fire, could hear the cracking of the ship's hull. By the time the ship ran aground on the island's northern side near the lighthouse, tugboats and ferries had arrived to rescue the hundreds of people in the water. Without fear, many nurses, hospital workers, and even patients leapt into the water to rescue survivors. Some may have even noticed the name of the ship's burning hull, the General Slocum. This excursion steamboat had departed its 3rd street pier that morning, loaded with passengers, mostly women and children from the German neighborhood of the Lower east side, headed for a day trip on the north shore of Long Island. But as the overcrowded steamship entered the hell Gate, a fire started in the lower lamp room and quickly spread. Within 10 minutes, before the captain was even informed, the blaze had spread through the lower levels and passengers began pushing upwards. The life preservers were in poor condition and many disintegrated into dust. In panicked passengers hands the life jackets were useless and those who wore them drowned. Perhaps the residents of North Brother island wondered why nobody had used the ship's lifeboats. It was later revealed the boats were wired to the ship and unable to be freed, the captain had purposefully beached the ship onto North Brother island in order to give the passengers a chance to escape. And there were many stories of heroism that day. A 17 year old patient named Mary McCann swam to the Slocum's rudder and rescued a woman clinging for dear life. She then went in again rescuing four other people. A hospital food worker named Pauline Pates, who was once employed as a lifesaver at Asbury park, saved five children that day. She reportedly shouted to panicked parents aboard the ship to throw their children overboard to be rescued. Two babies were rescued and resuscitated thanks to North Brothers telephone operator Lulu McGibbon. And a nurse named Nellie O' Donnell saved 10 children despite the fact that Nellie did not know how to swim. These feats of extraordinary bravery continued even as the burning husk of the boat dislodged from the shore. To quote from author Edward T. O', Donnell, it was a scene of absolute chaos, with victims flailing in the water and rescuers working furiously to grab as many people as possible before the time went out. There were simply too many people in the water to save. Each trip into the water brought moments of awful choices. Whom to grab, whom to leave behind. Soon there were no more survivors to save and the hospital staff turned to reviving the unconscious and then to treat those who were burned. Eventually, the flaming husk of the General Slocum broke free from the shore and and drifted east one mile before sinking off the coast. 1,021 people died that day, the worst disaster in the history of New York City before September 11, 2001. But that number would have been far greater but for the bravery of the women and men, the nurses, the doctors and patients of North Brother Island. Much has been written about the trauma experienced by the survivors of the General Slocum disaster. It decimated the German population of the Lower east side, but not so much the trauma experienced by the rescuers. In 1905, the nursing staff of Riverside received a visit and a special commendation from German Empress Augusta Victoria and many from that day, including Lulu McGibbon, were key witnesses called by a federal grand jury investigating the tragedy. Some writers suggested building a memorial to the victims of the General Slocum out on North Brother island, but this never came to pass. In July of the following year, another excursion ship named the Sirius, filled with a thousand passengers, ran aground on North Brother island at almost the same area of shoreline as the Slocum. Although thankfully no injuries were reported, the incident must have triggered some very serious post traumatic stress among Riverside staff. The start of the 20th century brought new patient pavilions, more staff housing, and even an expansion of the island itself through landfill. But North Brother island was about to make another sensational appearance on America's front pages. For in May of 1907 a ferry arrived bringing a very contentious new patient, one who had given sanitary officials quite a Chase, a 37 year old Irish immigrant named Mary Mallon, although to most New Yorkers she would become known as the notorious Typhoid Mary. The rest of the story after this Price Tracking by Expedia you were made to use your do not disturb mode. We were made to track flight prices to out of office Expedia made to travel available as a member benefit and.
- [27:14]
Narrator
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- [27:44]
Tom Meyers
It was said that Mary Mallon grew very, very tired of the Typhoid Mary story, a story in which she had become the unwitting villain. For years, Mallon had worked as a cook for several New York families. In her wake, members of those families became seriously ill, culminating in an incident at a Park Avenue home where a young girl became sick and died of typhoid fever. An investigator named George Soper had tracked Mallon's movements throughout the city and eventually confronted her. Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, spreading it through the food she prepared for the unsuspecting families. She was swiftly arrested and forced to provide stool samples that positively concluded that Mallon was a carrier of Salmonella typhi. Yet she herself was not sick. That March, she was removed to North Brother island despite her seeming health. And it was during this time when her name appeared in medical journals. Nicknamed Typhoid Mary, Mallon would initially spend about three years on North Brother island, battling for her freedom in court. In February of 1910, she would at last be released, provided that she would promise to never work again as a cook. However, in 1915, she was caught on the staff of Sloan Maternity Hospital, violating that promise after spreading typhoid fever to 25 people there. Mallon was again returned to north brother Island on March 27, 1915, and this time she would never leave. By this point, the prominent illness being treated on North Brother island was not smallpox, but tuberculosis, sometimes called the white plague or consumption. This would fundamentally change the focus of treatment at North Brother Island. But it also meant that Mallon then was kept away from the general patient population and spent her years in a small bungalow, isolated but for the company of a dog. One misconception about Mary Mallon is that she created her own predicament, that she was somehow reckless with her condition or that she was unusually dirty. She was told she could eventually leave the island, in fact, if she just got her gallbladder removed, which she refused, surgery being a bit more dangerous back then. But it was only her notoriety which made her unique. In fact, there were other typhoid carriers. Mary had even met one at Riverside, a German born confectioner named Frederick Morsh, who operated an ice cream shop where he was known to have infected as many as 60 people with typhoid. Marsh spent years living on North Brother island in a similar isolation as Mary's in, yet he was allowed to come and go. In fact, by the late 1930s, over 300 asymptomatic carriers of typhoid were known to live in New York alone. But carriers were treated differently, and factors determining this included social status and then who was deemed trustworthy. Mary, it seems, was not. Another misconception about Mary was that she was antisocial and eternally bitter. The attention definitely bothered her. She once said, I have been in fact a peep show for everybody. Even the interns had to come and see me and ask about the facts already known to the whole wide world. But in her second and permanent stay on North Brother island, she was given a unique freedom to walk around wherever she liked. She made close friendships on the island, including with a nurse named Adelaide Offspring who brought her mail from curious folks from all over the world. She made bead necklaces for patients and even baked cakes for employees. Mallon Then became a domestic worker at the hospital and in her later years worked in the laboratory. She understood North Brother island as no other. Its most notorious patient, its permanent resident who sometimes saw the nurse's perspective. She read Charles Dickens and the New York Times. By the late 1920s, she was even allowed little trips into New York. At this point, there was no other life for her but the one on north brother Island. In 1932, she suffered a stroke and was then confined inside the hospital. She died on November 11, 1938. She willed all of her savings, all the money that she had made with working at the hospital laboratory, willed them to her friend Adelaide offspring who had returned to the hospital to care for Mary in her final moments. By the 1920s, major changes would arrive to make Riverside Hospital obsolete. US immigration quotas in the 1920s eased the mass waves of immigration. And the successes of the Progressive era made urban life healthier for the working class. Important health and scientific advancements brought on by World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic introduced more effective means of combating diseases. And the world immediately around North Brother island changed as well. In 1932, its neighbor Rikers island became a city jail. Now, for decades, determined patients on North Brother island attempted to break free and swim to shore. Most of them were caught. Now escaped convicts from Rikers island were escaping to North Brother Island. The most famous incident in 1935 was a man named Walter Zell at Rikers for petty larceny, who escaped the facility via a coal chute to jumped into the river and swam to North Brother island, where he was apprehended by the lighthouse keeper. With so many diseases treated more efficiently elsewhere, the city decided to strictly devote Riverside Hospital to the care of tuberculosis patients. In 1941, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia laid the cornerstone here for a new art modern style hospital and declared that tuberculosis would be a thing of the past. And in 25 years, that hospital is the largest structure on North Brother island today, and it's one of the newest. But it was never used for its intended purpose. In fact, the entire campus was abandoned, Its isolation seen now as an encumbrance. And health care workers were needed elsewhere during the years of World War II. But a surprising new purpose for the abandoned medical facility came in the years for following the war as a home for returning GI veterans. From 1946 to 1951, these buildings, once filled with sickness, became a home for almost 1500 people, veterans and their families and college students from Fordham and Columbia University who took the ferry into the City every day for work or school. It was certainly an unusual life. Little island suburbia. The old wards were renovated into apartments, but the ghosts of its prior use were scattered throughout the place. Rusted machinery, dusty tools in the old morgue, and ships were still at risk of running aground here. Fortunately, there was still a lighthouse and a lighthouse keeper, but that too would modernize, replaced by an automated beacon in 1953. In 1951, North Brother took on another role as an experimental drug rehabilitation center for young people. The Riverside Hospital for juvenile drug addicts opened in July of 1952. Many considered it a major advance in the field of drug rehab. Instead, it became a wildly inefficient and chaotic experience, using isolation tactics for getting teenagers weaned off of heroin in the press, the facility played into every fear and cliche about, quote, drug fiends in the 1950s. Just some sample stories here from the New York Daily News, February 1953. Quote. Police reserves rushed to North Brother island last night when a pillow fight among young narcotics addicts undergoing the cure threatened to turn into a free for all. April 1956. Headline, City haven for teener junkies has a campus atmosphere. It seemed incredible that these sociable, noisy young people could have been transformed into sly, subhuman creatures full of guile and animal cunning. But behind the sensational coverage, it was the treatments themselves that might have been described as subhuman. Graffiti still adorns the walls of the old dormitories where addicts would be locked in their rooms for days to detox. One message scrawled says, help. I'm being held here against my will. Societal judgments about the morals of their patients clouded treatment. To quote the author, Jessica Diller Kovler. The hospital was overcrowded, financially corrupt by some accounts, and simply unsuccessful at curing patients. Prostitution and drug use were repeatedly rampant among patients, and the staff auditors found that the building had many broken windows and dilapidated, hazardous interiors, unquote. The program was finally shut down in 1963. The following year, an employee of the rehab named Don Peterson wrote a play about his experiences on North Brother Island, a play called Does a Tiger Wear a necktie? In 1969, a Broadway adaptation of this play would garner a Tony Award for one of its breakout stars, the first major acting award for a very young Al pacino. For almost 80 years, North Brother island had served New Yorkers in various ways. The waters around it were no longer as treacherous, and now passenger jetliners flew overhead. Things on North Brother island simply stopped. The lights faded, the ferries Stopped coming. By no particular planning, this place began a new phase as a growing ruin to be overtaken by nature. This was not by design. This is New York. You don't let real estate go to waste, no matter how possibly possessed or disturbed its history is. In the mid-1960s, plans briefly surfaced for an alcoholic rehab center here for, quote, Bowery derelicts. But that fell through in 1972. New York Councilmen suggested building a casino on the island and turning it into Las Vegas of the east. When no city agency expressed interest in taking over the island, the city then considered auctioning it to private owners. With each passing year, there seemed to be new proposals that never got off the ground. And all the while, the island ever so slowly began to return to its original state. From the New York Times, 1981. The island still has the husks of several old hospitals and the remains of a rotting pier jutting into the river. The underbrush is reported to be very thick, and pheasants are said to nest here and then the following year. Today, the property is a mass of spindly trees, twisted vines and overgrown weeds, interspersed with splotches of Queen Anne's lace. The ferry landing is slowly sinking. There are so many seagulls that the island looks as if it has been the scene of a massive pillow fight. In 1986, Governor Mario Cuomo announced the construction of a new 1000 cell maximum security prison on North Brother Island. The expensive project was abandoned the following year. By the 1990s, city planners had decided that the island's gradual slide into its natural state was to its advantage. In the year 2000, the city observed more than 190 birds nests on the island, mostly those of egrets and black and yellow crowned night herons. The following year, the New York Parks department was given control over the fate of North Brother island, not for a park for human visitation, but as a bird sanctuary. That year in 2001, Seth Kogel in the Times wrote, there are no plans to give any access to North Brother island, which is now largely overgrown with cat briar and other heavy vegetation that makes the site inhospitable to humans. The one thing Parks commissioner Henry Stern may do is hoist the department's maple leaf banner there. Before winter arrives, we'll raise the flag over the island and hope no birds hit it, he said. A canopy of trees now cloaks most of the ruins of North Brother Island. Trees mounted into a thin layer of soil, which has taken over old roads. Vines wrap around lampposts and explore the surfaces of hospitals and dormitories. Age, weather and the weight of nature has collapsed a few brick walls and rooftops. The only things taller than the trees are long, inactive smokestacks. A spiral staircase in the nurse's dormitory still retains a ruined elegance. Humans are not allowed on North Brother island today. Only those with compelling academic and scientific purposes may be given a permit for visitation, but almost never during the spring and summer, which is bird breeding season. Since 2008, photographer Christopher Payne has been allowed on the island to document the deteriorating buildings and changing landscape. He reprinted many of his most striking photographs in the 200414 book North Brother the Last Unknown Place in New York City. Among a dangerous setting of collapse and ramshackle structures, Payne and his team found many clues of the island's history among the beds of shrubbery and vines, old X rays, grammar school textbooks, rusted keys still on their hooks, he writes. Quote Though its appearance and use have changed over the years, its essential culture quality as a place of refuge remains intact more than anything else. Here in a city of millions, there is one small corner where there is no one. And if you can get there, the rarest of solitudes await you.
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Narrator
How hard is it to kill a planet? Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.
- [44:15]
Tom Meyers
Are we really safe? Is our water safe? You destroyed our tap.
- [44:19]
Narrator
And crimes like that, they don't just happen.
- [44:22]
Jamie
We call things accidents.
- [44:23]
Tom Meyers
There is no accident. This was 100% preventable.
- [44:28]
Narrator
They're the result of choices by people. Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime. These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet. Stories of scams, murders and coverups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
- [45:03]
Lily Chiu
Before the Internet ruled our lives, AOL brought America Online with email and Instant messenger. By 2000, AOL was so powerful it bought media giant Time Warner. This was a deal that was supposed to bring bring us into the future revolutionized media, but instead it became one of the messiest corporate disasters in history. So what went wrong? The.com crash? Culture clashes? Or something deeper? Business wars gives you a front row seat to the biggest moments in business and how they shape our world. Because when your flight perks disappear, your favorite restaurant chain goes bankrupt, or new tech threatens to reach shape everything overnight, you can bet there's a deeper story behind the headlines. Make sure to follow Business wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast. And you can binge all episodes of Business the AOL Time Warner Disaster early and ad free right now on Wondery.
- [46:02]
Tom Meyers
This podcast was inspired by a ferry ride that I took up to Soundview in the Bronx. You actually go right by forward and back, right by North Brother island and it's probably the closest you will probably ever get. But you can still see some of those beautiful ruins peeking up through the canopy of trees. And it's, it's just, it's magical to me. Obviously I just recorded a whole show about it. That's how taken I am with it. You can see, you can see the video I made and of course many fascinating images of the place by visiting our website boweryboyshistory.com in addition, follow us on the social medias, Twitter, Instagram and on Facebook. We are grateful for those who Support us on Patreon.com you're helping us in producing the show and gathering research and being able to visit. Well, not visit North Brother island, but get pretty close. So thank you very much for your support on Patreon. If you'd like to join us on Patreon where we have a lot of bonus audio and a lot of other goodies, please head over to patreon.com boweryboyz and and we are going to have a live show sometime in the near future and if you're on Patreon, you'll be the first to hear about it. So join us there on Patreon.com BoweryBoyz thank you very much for joining me on this weird adventure. Thank you very much for listening. Have a great New York week, whether you live here or not.
- [47:45]
Jamie
Oh, what you eating?
- [47:45]
Tom Meyers
The new banana split cookie from AM pm. All freshly baked with real butter with banana, chocolate and strawberry flavors.
- [47:52]
Jamie
Wow, that sounds amazing. Can I have a bite?
- [47:54]
Tom Meyers
I'm sorry but no. But you can't split the banana split.
- [47:57]
Jamie
Not even a little.
- [47:58]
Tom Meyers
Not even a crumb.
- [47:59]
Jamie
What if.
- [48:00]
Tom Meyers
No, please mine when it's too legit to split. That's cravenience. Get a 3 pack for 99 cents with our app ampm. Too much good stuff. Plus tax where applicable. Prices and participation may vary in terms of conditions apply.