Damnation Island
A heroic Episcopal priest is just one of the colorful characters in “Damnation Island,” a history of what is now known as Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River but once was called Blackwell’s Island.
In the 19th century, the island was the site of a lunatic asylum, a workhouse, an almshouse, a hospital for the poor and a penitentiary.
The story of Blackwell’s Island proves the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Conceived as a shining beacon to the world, the island was purchased by the city of New York in 1828 in an attempt to relieve overcrowding at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital.
“Their idea was to move the sick, mad and punishable away from the gener- al population and into the more humane, stress-free and healthful environment of this lush, pastoral island,” Horn writes. ”The inmates would get all the benefits of modern science and a chance at a future.”
The noble experiment didn’t work out. As Horn details, the island soon descended into a dank, overcrowded, seething cesspool of humanity. To say conditions were unsanitary is an under- statement. Disease, mistreatment — and death — were rife.
Intrepid undercover reporting by Nellie Bly and William P. Rogers (from the lunatic asylum and the workhouse, respectively) on behalf of the New York World provided contemporary first-hand accounts of conditions.
Bly relayed that asylum inmates were forced to bathe, one after another, in a tub without a change of water “until the water is really thick” and were “continuously dosed with chloral to keep them quiet.” Rogers detailed how inmates of the workhouse bakery, charged with making bread for all Blackwell’s institutions, were “thoroughly infested with vermin.”
This is not a happy book — it is litany of terrible suffering, injustice and cruelty — but Horn presents a fascinating history of a neglected aspect of the past. The story is crammed with colorful characters and the events that led those characters to a place that, if not quite hell, was certainly hell-adjacent. Exhaustive in detail and meticulously researched, the book nonetheless moves along at an entertaining clip.
The Rev. William Glenney French is a rare beacon of light in this dark tale. From 1872 until 1895, French was the Episcopal missionary to Blackwell’s Is- land, visiting every institution each day except Saturday (his day off), holding church services, running errands for inmates, establishing and improving libraries in every institution and paying out of his own pocket for such supplies as warm clothes, paper and envelopes.
He lived out his calling with an intense sense of compassion and justice, advocating for the people sent to the island. Writing of the poor single women sent to the island hospital to give birth, he said they were “often more sinned against than sinning” and were “in a most pitiable condition, knowing neither where to go, nor what to do.”
His story is central to this book, making it an especially compelling read for Episcopalians. His presence on Blackwell’s Island proves there always are angels, even in the darkest of times and places.
The deplorable conditions on Blackwell’s Island continued to the very end. The penitentiary was demolished in 1936, making way for a new, improved institution — again, conceived with the best of intentions. The prison on nearby Rikers Island has turned out to be a case of history repeating itself.
As Horn writes: “Rikers is now recognized as one of the worst prisons in the United States ... After only three years, it was already so crowded, unsanitary and dangerous [that] a Bronx court declared it ‘nearly unlivable.’”
It is apparent from reading this book how far we’ve come in terms of treating the poor, the disabled, the disadvantaged and the criminal, but in a thought-provoking epilogue, Horn also forces us to confront how much work remains to do.