🇺🇸 New York · Ghost walk

Madness and medicine

Quarantine, asylums and ruins on Roosevelt Island

In the middle of the East River, between Manhattan and Queens, lies a narrow island that New York used throughout the nineteenth century for what the city wanted to hide away: the sick, the insane, the poor and the prisoners. It was then called Blackwell's Island, and here an asylum, a quarantine hospital, a prison and a poorhouse were built side by side. On this walk you ride the floating cable car over the river, walk to the octagonal tower that was the entrance to the city's first public lunatic asylum, where the reporter Nellie Bly had herself locked in to expose what was going on. You follow the island south past the chapel built for the inmates, the island's oldest farmhouse, and on to the Gothic ruin of the Smallpox Hospital, built to isolate smallpox patients. This is New York's hidden medical history, built in stone on an island the public was long forbidden to enter.

6 stops · ⏱ 120 min · 3.2 km

Self guided on your phone, walk whenever you like

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