While most New Yorkers think of Governor’s Island as a concert venue, an outdoor haven, or simply a respite from endless blocks of skyscrapers and concrete, a crumbling portion of the island reveals a very different history.
Stairwells strewn with debris and walls crumbling slowly to dust, it is the island that New York forgot for 50 years. Now, in a series of extraordinarily eerie pictures, the lost world of North Brother - quarantine zone, leper colony and centre for drug addicts - has been brought back to life.
It is hard to believe that these echoing corridors and abandoned halls were home to hundreds of patients - or that a criss-cross of tree-lined avenues were once roads.
But the haunting quality of these pictures makes it easy to imagine that it was a place of indescribable misery, which one inmate compared to the notorious black hole of Calcutta.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2094823/North-Brother-Island-Eerie-pictures-abandoned-New-York-leper-colony.html#ixzz1yNqBM2D5
A women’s asylum rots on an abandoned New York island
Hart Island, which sits at the western end of New York's
Long Island Sound, boasts more than 850,000 residents - all of them
dead. The island is now used primarily as a potter's field, but in its
past it has housed a POW camp, a rehab facility, and a women's insane
asylum.Read more: http://io9.com/5917104/a-womens-asylum-rots-on-an-abandoned-new-york-island
What's more intriguing than an abandoned island with a rotting castle sitting just north of New York City? Bannerman's Island sits in the Hudson, just about 50 miles north of here, and American Heritage explains "this island fortress was once the private arsenal of the world's largest arms dealer," Frank "Francis" Bannerman.
--http://gothamist.com/2008/10/14/bannerman_island.php#photo-1
The woods in this part of Staten Island grow dense, thicketed with thorny branches and barbed plants. Emerging from them, a large brick building looms, crumbling from years of disuse. Entering through a graffiti-covered archway, you find a sizable hallway lined with dilapidated concrete cubicles. This is the abandoned Sea View Hospital, a forgotten relic of the days when mental illness lead to being locked away and forgotten.
In its heyday, Sea View Hospital doubled as a tuberculosis treatment facility, although given the lack of a proper cure, it was more hospice than hospital. When the TB vaccine came along in 1946, the clinic was shuttered, but never demolished. Now it sits in the woodlands across the street from the new and improved Sea View, developed out of the half of the original facility that was not closed down. My roommate, an avid urban explorer, took me to visit the ruins of the sanatorium.
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