Everyone left in 1963, and the city took custody of the island. A lack of management made it a looting grounds for vandals. To this day, the city has yet to figure out if and how it will let the public set foot there again.
The island tried to reinvent itself as a rehabilitation camp for troubled teens, from 1952 through 1963. But patients didn't get the help they needed when returning home after three- to five-month stays. The program was considered a failure.
The island struggled to find its purpose after a tuberculosis vaccine emerged in 1943, and soldiers found places to live on the mainland.
The structures, like this Physician's Home, built in 1926, are on the verge of collapse. They were probably once beautiful, and might have even been useful today — had they been maintained.
The island is a place few people would dare spend a night on, but it seemed more sad than spooky to me the more I explored it.
The $1.2 million facility was finished in 1943 and never treated a tuberculosis patient; instead, it housed World War II veterans.
Source: Business Insider
It is a sprawling four-story, 83,000-square-foot building that was designed to house people sick with tuberculosis, but then World War II broke out.
Few animals seem to live here, and a Parks and Recreation official said that mammals are practically nonexistent — no rats, chipmunks, mice, and the like.
After 1951 and until the island's abandonment, the building was used as a drug rehabilitation center.
The dormitory became a nursery school for veterans' families who lived on the island during the post-World World II housing crisis, from 1946 through 1951.
Rather than take the ferry each day, some hospital workers opted to live in the Nurse's Home. Bath tubs have fallen through the ceiling of the 40,000-square-foot Victorian-style mansion, which was built in 1905.
From the 1880s through 1943, the city quarantined people sick with highly contagious diseases on the island — including the infamous "Typhoid Mary" Mallon. Those who died were stored in the morgue.
Source: Business Insider
Parks and Recreation officials do not let anyone into most buildings, since they are in a dangerous state of disrepair.
One of the first buildings I saw was the morgue (right). The fractured chimney of a coal-fired boiler room (left) is also visible from miles away.
Invasive kudzu vines, which come from Asia, crawl and infiltrate many nooks and crannies of the island.
It was falling apart, like everything else on the island, but was one of the most stable structures with a functional roof — and rain clouds immediately began to threaten our day trip.
Sea levels could rise by as much as 2.5 feet in the next 35 years around New York City. If and when a large hurricane rolls through as the waters rise, the surges will swallow the island's habitats, ecology, structures, and history.
Source: Business Insider
The island's buildings used to be powered by coal, which workers loaded onto this dock. Now it's sinking, covered in kelp, and totally submerged at high tide.
In June 1904, for instance, a steamship called the General Slocum burst into flames and sank in the East River. Only 321 people survived, and the bodies of 1,021 people washed ashore for days.
Source: New York Public Library
The island was first claimed in 1614 and inhabited in 1885, and its history is checkered with death, disease, and decay.
No one is permitted to visit the island without permission along with an escort from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which manages the site as a bird sanctuary.
Pulling up to the island, we navigated around rotten dock supports. The ferry dock and its rusted derrick looked ready to collapse at any moment.
The East River was crawling with police, probably because Riker's Island Correctional Institute is less than a mile away — and they are wary of anyone visiting North Brother Island.