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"Enthralling; it is well worth the trip." -- New York Journal of Books
Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse." Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island's inhabitants. We also hear from the era's officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated undercover reporter Nellie Bly. And we follow the extraordinary Reverend William Glenney French as he ministers to Blackwell's residents, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Department of Correction and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man's inhumanity to his fellow man. Damnation Island shows how far we've come in caring for the least fortunate among us--and reminds us how much work still remains.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Horn (Imperfect Harmony) creates a vivid and at times horrifying portrait of Blackwell's Island (today's Roosevelt Island) in New York City's East River during the late 19th century. Using the institutions that populated the island as an organizing principle, Horn selects colorful stories of individuals confined in the asylum, workhouse, hospital, almshouse, and penitentiary. Episodes include the heroic muckraking efforts of journalists Nellie Bly and William P. Rogers in exposing the mistreatment of the confined; tragic tales of young prisoners, like teenaged pickpocket Adelaide Irving, imprisoned for relatively minor crimes and never able to fully recover from her time there; and truly nightmarish accounts of medical experimentation, including brain surgery administered under (ineffective) hypnosis rather than anesthesia. The anecdotal rather than linear narrative approach captures the drama of the island's inmates, but can make understanding the chronology challenging. Horn has created a bleak but worthwhile depiction of institutional failure, with relevance for persistent debates over the treatment of the mentally ill and incarcerated. Agent: Amy Hughes, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Somber study of a dark, little-known episode in the history of New York, when Riker's Island wasn't the only warehouse for the condemned.It makes good sense, on reading Horn's (Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others, 2013, etc.) latest, why the 2005 horror film Dark Water found so appropriate a setting on New York's Roosevelt Island. In the late 1800s, writes the author, that small chunk of land, barely 150 acres, saw four kinds of unfortunate denizens: the mad were shunted off to the island's Lunatic Asylum, the destitute to the Almshouse, the vagrant or indigent to the Workhouse, and the seriously criminal to the Penitentiary. Each offered its own version of a living hell, and despite reports by early whistleblowers, not much was done to improve the condition of the inmates. "You can have no ideawhat an immense vat of misery and crime and filth much of this great city is!" exclaimed a social reformer who worked on the island, and Horn's account paints an exacting portrait of just how true that wasand how summary the judgments against the lower class could be. Of interest to students of Foucauldian history is the author's contrast of what was then called Blackwell's Island with facilities for the well-to-do, such as the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum near Central Park, with its well-appointed libraries, plush chairs, and expensive artwork. No such amenities were to be found on Blackwell's, which saw appalling levels of disease, starvation, child mortality, and other ills. Despite such demerits, as Horn writes, the rate of escape from the island was low and the level of recidivism, particularly among younger inmates, high: "At ten the boys are thieves," noted one official, "at fifteen the girls are all prostitutes."Horn engagingly explores a history that, perhaps surprisingly, extended into the 1960s, when the renamed island became a site for mixed-income housing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The purchase of Blackwell Island by the city of New York in 1828 was an act of great optimism. Located in the East River, the long, skinny island was intended as a utopian sanctuary for public charities and correctional facilities, and great plans were made for compassionately administered institutions, including a lunatic asylum, almshouse, workhouse, low-security prison, and hospitals. Once the plans were drawn, however, penny-pinching commissioners and corrupt bureaucrats took over, erected buildings, and filled them with unfortunates. As each enclosure opened, it quickly became crowded, and inmates soon suffered from inadequate heat, light, ventilation, meals, and nursing care. Many starved, drowned in the river, died in epidemics, or were killed in their cells. Horn (Imperfect Harmony, 2013) draws on reports from the era's clergy, undercover journalists, and government reformers to tell stories of unnecessary cruelty and the public abandonment of the old, the poor, the sick, and the mentally ill in nineteenth-century America. This is an essential and heartbreaking book for readers seeking to better understand contemporary public policy.--Roche, Rick Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BLACKWELLS island housed the first and arguably the worst institutions in which the city of New York once exiled the poor, the mad, the criminal and the sick. This two-mile-long piece of land in the East River became known as "Damnation Island" to its many thousands of residents. Men, women and children languished there in conditions of almost unimaginable squalor, brutality, overcrowding, starvation, verminous infestation and neglect. In her fine new book about those horrors, "Damnation Island," Stacy Horn lucidly, and not without indignation, documents the island's bleak history, detailing the political and moral failures that sustained this hell, failures still evident today in the prison at Rikers Island. It all began in 1839 with the founding of the New York City Lunatic Asylum. Dickens visited the place three years later and remarked on its "naked ugliness and horror." In 1848, the great asylum builder Thomas Story Kirkbride spoke publicly of the "degradation and neglect" he'd observed there and condemned the leaving of inmates "to the tender mercies of thieves and prostitutes." He was referring to the fact that other institutions had arisen on the island, including a penitentiary. Almost from the beginning, these other institutions - deceptively named "retreats," "lodges" and "pavilions" - were crammed in as the need arose. Later still, other islands in the East River, like Randall's and Wards, would be pressed into service, used as dumping grounds for those the citizenry didn't care to have living among them. Horn argues that a further and more insidious evil was done by crowding these disparate populations together. This confirmed in the public mind that all those swept up in such indiscriminate mass institutionalization were equally morally defective. And, as she points out, that attitude persists to this day. As evidence, she quotes Newt Gingrich's argument in the mid-1990s that welfare programs "ruin the poor. They create a culture of poverty and a culture of violence which is destructive of this civilization." It's an idea that continues to sully our political discourse. Yet amid the horror, occasional salutary gleams of light may be glimpsed. Consider, for example, the events that occurred during the draft riots of 1863, in which over 100 New Yorkers died during violent protests against a law allowing the rich to avoid service in the military. Horn tells how the children in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan were rescued from a mob of several thousand men, women and children and escorted to safety on Blackwell's Island. None came to any harm. But while a few saintly figures are met in these pages, attempts at real reform generally came to nothing. The story of Damnation Island finally ends with Eiorello La Guardia, the mayor who saw to its destruction in 1936. With the exception of the prison on Rikers Island, almost all the hellish institutions that once cast their shadows over the East River have now been torn down - although from the LD.R. Drive the ruins of James Renwick Jr.'s smallpox hospital can still be viewed, to best effect by moonlight. Damnation Island is now, of course, Roosevelt Island, home to a community of racially diverse, mixed-income residents. As for Rikers, Horn writes that it is now recognized "as one of the worst prisons in the United States." And she tells the harrowing story of Kalief Browder, "arrested in 2010 at age 16 for stealing a backpack." He was held on Rikers for three years without trial, during which time he was beaten by both guards and inmates. Two of those years were spent in solitary confinement. His case was dismissed in 2013. "On June 6, 2015," Horn writes, "Kalief Browder, who never recovered from the trauma of his incarceration, hanged himself from his bedroom window in the Bronx_In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he supported a plan to close Rikers in 10 years." PATRICK mcgrath is the author, most recently, of a novel, "The Wardrobe Mistress."
Library Journal Review
Horn (The Restless Sleep) gives us the harrowing story of life on Blackwell's Island, located in New York City's East River. The city purchased the island in 1828. Over the next 100 years, the city government built a lunatic asylum, a prison, a hospital, a workhouse, and an almshouse. Though these institutions were intended to reform criminals and provide aid and comfort to the poor and ill, the reality was far different. Prisoners, the destitute, and the infirm were treated horribly. Corrupt politicians controlled the island's budget and staffing decisions. Insufficient funding was provided for food, lodging, and clothing, and unqualified and cruel staff mistreated the inmates. Calls for reform, including an inside account by Nellie Bly, largely went ignored. Horn bases this history on newspaper accounts, annual reports of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections, and the notes and journal entries written by the Rev. William French, the long-serving missionary for the institution. Reader Pam Ward does an excellent job presenting the story. VERDICT This at times heartbreaking audiobook is recommended to all listeners with an interest in history or prison reform. ["A dour yet deft telling of an often forgotten era of 19th-century America. Criminal justice advocates and historians as well as general readers interested in the history of the New York under-world will delight in Horn's timely and skillful offering": LJ 5/1/18 review of the Algonquin hc.]-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. ix |
| I The New York City Lunatic Asylum | |
| Opened on Blackwell's Island 1839, to Accommodate New York City's Lunatic Poor | p. 1 |
| Reverend William Glenney French: The Blackwell's Island Episcopal Missionary from 1872 to 1895 | p. 3 |
| Sister Mary Stanislaus: Committed to the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island August 3, 1872, Diagnosis: Monomania | p. 20 |
| Sister Mary Stanislaus Is Admitted into the Asylum | p. 24 |
| The Trial of Sister Mary | p. 32 |
| Suicide, Murder, and Accidental Deaths on the Rise in the Lunatic Asylum | p. 44 |
| Lunacy Investigation December 1880, Metropolitan Hotel, New York City | p. 60 |
| Nellie Bly Ten Days in a Mad-House, September 1887 | p. 78 |
| II The Workhouse | |
| A Penal Institution for People Convicted of Minor Crimes, Opened on Blackwell's Island in 1852 | p. 91 |
| New York City and the Unworthy Poor | p. 93 |
| Rev. William R. Stocking: Superintendent of the Blackwell's Island Workhouse from 1886 to 1889 | p. 108 |
| A Workhouse Exposé and Lawrence Dunphy: Superintendent of the Blackwell's Island Workhouse from 1889 to 1896 | p. 125 |
| III The Almshouse | |
| Completed in 1848, to House the Poor and Disabled of New York City | p. 133 |
| The Almshouse Complex, The End of the Line for Many | p. 135 |
| IV The Hospitals for the Poor | |
| In Operation Beginning 1832, to Serve the Sick People of New York City, and the Inmates of the Penitentiary, Workhouse, and Almshouse | p. 163 |
| Penitentiary Hospital aka Island Hospital aka Charity Hospital aka City Hospital | p. 165 |
| V The Penitentiary | |
| Completed in 1832, for People Convicted of More Serious Crimes, and with Sentences Generally from three to six months to two years, although sometimes more | p. 187 |
| Adelaide Irving: Sentenced to the Penitentiary December 6, 1862 | p. 189 |
| William H. Ramscar: The Old Gentlemen's Unsectarian Home, Sentenced to the Penitentiary December 23, 1889 | p. 203 |
| Reverend Edward Cowley: The Shepherd's Fold, Sentenced to the Penitentiary February 20, 1880 | p. 216 |
| VI Separating Charity from Correction | |
| New York City Divides the Department in Two in 1895 | p. 237 |
| The End of a Dangerous Conglomerate | p. 239 |
| Epilogue | |
| Blackwell's Island after 1895 | p. 257 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 265 |
| Appendix | p. 267 |
| Source Notes | p. 269 |
| Photograph and Map Credits | p. 285 |
