Book Tour: Shelley Nolden /The Vines
The details:
Author Bio:
The Blurb:
Guest Post:
North Brother Island: A Little Known
Historical Gem in New York City
Guest Post by Shelley Nolden, Author
of The Vines
For millions
of New Yorkers, the East River’s North Brother Island lurks innocuously in the
backdrop of their daily lives. As they commute past, or work or live within view
of it, their minds stay on where they are going or have been, or what’s for
dinner—far more relevant concerns than the lingering evidence of death and
despair shrouded in foliage in the summer and laid bare in the winter.
For the
first decade that I worked in New York City, near Central Park and less than
five miles away from North Brother Island, I’d been one of these people. Dozens
of times I rode on planes that flew over the small spit of land before touching
down at nearby LaGuardia Airport. As I gazed out the window, the gleaming
skyscrapers of downtown and midtown Manhattan always pulled my attention to
them, and away from the desolate twenty-acre island below.
Then, during
a plane decent in February 2014, my husband, in the window seat, elbowed me in
the side and directed my attention to North Brother, its abandoned, crumbling
structures surrounded by skeletal trees. “You should write a book about that
island,” he casually said.
Intrigued, I
consulted a map on the Internet as soon as we landed and from there found a few
articles with gripping soundbites. The island certainly had a dark history; I
felt compelled to learn more about this place that had been so physically close
yet completely off my radar. Even during my initial, surface-level digging, I
couldn’t shake the notion that my husband had been right that it would make a
great setting for a novel.
The abandoned structures we’d gawked at from thousands of
feet above had once been a quarantine hospital for New York City’s poor
immigrants, who’d lived in tenements where contagions could easily spread.
Previously located on Blackwell’s Island, Riverside Hospital was relocated to
North Brother Island in 1881 to address a growing smallpox epidemic. The new
facility officially opened in 1885. Over the next two decades, an increase in
infectious disease outbreaks—smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and
typhoid fever—in New York City spurred the addition of more pavilions and tents.
By the early 1900’s, Riverside had earned a reputation as a place where
immigrants were sent to die, so to prevent families from fearing the facility
(and thus hiding their ill), the city embarked on a campaign to improve the
facility’s campus as well as its reputation.
On June 15, 1904, the small island became the site of New
York City’s greatest loss of life tragedy prior to 9/11. The PS General
Slocum steamship, chartered by St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kleindeutchland
for a picnic outing at Locust Grove, caught fire. Its captain, William Van
Schaick, ran the ship aground at North Brother’s southwestern shore. Riverside
Hospital’s staff did all they could to rescue the passengers. However, due to a
lack of lifeboats and functioning life preservers, as well as poor decision
making by the captain, over 1100 victims died that day—mostly women and
children. The overwhelming grief borne by a single community is believed to be
one of the primary reasons Kleindeutschland no longer exists within
Manhattan.
In 1907, North
Brother Island became home to its now infamous resident, Typhoid Mary. The
Department of Health gave Mary Mallon, an asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella
typhi, a choice – to have her gall bladder removed (where the bacteria were
believed to reside) or be exiled to North Brother Island. She refused the
surgery, which was dangerous and not guaranteed to work. So, the Department of
Health forced her to move into a small bungalow on the island built just for
her. In 1910, her solicitor secured her freedom, but following a typhoid fever
outbreak in 1914 at a maternity ward where she’d been illegally serving as a
cook, she was once again exiled to the island where she stayed until her death
from a stroke in 1938.
Following
World War I, Riverside Hospital, briefly served as a drug rehabilitation center
for treating returning soldiers with drug addictions.
Throughout
the 1920’s and 1930’s, Riverside Hospital remained a quarantine facility for
those afflicted with contagious diseases. However, advancements in public
health, epidemiology, and pharmaceuticals eliminated the need for a remote
isolation facility.
After
briefly operating as barracks in the later years of World War II, Riverside
once again housed soldiers (and their families) while they were studying at NYC
universities under the GI bill. During this period North Brother Island contained
a flourishing family community, complete with a grocery store, cafeteria,
library, and movie theatre.
But once the
veterans had completed their degrees, the facility sat idle until July 1952
when it was reopened as an experimental rehabilitation treatment center for
heroin-addicted juveniles. Latino American poet Frank Lima was one of the
program’s only success stories.
Following
the program’s termination in 1963, Riverside was shuttered, with all electricity,
phone, and ferry service to the island discontinued.
Throughout
the decades that followed, New York City considered many proposed uses for the
space, including a “center for derelicts,” maximum security prison, landfill,
homeless shelter, and quarantine facility for AIDS patients. As the years
passed, a forest slowly took hold. Seemingly hellbent on returning the land to
its natural state, the indigenous and invasive species have been uprooting and
tearing apart the manmade structures.
In 1987, The
New York City Audubon Society and the NYC Department of Environmental
Conservation determined that the island had become heavily populated by several
species of colonial wading birds. In 2001, the New York City Department of
Recreation acquired the island and designated it a “Forever Wild” resource with
no public access.
Prior to the
pandemic, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation was allowing
limited access through permit applications. However, at the time of this
writing, that program remains suspended due to COVID-19.
As I continued my research into the fascinating, yet dark, past of North Brother Island, I marveled at how right my husband had been. This was an island that deserved to have its story told. And so I began to plot the epic saga that became The Vines.
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