north brother island

[hkboy313]

hello all,

i was wondering if anybodys been around the islands...north or south. you're able to take the water taxi and view them along with a view of the city and bird watching.

if theres information i can get from the internet, or a department here in nyc, please let me know. i thank you in advance

[ZippyTheChimp]

The island is one of the largest nesting areas in NYC for Black-Crowned Night Herons, which are becoming common around the city.

This one was at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
http://img288.imageshack.us/img288/2328/bird010ig.th.jpg (http://img288.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bird010ig.jpg)

The New York Audubon Society conducts tours in partnership with New York Water Taxi.

website: http://www.nycaudubon.org/home/

[Merry]

Wow, very interesting.

North Brother Island - Riverside Hospital

Of all the forgotten and mysterious places in the Five Boroughs of New York City, few have histories as rich and interesting as that of North Brother Island. Situated in the Hell Gate, a particularly treacherous stretch of the East River, North Brother was home to the quarantine hospital that housed Typhoid Mary, was the final destination of the General Slocum during its tragic final voyage, and was the site of an experimental drug treatment program which failed due to corruption. Riverside Hospital, the name of the facility on the island throughout its various incarnations, treated everything from smallpox and leprosy to venereal disease and heroin addiction; after the Second World War, it housed soldiers who were studying under the GI bill. The entirety of the island has been abandoned since 1963; over a dozen buildings remain, in various states of disrepair.

complete blog entry (http://kingstonlounge.blogspot.com/2011/01/north-brother-island-riverside-hospital.html)

Beautiful:

http://www.ianferencephoto.com/kingstonlounge/nbi/00.jpg

http://www.ianferencephoto.com/kingstonlounge/nbi/M1.jpg

http://www.ianferencephoto.com/kingstonlounge/nbi/D1.jpg

http://www.ianferencephoto.com/kingstonlounge/nbi/N1.jpg

http://www.ianferencephoto.com/kingstonlounge/nbi/S1.jpg

http://kingstonlounge.blogspot.com/2011/01/north-brother-island-riverside-hospital.html

[mariab]

It is beautiful; nature wants it back, although I don't like decaying buildings. Another one to add to my tour list.

[MidtownGuy]

I'd love an opportunity to photograph this place, but according to the blogger it's off limits to the public. I wonder how he was able to get access.

[Merry]

A Visit to Typhoid Mary’s Domain

By JAMES BARRON

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Photos: Ángel Franco/The New York Times

It took five minutes of wading through jungly vines. “I think we’re standing where her house used to be,” he said.

Her house. Daniel Avila did not have to say who she was: Typhoid Mary. The cook who carried a deadly disease and infected more than 50 New Yorkers in the early years of the 20th century.
Mr. Avila has made a specialty of photographing off-limits places cared for by his employer, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation — places the public cannot go. So here he was on North Brother Island, “a 20-acre knob of glacial detritus which pokes out of the East River about 2,500 feet west of Rikers Island.”

That description came from someone who never actually set foot on North Brother, the author and chef Anthony Bourdain, who published a 148-page book about Typhoid Mary (http://www.amazon.com/Typhoid-Mary-Historical-Anthony-Bourdain/dp/1582341338) in 2001. Mr. Bourdain called North Brother “a ramshackle Alcatraz” where Typhoid Mary — real name: Mary Mallon — was confined. Those who do not see her as a cold-hearted killer, someone who knew she was putting people in danger just by handling their food, would end the last sentence with a word like, say, incarcerated.

But now North Brother is an urban ruin, abandoned for more than 40 years. The city has long owned the island but has no use for it, and assigned it to the Parks Department in 2001. The public is not welcome there — the parks department warns of “large sinkholes from decaying infrastructure and tremendous overgrowth (poison ivy, vigorous vines) that make public access hazardous” — but the Internet does not seem to know that. A search yielded the kind of come-on that would tempt unsuspecting travelers: “Find Low Rates at Top Hotels! North Brother Island — Cheap.”

You cannot take a taxi there from nearby La Guardia, though. The only way to get there is by boat, unless you are a bird. North Brother is among the islands around the city that birdwatchers know as the Harbor Herons Preserve.

But even the herons and egrets have abandoned North Brother, which can happen if predators like great horned owls take up residence “and think it’s a banquet all around them,” explained Glenn Phillips, the executive director of the New York City Audubon Society. He also said the herons and egrets had tired of the vines.

Mr. Avila, who is 32, grew up a few miles away in Hillcrest, Queens, and now lives in Astoria, but said he had not known until recently that North Brother was so close by. “I could spend a week here,” Mr. Avila said. “The first time I was here, I was like, ‘Can I just bring a tent?’ ”

That brought to mind a bacteriologist quoted in Mr. Bourdain’s book who saw Mary regularly and said of North Brother: “This is heaven. It’s delightful. Otherworldly. Unlike New York City.”

It is, but Mr. Avila’s take was different. “So much negative history,” he said during the half-hour boat ride with a parks department crew packing weed cutters and vine clippers. “So much sickness and death and people being held against their will.”

That was a reference to the island’s life as the site for a quarantine hospital for patients with contagious diseases and, in the 1950s and ’60s, as a drug treatment center. Typhoid Mary was not the island’s only connection to infamy: the General Slocum disaster, the deadly explosion of a steamer in 1904, unfolded just off the island. Some parks department workers who have read their history say rescuers lined up dozens of bodies in the grass.

Once, the dock had a platform went up and down smoothly, like a drawbridge. One is tempted to guess who was president the last time it worked: Nixon? Johnson? Kennedy? Mr. Avila pulled himself up, and also his camera equipment — a bag with a Nikon and lenses, and a tripod, useful for long exposures in dim rooms. There are a lot of them here. The electricity was shut off years ago.

He led the way past a smokestack and a building that was once the morgue and into another that was a wreck of peeling plaster, with an overturned bathtub here and a rusty examining table there. Mr. Avila tested the stairs before he climbed. One flimsy tread gave way.

In an upper hallway, a tree was growing, its roots in dirt that had blown in through the broken windows.

Mr. Avila spent a couple of hours clambering through the old building. Then it was off to find Mary’s house.

Mr. Bourdain’s book said her bungalow had “a living room, kitchen and bathroom and all the conveniences of the time: gas, electric and modern plumbing.” It also quotes one of her nemeses as saying the house was “pleasantly situated on the river bank, next to the church.”

Mr. Avila said he had seen photographs of the cottage on the Internet, and he knew the next part of the story. She was confined there for several years, and then, he said, “They allowed her off on the condition that she not work in the food industry.”

“But they caught her doing that,” he said. “They brought her back.” That was in 1915, after an outbreak in a hospital where Mary had been working, under an assumed name, in the kitchen.

She lived on North Brother for the rest of her life. The bacteriologist who saw her during those years remembered their first encounter, when Mary loomed like a frightening figure “with her hair unkempt pulled back in a tight knot and a huge lab coat” that was “filthy as hell with all kinds of stuff on it.” Mary had a stroke in 1932 — the same bacteriologist found her lying on the floor of the bungalow and referred to “the stench that came out of that doorway.” Mary died in 1938.

In the weeds was the doorway to the chapel. Mr. Avila turned and took a few more steps.

“Her house — this could have been it,” he said. On the ground was a fallen truss.

“It’s sad,” Mr. Avila said, “but it’s become part of the landscape now.”

Not far away was another building — no windows, poison ivy growing up the sides. Later he cut across what was left of a handball court. The smokestack loomed ahead, and beyond it the dock. The boat was waiting.

As it churned toward Queens, he made an announcement.

“I was looking at the map,” he said. That could not have been her house, after all. He had gone to the wrong side of the chapel.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/a-visit-to-typhoid-marys-domain/