Lunatics Radio Hour
The history of horror and the horror of history.
Lunatics Radio Hour
Episode 139 - The Dark History of New York City
Abby sits down with our friend Alan from A Storied Native, to talk about the dark history of New York City. We discuss Roosevelt Island, the New York Lunatics Asylum and Nellie Bly, the lost estates of Astoria, Queens and North Brother Island.
Follow Alan @A_Storied_Native on Instagram.
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Hello everyone, Welcome to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. I'm Abby Branker sitting here today with a different Alan. Hi, Alan, hey, how are you? Thanks so much for being here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a pleasure.
Speaker 1:So this is Alan from Asteroid Native on Instagram. I should let you sort of define yourself, but in my experience Alan is one of the smartest New York City historians and just an encyclopedia of information. And so we met through Instagram and have talked quite a bit about New York City history and we thought it would be great to kind of sit down together and do that here.
Speaker 2:Where shall I begin? Oh, I was born and raised in Astoria, queens. I lived there all my life. When I was about like seven or eight years old, my dad came home and he said hey, listen, there's this book. I found it's like oh, what is it?
Speaker 2:it's a, a picture book on the history of long island city. Really it was like, yeah, there's like a story is in there, long island city's in there, and that was like that spark that got me really into not only just a story history but like new york city history. Yeah, because as a kid you know, in school they don't teach you nothing. They just say, yeah, the American Revolution happened, let's go straight into the Civil War.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Everything in between is pointless. Cool Me, I'm like they never teach me about how the city transformed Right. Fourth grade came around, though, and this is the one time where I remember we were talking extensively about New York City's history, and it started off with, like how we were not fiboros, we were just a little sliver of land at the tip of Manhattan, and that was always like that until about 1820s, when they started moving up. Even then, it was just Manhattan. It wasn't until 1900 that everything around was kind of absorbed into New York, and then my big thing was what was life like before anyone was a part of New York? And then my big thing was what was life like before anyone was a part of New York?
Speaker 2:You know, these weren't just like boroughs or counties, these were like independent hamlets, towns. Long Island City was its own city, basically, and it was a collection of all these towns, so that's that's why I was like I really love to get into this, and it got into this weird little thing, why I was like I really love to get into this and I got into this weird little thing where I was looking up all these maps that I found on the web. You know, library of Congress had all these digitized maps and then I looked up and I realized wait a second.
Speaker 2:You know, there were mansions here. There were a lot of mansions. There were a lot of like communities that now no longer exist. So parts of Astoria were centered on specific spots and now those specific spots they were industrialized so, like all those houses, they no longer exist. But I was so curious, what was there? And it went on to this rabbit hole ever since then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so interesting. I can't wait. So we're going to get into sort of three specific topics today that we both have a shared love for, which is going to be really, really fun. But before we get into all the history stuff, we ask every guest this, so I apologize for the cringy questions, but have you ever had a paranormal or sort of just like unexplained experience?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Tell us. Oh, my God.
Speaker 2:Yes, okay, great. Going back to my backstory, I'm from an immigrant family, my mom's Dominican, dad's Ecuadorian, in a Latino household. It's very, very much intertwined with local legend, local lore of your respective countries. When I was a kid, I always we lived in a house in Astoria and you know it was an old house from the 40s, and I always said, man, is this house haunted? Because I don't know. I always get the wrong feeling, but you know, as a kid you never noticed things yeah until they were way older.
Speaker 2:When I was a kid, I saw on multiple occasions a woman in white in my parents bedroom and I always mistake. I always mistook her for my sister because I always saw her from behind. She had long hair, my sister had long hair. But then I realized, wait a second, my sister's in the other room. I was walking by For a glimpse. I saw someone in the bedroom and then I went back to another back room. Then I saw my sister in the back room. I was like wait, what are you doing here? I thought you were in the bedroom and she said no, I was here all the time doing homework. I go back into the bedroom. There's nobody there. It scared me ever since. Yeah, freakiest of things.
Speaker 2:I think the weirdest encounter I've ever had was when I was about eight years old. We're all awake. It was a family movie night. We were in my parents bedroom. We're, I think, we're watching national treasure. We're watching national treasure and it's like the ending part where, like, nick cage finds like the big room of treasures. And then I look over to my left and I look you know, the lights were mostly off in the house. But I look over to my left and I see what looks like a black figure, like completely shrouded in black, but it was crawling oh my god on the hallway.
Speaker 2:I didn't say anything, I just looked at it. I continue watching the movie, but it's been on my mind ever since, till one day my mom told me a similar story about when she was in. When my sister was younger, she woke up one night out of nowhere and what may have been sleep paralysis. She remembers like she woke up and she was like looking at the time. My dad wasn't home, he worked late at night at, he worked at a hotel and he she saw a black figure crawling with his big hat crawling really weirdly. And she remembers she started like screaming this prayer and it started running out of the room. Oh my God. And for a while we're thinking what was that? So I didn't say anything until she told me that story. When I told her the story, she's like I saw the same thing too and she said really, I thought this was sleep paralysis. No, I saw the same thing as a kid. I was eight years old and I saw it crawling. And oh god. Then we realized yeah, this house is not haunted is an understatement.
Speaker 2:There's something really weird going on here yeah in the final years that I was living there I saw a lot more things I saw I had, like this big poster of the beatles yeah and one night I wake up and I just hear it like literally violently shaking, and then just like flew out. I'm like, oh god, scared, scared me out of nowhere. Another time I was out gaming to like 4 am. Yeah, around like 1 or2 am. I was on the discord call. You know, everybody's just tired of sleep. I'm like, okay, I'm the only one up.
Speaker 2:I hear footsteps, heavy footsteps, walking in the hallway and I thought they were my mom's. No, it stops on my door. It twists the doorknob. I had a rosary, though, so never opened yeah, and it twists back and I hear it walking away. And then I ask her, I ask everybody, yo, who was? Who was in the house last night? My mom was like I was asleep. I didn't wake up yeah my sister was with her boyfriend. My dad didn't get home to like much later because I think he was working overnight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh my God, you have a lot of experiences. Yeah, wow.
Speaker 2:I wish I could say hey, I'm just embellished. No, this was sadly my childhood.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that must have stuck with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I always tell people listen. You know, when a lot of people say, oh, I'm skeptical, I hey listen. Good on you, for skeptical I'm just. I just can't be skeptical because I saw way too much in the house for me to be skeptical on these spirits, on these energies, you know.
Speaker 1:Totally, totally.
Speaker 2:We have a feeling, though, that that little dwarf thing was probably like a curse, because apparently my mom had beef with uh, my uncle and we think he may have like done a curse on her oh my god the woman in white though 99.9 sure my dad found out when he bought the house that a woman died there yeah the people lived there were greek family.
Speaker 2:The mom got sick, she uh passed away. She, back in the day Mount Sinai used to be a story general. She never left the house. Obviously the kids all moved and my dad remember he had a similar story where he was in his bedroom when he first bought the house. He didn't meet my mom, so it was just him and his brothers and they would always party. Imagine this big house, it would just party all the time. He got home like around 5 am. Big house, it was just party all the time. Yeah, he got home like around 5 am and it was after a party. All of his brothers were at work at this point and he felt his covers literally get just dragged. You know, they just got dragged out and he, he like, woke up and said what was that? And he realized, oh god, I think, I think this house is haunted.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's like from a horror movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, damn, wow, what a rich history of the paranormal in your family so we also have a lot of lore from my mom's side of the family yeah my dad's side so, like in dr, we were from the country.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of voodoo being practiced, so we always hear stories about the old country. And then my dad's side. He also has like a bunch of stories, mostly of like going out in the country and there were witch doctors yeah yeah, this is going back like early 1900s.
Speaker 2:So so my a little backstory. My dad he was born in the 50s and his father had him very late in life, so his father was born in 1908. This is basically like rural ecuador you know he's going up in the mountains and he would hear stories about, like all these people and all these legends and a lot of it like involving about gold and the devil's gold being buried somewhere. Yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 1:That's so cool. I love that. That's one thing we're trying to do more of on the podcast too, is research and have people come in from different cultures to talk about their sort of like mythologies and things where they're from. So maybe we can do another episode on that someday, because we're so fascinated by that. Yeah for sure, yeah, so one other, the other kind of cringy required question what are your favorite horror films? You could just give us a few, oh, just so that all the listeners can really judge you. You know, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2:Oh man, I mean, does the Lighthouse count as a horror film?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely yeah, I love the lighthouse that's my favorite.
Speaker 2:I liked it because it was like this psychological dance between two guys who are alone. Yeah, and I get. So I watch it with my dad, and he was just laughing his ass off because you know it's filling the phone. Robert pattinson going crazy, it's wild, yeah. Ending scene, though, was what really got to me was when robert pattinson he finally goes up into the lighthouse spoiler alert if you haven't it and he starts like reaching his hand inside the light and he's like screaming and it's distorted the sound in it. You know it's distorted, it sounds insane. I think I watched it once with someone and they were just like that actually scarred me. It's like, really that scarred you. That's so funny. Second, you know I don't know if this is a horror movie. This is more of a war movie, but I count this movie more as horror. It's called Come and See.
Speaker 1:I've never seen it.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a Russian movie. It's very, very, not violent in the gory physical sense, but in the psychological sense, and that's what I'm attracted to. I like watching movies about that psychological storyline. It's about a young boy who becomes a partisan. He's like 14 years old, and this is during the invasion of the Soviet Union, so this is centered in Belarus, back when it was just part of the Soviet Union, and at that time, when the Nazis invaded, they started burning villages left and right. And he is a young boy who wants to join the partisan, just so he can become a fighter, so he can make himself a man, this and that. When he joins, though, he quickly learns that war is way more brutal.
Speaker 2:The movie looks more like a horror film than anything there's. The climatic scene is when he he's, he's wandering and he's found by this village and they take him in, and again spoiler alert, but I'm not going to get too into it he, he goes into the village, and just as he arrives in the village, in hiding one of the older villagers, he's like oh yeah, you're my grandson. You know, don't let anyone tell you, otherwise You'll take the identity of one of my dead grandsons. Cool, the Nazis come in, they round everyone up and in this weird show of this cacophony, this cacophony of like chaos, of like chaos is how they predict it, of how they burnt these villages, how they kill these people, yeah, wow, so it's called come and see, come and see.
Speaker 1:Okay, uh, I'm gonna watch that the director.
Speaker 2:His name was elim klimov. He was um. This was the only movie he made. He based this movie on his experience as a kid during world war ii and he said I had to pull back. There were things that were way more brutal that I saw, yeah, and it got to the point where it comes to the question of like humanity going back to their animalistic instincts. He said people were animals during that war and it's savagery I would never want to wish on anyone else, but it's savagery we must know about to prevent things from happening like this again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's powerful and absolutely you know, especially given what's happening in the world.
Speaker 2:It's a good time to watch a movie like that, and you know, remind ourselves for sure and little warning if you do watch it, you will be depressed for a week. Yeah, copy copy.
Speaker 1:Next question alan. All right, we talked about this a little bit, but maybe there's there's something you want to expand on here. Yeah, history I this is something. I know this is kind of a loaded question, but I feel like it's maybe less and less rare than it was 10 years ago. But you know, for people like us who are in our twenties and thirties, I feel like it's not as common to have hobbies that are based in history. So why? Why is this like how you kind of fill your free time?
Speaker 2:I think of history as stories. It's a collection of stories and the one thing I learned. So originally I wanted to study to become a high school history teacher. I went to school for it, pandemic came, that never panned out and I just worked. I ended up working at Apple and in my spare time during the pandemic I was like listen, I still love telling stories. History is just that telling stories and the history of all these people, and they're all interesting. You know, I love it because it's a window of a different era.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's partly listening to all these stories of these people doing these different things, be it just founding a village or going into the Arctic and disappearing or survival. You know, mostly most of it's just survival of people, you know. So I like history because it's a way to tell a story and I love telling stories, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just that, again, these were like people who may have lived in different times, but they were not all that different from us. So at least going out and realizing those similarities to us, it helps a bunch for people to, yeah, go ahead and connect, you know yeah, and not to get too political or loaded.
Speaker 1:But I do think one thing I found and you and I have talked about this offline a little bit by being accounts that post about history and sometimes the reality of history and there's a lot of pushback. Sometimes you get right and you talk about like that this is in fact stolen land and that there's all these other things that happened, right, that before settlers and colonizers came in. But a lot of the history we're covering is post that, right, and so it's like kind of when, when there's those acknowledgements, people can get angry, but I think it's important to continue posting and telling those stories and like highlighting all the aspects of a thing, um, especially right now, right. So I also think you're great at handling that and navigating that, and I've come to you multiple times to be like what do I do with this comment? And you're like dude, no rise above that comment, you're good.
Speaker 2:We get a lot of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I always tell a lot of these people who get angry. They learn to romanticize history.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:When you're older and you start reading and you start noticing. The one thing I always try to look is I try to look through an unbiased lens, which is extremely hard. Yeah, you can never look through an unbiased lens, but I try to look through it as a two-point standpoint, and what you realize is that history is brutal as well. It's again going back to the whole stolen land comment.
Speaker 2:You know this is stolen land yeah these were people who were here before us, who survived basically what became a brutal colonization process that was nearly genocidal.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you just have to remember that people nowadays, the school system has failed them and they live in a romanticized view of what their ancestors did. So they're going to feel angry, they're going to feel all this stuff so like. I said you just got to rise above those comments and just continue selling your stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really great way to look at it. I think that's that's very true. A lot of people when they do make those comments because they're coming at the world through a different lens, you know, and all you can do is try to try to represent as much as you can. So, first up, I'm very excited because we are going to talk about the New York lunatics asylum and the history of Roosevelt Island, which is one of my favorite topics. Speaking of comments, actually, the first thing is the New York lunatics asylum, which, strangely, you suggested as one of the topics but also sort of inspired.
Speaker 1:The name of this project, you know, in in out of context, can is not like a great word to throw around lunatics. However, it's sort of meant to be an homage to people who were labeled as this right or put in these terrible situations before there was this understanding of what was happening. It actually is kind of super relevant for us and, like the story of Nellie Bly and all the stuff that happened there has inspired me since like sixth grade when I learned about it, right, and so that's why there's kind of a connection there for me, and we've also there's lots of posts actually and videos that we've done on Roosevelt Island and some of the stuff we're going to talk about, the asylum itself and what it is now. So I will link all of that in the description so you guys can have some visuals to kind of go along with it. And I'm sure Alan has lots of images on his account as well, so we'll make sure to add those.
Speaker 1:So if anyone isn't familiar with New York City geography, roosevelt Island is sort of directly between Queens and Manhattan in the East River and sort of on the, you know, northern-ish end of Manhattan. I guess it was previously known as Manning Island and Blackwell Island until about 1912. And this island has had many names which we're going to talk about them. It was also Welfare Island until 1973, when it finally was renamed to Roosevelt Island and locals kind of colloquially referred to the land as Ward Island for many years because of the number of hospitals and medical facilities that were housed on Roosevelt Island, and this is something we're actually going to talk about quite a bit in today's episode that a lot of the islands off of Manhattan became like places to quarantine people or to put hospitals, because there was, like you know, a distance from where a lot of people were living, also dating back before colonization. The Lenape people called the island Minnehannock Island.
Speaker 2:So around about 1624, 1625, the Dutch, they settled lower in Manhattan. They make a deal with the Native Americans. The funniest story is how people say, yeah, you know the Dutch, they bought Manhattan for $24. That's not true. They sold things that were about the worth of 60 guilders, hatchets, knives, etc. But the people they sold it to were not the people who owned quote-unquote Manhattan or the people who were around Manhattan. They were just a tribe from across the Hudson or I forgot the, I don't know. It was across the Brooklyn. They lived in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2:The tribe that actually owned it was another tribe. I'm bad with names so I'm not going to remember it too well and that's my fault, but the story was that this tribe that was here, they were using it for hunting grounds. They saw that they're just like hey, yo, we want to buy your land and they're like cool, how much do you want to give it for us? Here we got this cool stuff and it was like cool, all right. And the actual people were rivals with this tribe that sold it off quote unquote and they were, to say the least, they were pissed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, regardless. The dutch built the wall. Yep, they built a lot of fortifications, wall street, that was where the wall ended. Where the wall was round about 1633, there was a gentleman by the name of Wouter van Twiller. He replaced the original governor, peter Minwet.
Speaker 2:Wouter van Twiller was a very, very greedy individual. He had connections. To be honest, this was a recurring theme. A lot of these governors had connections with people who were in the East, the West Indian Company. It was the Dutch version of the East Indian Company, but anywho, they would come to these places and their sole purpose was not to colonize, it was to make business with the Native American tribes. That's not what always happened.
Speaker 2:So, vatter von Tuiler, he was corrupt. He was always trying to, you know, scam people into getting him money, and they'll never pay him back. So there was one case where he scammed a local, uh, burgemeister, and he never got the money back. So the burgemeisters went after him. So then, after that, he tried getting the burgemeister sent back to to holland, and the company found out, and they sent they sent out a report to the company, so they had him recalled, but in this time though. So they had him recalled, but in this time, though, he wanted land, so one land that he found was the little strip of land that is now known as Roadsworth Island. The Dutch called it Vartgens Island, which was a translation of Hog Island. Apparently, there were a lot of hogs on there. He bought it for himself. Not long after he bought it, he literally gets sent back to Holland to face an inquiry for his corruption. After that, though, there's another gentleman. His name was william kieft. Kieft was a very, very racist and brutal man to say the least.
Speaker 2:Kieft came in with the same intention cool, I'm gonna be in this post, I'm gonna be making some money but he hated Native Americans. There were at least three very, very bloody wars and one of the most famous casualties of that war was Anne Hutchinson. She was a dissenter from Massachusetts who came down to live in New Amsterdam because the thing was, new Amsterdam was a very tolerant colony. They accepted everyone because, again, their sole purpose was to make money.
Speaker 2:Willem Keeft there were a number of occasions where he had disputes with the local Native American tribes. There was the Peach War. There was two other wars I forget their names, but they all revolved around Native Americans who were freely using the land. The Dutch settlers, who had a much more different idea of what property was, saw that they were using their land and would kill them. Okay, so the Peach War. There was a young girl who was at a farm I think this was in Staten Island. She noticed there was a grove of peaches and she grabbed one of the peaches and the farmer saw her and shot her. Oh my god, the Native Americans were very, very angry.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because she was. I think she was a relation to one of the warriors or one of the chief's family, and they went to war with the Dutch, plain and simple. So the Native Americans, basically, were coming around New Amsterdam, the areas that were not protected, and just burning down a lot of these settlers' farms and killing them. And Hutchinson was a casualty. She had a farm up in the Bronx. I think one of her kids survived, but most of her family was killed. After that, willem Keefe he was recalled. When he was recalled, though, his ship actually got sunk during a storm and he drowned.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:I want to say that's karma.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, my God.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So going back to that, peter Stuyves, yeah, oh my God, but I'm also a huge anti-Semite.
Speaker 1:Right, it's always something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Peter Syverson, he gets control of the colony. Everyone calls him Peg Leg Pete. He's like this really hulking guy. He was in a war with the English and he had like a leg chopped off. And he comes around with his peg leg and he's always like angry and people are afraid of him. But anywho, 1664 comes, the English are at war with the dutch republic again. They come to new amsterdam basically say yo, hand over your colony or we're gonna destroy you. Peter stuyvesant's like yo, I'm gonna fight. And everyone's like are you crazy? We don't have any guns, man, we have. Nah, we ain't doing this. And peter stuyvesant was like, okay, I'm gonna surrender. When he surrenders, about two years later, you know, the colony is renamed New York. It's English. Now Varkin's Island is taken over, or at least it's acquired by a gentleman named Captain Manning. Manning was an English Army captain. He takes the island for himself, says, okay, cool, I'm going to take this island.
Speaker 1:It's become, it's named manning island don't you love when a man just takes something and then he's like, and it's called my name like clever, nice, nice very nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, then after that his one of his daughters marries off to another settler family called the blackwells the son-in-law his name is robert blackwell. He basically inherits the island and it's renamed Blackwell's Island For most of the 18th and 19th century. It is called Blackwell's Island because of the family. The family had a lot of holdings throughout what is now Western Queens. They had a big mansion somewhere around what's now like Astoria Peninsula, like that area between Ravenswood and Astoria. They had a big farm there.
Speaker 1:So Roosevelt Island contains many historic buildings. Alan and I go there all the time, my Alan. It's a great place to ride bikes also because it's very contained. I actually have quite a fear of riding bikes in the city, but there's very little traffic on Roosevelt Island so it's like nice to kind of bring your bike over. But there is Blackwell Lighthouse, there's the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital and there is what once was the New York Lunatics Asylum. Now the Smallpox Hospital is still sort of standing in ruins. You know, I think that's fair. The lighthouse is great, but the asylum actually has been turned into apartment buildings. But we'll talk about that more. The cool thing about the architecture of the asylum is that the main sort of central entrance was built in the shape of an octagon, so a lot of people also called it the octagon, and I think that's what the apartment buildings are called now. It was first built in 1834, and it was designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, and Davis was known for his work on sort of beautiful mansions and wealthy homes.
Speaker 1:The hospital received national attention after Nellie Bly tricked the faculty into admitting her, after she feigned insanity and was involuntarily committed, which is quite the performance. But after being committed. Bly was kept with the other female wards in the hospital and she was a journalist and her intention was to sort of be there undercover and to expose the harsh conditions of being in an asylum at this time in New York City, which she certainly did. She documented her experiences and published them, first in a series of articles for the New York World and later in a book called Ten Days in a Madhouse, which came out in 1887. Her journalism exposed harsh and inhumane conditions and inspired reform, which we love to see.
Speaker 1:I'm going to quote from Bly directly because I think it's impactful Quote. I left the insane ward with pleasure and regret. Pleasure that I was once more able to enjoy the free breath of heaven. Regret that I could not have brought with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself. End quote. Bly's book is actually really short and accessible. I've listened to the audiobook version, I think for free online, but you can find like PDFs of it online. But again, just kind of a warning on all this some of the language used in it is a little bit outdated, so just so you know going into it, but if you do read it, you'll notice that she refers to roosevelt island as blackwell island, which it was called during her time like I was saying, the blackwell's family, they uh own the island, a bunch of land in western queens.
Speaker 2:In 1796 they built a little mansion there that still exists, to see blackwell house. Around about 1820s there were a lot of plagues, there was a lot of hospitals that were becoming very overcrowded in in, you know, lower manhattan, and the city decided you know, why don't we just start building these hospitals somewhere else? There's a lot of rural places, there's a lot of places that are empty. They came to the Blackwell's family sometime around the 1820s and they said to them hey, listen, we'd like to have a proposition, we'd like to buy this island. And the Blackwell's were like cool, how much? How about $32,000? That sound good. Yeah, cool, how much? How about 32 000? That sound good? Yeah, cool. All right, here's the island, we don't need it. By 1828 they buy it. The city starts making plans to build a lot of hospitals there.
Speaker 2:Now, originally there was supposed to be a mental asylum that was built in ravenswood. Now I forgot what the situation was, but there was an issue with the local people in Ravenswood and in Astoria as well. They did not want a mental asylum for fear that if inmates were escaping they would wreak havoc in the communities. So out of anger, when they were starting the construction of this one mental asylum, a lot of the local people came in. A mob basically came in and they burned down the unfinished asylum. So the city basically kind of backed off from that and said, okay, that's more trouble than it's worth, let's just buy this island. They bought the island. Then they started building the new york lunatic asylum. So the lunatic asylum is designed by alexander jackson davis, who also designed some of the mansions in uh around new york city. He builds this lunatic asylum. It was supposed to be a lot bigger. The current section of it was supposed to be a wing and the main section of it was supposed to encompass all around like a rectangular form. But it had all these wings and it had a courtyard in the center. But because of funds all they had built was what is now the octagon and just two side wings.
Speaker 2:The hospital was opened. The really insane thing about this place was the city put no money into this. So the doctors were working with very little funds, the faculty, the nurses and the handlers they were all recruited from the nearby workhouses. So on top of the hospital the island had a penitentiary, a workhouse, as well as the smallpox hospitals. That was built later in the 1850s. The workhouse mostly housed quote-unquote lazy people, people who were destitute, people who did not pay taxes or whatever they could find a reason to find to arrest poor people and put them here. They would do it, they would send him there, and the penitentiary was basically the city's prison. It was like the early version of Rikers. The hospital needed handlers, so the doctors would recruit prisoners who weren't that violent or who did not have that lengthy charges and they would use them as handlers and the nurses. However, these people would physically abuse the mental patients because they had no training. They were just criminals.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of stuff going on in there. People were not treated well. At one point the hospital had 1,700 inmates, which was twice the capacity it was built to hold for Wow. So people were being crammed into these cells and these rooms and at some point there were just people in the hallways. It was a mess. Charles Dickens visited it and he said this is appalling, because this is such a beautiful building. You would think that here in the United States they would be building this beautiful building to advance the welfare of mental patients. But no, it was a madhouse that was wrought with abuses and a lot of trauma, and he was appalled, to say the least.
Speaker 2:30 years later, nellie Bly we all know Nellie Bly, investigative journalist of the time she decides I'm going to go in there because there's a lot of stuff going on in there and she basically stands in a mirror all throughout the night to make all these weird faces, to make her seem like she's mentally insane. But then she realized I think it's a lot easier for me to go in because I'm noticing. Anyone can be called crazy, and that was that was the issue at the time. Right, if you were someone who was, you know, homosexual, or if you were someone who the family just found weird or did not want, they would just send you and admit you there and leave you there, and you couldn't leave. So perfectly sane people were sent to these asylums. So she said okay, I'm going to go there, I'm going to try to find what's going on in here.
Speaker 2:She goes there, she admits herself. They take her like, yeah, cool, you look insane enough, let's take you down the river. They take her to the east river. There's a back. Then it was all fairies, so they would put them in the fairies and then the island was um. Basically they had an armed guard. Yeah, mostly because of the penitentiary, but also because of the inmates in the asylum as well. If they tried to escape regardless, she gets sent over there and she's noticing all these women who some clearly were suffering from mental illness, while others were clearly of sound mind, but they were suffering from mental illness from all the trauma they were facing there, all the abuse they were facing there. So you could be perfectly normal and admitted there, but you would go insane, as is, because you're basically in this really horrible place with these really uncaring, unsympathetic people yeah when she got out, she wrote her story.
Speaker 2:The state went into invest, they went into an inquiry and they took the asylum away from the city and they gave it to the state. It was moved up up the river in ward's island, randall's ward's island. There was another hospital there, that same that that had similar issues and there was an inquiry as well, and all that stuff was basically taken away and and put into state control. Not to say that stuff got better, but but it was better than having criminals as their nurses and handlers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They actually had a trained staff. A nurse's school was set up around the 1890s. Then there was a lot more hospitals, the penitentiary, though. Let's actually talk about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Around the 1830s a penitentiary was built. It was a house. Basically the criminals of New York City, because the jails downtown weren't becoming filled, they sent them up there. A lot of abuses were happening there as well. However, it got really bad in the 20th century because this was around the time of LaGuardia, when he was mayor. So it was like 1930s, 1920s, 1930s. There was actually a cocaine ring between the prisoners and the guards and the local gangs who were distributing it.
Speaker 2:If you know your crime history, the mafia did not like drugs, but people like drugs and there's a lot of money to be made. Now. This is the old school mafia, new school mafia. It's like the 70s 80s. They were all into the drugs, but like the old guys, the mustachioed peets, they did not like drugs. They said if you sell drugs, it'll come back to the community. Meanwhile they had like speakeasy, so they were making enough money off of like um prohibition, uh, you know the alcohol.
Speaker 2:Yeah, la guardia found out that there were a lot of stuff being committed there and in the uh, the prison, there were race riots, there were again cocaine rings. There were a lot of smuggling rings. So in the 30s he sent out an investigative team. They basically just raided the prison. They arrested everybody, guards, prisoners, everyone and they sent them up to the state prisons and they had the prison shut down in, I believe, 1936. They had it demolished. Then it became the kohler goldwater hospital. Then the kohler goldwater hospital was destroyed and now it's that cornell tech yeah campus one section wild, yeah wild.
Speaker 2:So much history in one building yeah, so down south, all the way at the edge, there's the smallpox hospital, originally the city. When we had plagues, we had epidemics. Smallpox was a big killer, and when that happened, there was a need to, and when that happened, there was a need to quarantine. So when we acquired Roosevelt Island, we had this hospital built to bring in patients. Not only was the hospital built to bring in patients, but they were also sent out. They also had, like these big tents. Unfortunately, though, a lot of these patients would die here, and when they would die, they would either.
Speaker 1:I don't know if there was a mass grave being dug here, but I also know that they were also dumping the bodies in the harbor, but they say that at least 400 patients are buried in Roosevelt Island from the smallpox epidemics, mass graves all over New York City and I think it's something people don't aren't really as aware of and like the cemeteries are great and all of that is like fun and cool to visit and think about the history like visually. But there's like a staples in Brooklyn where there's 300 people under it Like there's. It really is. You know, because if you think about how fast cities are expanding and when you have epidemics and other less, even like you know, more brutal reasons, epidemics and other less even like you know more brutal reasons.
Speaker 2:It happens a lot, so it's very common in big cities mask like the biggest one that we all know is, uh, washington square park.
Speaker 2:There's a big mass grave down there at least 10 000 people, if not more, buried there, and it was because people who did not have money to have like own a plot in a cemetery, they were basically put in a common grave. Yeah, next at a smallpox hospital was an even bigger hospital called city hospital and then it was renamed charity hospital and it was originally supposed to be the hospital that helped the um, the inmates who were sick or infirm or injured. They would go to this hospital would be basically a prison hospital. Then after that, when all the stuff happened with the penitentiary, it was renamed and reformed as a nurse's school and a city hospital for the people who wanted to come by here. The nurse's school was established and the smallpox hospital ceased being used as a quarantine, because at that point quarantining wasn't that a necessity, because now there was advances in modern science yeah they moved the facility, though for quarantining people to north brother island, and we'll get that that later.
Speaker 2:There was a nurse's school there, and city hospital had all this stuff. If you go to the rosewood island you'll still see the ruins of the smallpox hospital, but you'll notice there's like pieces of architectural stuff, like stones and columns. All this was from the old city hospital building that used to stand. It was torn down around the 90s, even though it was landmarked because structurally it was gone. There's another part too. In that area there's a laboratory that's actually well-preserved and it's called the Strenker Memorial Laboratories, built in 1895.
Speaker 2:As late as like the 60s, people used to sneak over there. My dad was one of them. He used to sneak into the facilities over there and used to get high off of his rockers. They remembered that they used to go into the laboratory or into parts of the hospital and they would still find jars of human limbs Wow, and they would use them for research, of course, but it's pretty daunting if you're like exploring these places and all you find are like preserved human limbs.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:My dad came there in the 70s. By this point it was all abandoned. All these hospitals started getting closed off in the 50s and they were moving them out to Queens, brooklyn, manhattan. So I know the operations from like City Hospital. They moved them to Elmhurst, which is now Elmhurst Hospital, as well as the operation in the Nurses School in what is now the Octagon that used to be the Wimpsick Asylum. They moved them out to Elmhurst as well. Jamaica Hospital All those places were being built. All the operations were being moved away from Roosevelt Island. In the 60s and 70s this island was essentially abandoned. There was a bridge already being built in the 50s. It was the Roosevelt Island Bridge. You can access it through 36th Avenue. That's how you get to the island by car. Back in the day, if you wanted to get to the island, it was either by ferry or when they built the Queensborough Bridge, you could actually take your car and go to an elevator.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:There was a building they call it the Upside Down Building. The entrance was all the way at the top floor where the Queensborough Bridge roadway is, and you would take your car or you would take the trolley and get off and you'd walk into the building and there was this big service elevator that you could fit a car under and it could bring you down into the island.
Speaker 1:No way, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. Yeah, that's wild, yeah, yeah, yeah, that feels like you know, when you like it's like Epcot, like this weird past futurism, you know. Oh my God, so cool so it was destroyed though.
Speaker 2:So, um, what's left of it is, uh, there's a big power station that was built around that time. But the 60s, though, even though, like the island was abandoned, people still could get across it, and when you got across it, you would see all these abandoned hospitals, and at this point they were like well over 100, 150 years old. There's hospitals. There was a workhouse that was still extant. There was the um octagon, which was falling in ruins.
Speaker 2:Around about the 70s, developers started going into the island. They started destroying a lot of the hospitals to build residential housing, so they can build it into a community, and because the island originally was called Blackwell's, they changed it to welfare because of the the amount of hospitals in the 70s. In 73, they decided to change it to Roosevelt Island because they said we want to get rid of the past, that this was a very, very much a a dark place. Yeah, if you notice around, like Main Street and Roosevelt Island, there's a lot of like buildings built in the late 60s 70s. You have that very brutalist look. My dad knew a kid who lived there and they used to go and hang out by the ruins, and one night he was like yo, let's go to the ruins, bring all these like people. I know it's like yeah sure, my dad goes into a city hospital in the ruins and he says, mind you, we're high, but I wasn't that high and I could have sworn. I heard footsteps like walking on the top floors and there was nobody there.
Speaker 2:Like there was no such thing as squatters. It was just abandoned ruins. There were just people who were like like them. He could have swore he heard footsteps. He could have swore he heard things were opening and closing. He could have heard, yeah, things that there were other people that probably were not people. They were probably spirits of all these patients that died there. But, yeah, insane stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I love also that you have all these family stories about it too.
Speaker 2:You know, I love that yeah yeah, yeah, my dad was here from the 70s. You know he was like 20 when he moved to New York City. He spoke very little English but he was like really much a charismatic guy. He loved making friends and that's how he got to know most of New York, because he went to the Bronx in the 70s and that was a war zone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the only reason why he survived going into the Bronx and not getting mugged or worse was he always wore this big, heavy black John Travolta leather jacket and he always had like these sunglasses and people looked at him like yo, that guy's probably like a hitman, let's not fuck with him.
Speaker 1:There you go. You wore a costume, yep.
Speaker 2:So cool. Part two about the island. If you go at the northern edge, there is a lighthouse. It's called the Roosevelt Island Lighthouse. Originally, though, it was built in the 1870s, it was called the Blackwell's Island Lighthouse. There's a story that our friend Chris actually did. In the Lunatic Asylum there was a patient, I think. He was an architect, and he had this very big fear that the British would invade New York again, and this was about 50 years after the War of 1812. So there were some fears to it. You know there was some truth to his fear, but he built this massive seawall on this fort, and I forgot what they called it, but it was this really insane structure. Like he basically just took bricks and stone and he started building this really craggly looking castle tower or whatever, and back in the day the lighthouse actually had its own island. They like filled it in a couple of decades afterwards, but to get to the fort he literally had to wade through the water and then build it, and then he had this bridge set out.
Speaker 1:Oh cool, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:I believe Harper's Ferry made an article about it. 1870s come around, they decided to build a permanent lighthouse. His little fort was demolished and the lighthouse was built using the same material that every other building in the island was built. So you'll notice so, with the smallpox hospital, the octagon and the lighthouse, they all have the same material. It's this blue stone that they mined directly from the island, and the prisoners from the penitentiary were the ones who were mining it, and then they were used as a construction yeah, yeah, so interesting the lighthouse was abandoned, I think in the 40s, because they also had a light station on astoria as well.
Speaker 2:There was another lighthouse that used to stand on what is now the um whitey ford field and now it's just like a little light. Sometime when the island was becoming a residential community they started like fixing up the lighthouse. Recently they remodeled it again and the the coppola at the top. It looks like the original coppola used to be there in the the lighthouse. There's also a memorial from the liblei at the at the edge as well, which is really nice going.
Speaker 2:Going back to the octagon, though so the octagon when it was abandoned in 57, in the inside there was this really beautiful spiral staircase. It was all wood. When it was abandoned, though, all that stuff was basically decaying and rotting and it just had to be torn down, sadly, but the exterior was still extant. They destroyed the wings, but the octagon itself was still extant. They destroyed the wings, but the exterior, the the octagon itself, was still extant. When, I believe it was 2005, there was uh plans to build a condo there. I have no idea why they would choose such a place, but they did it where the wings used to be. That's where, like, the residential units are yeah and the octagon services, the lobby.
Speaker 2:They reconstructed the mansard roof and it looks beautiful. And it's one of those things where I say I don't know why they just don't do this to new buildings. Now Add the original element of these architecture of the city. It's all just blocks and blocks of glass and all this stuff.
Speaker 1:Because it's so beautiful and it's like such an homage to the history and like everything that happened there. But it's so beautiful and it's like such an homage to the history and like everything that happened there, but it's, I mean, it's it. I do think it's a little ironic that it's like a very, like a very luxury, a built you know, apartment building now.
Speaker 1:But better that than nothing yeah and um, and you know it's providing housing and stuff for people, but it's, it's very beautiful and it's cool to be able to go to it and be like. This is what this was and we're not going to forget about it.
Speaker 2:I actually went inside of it. In the lobby there's still a spiral staircase. They kind of recreated that but it's all cast iron instead of the original wood. But there was this cool little exhibition I saw this was years ago. They had a really nice Edward Hopper he's one of my favorite artists. He made this really nice painting of Roosevelt Island when it was originally Welfare Island and it's there's a view of the octagon and there's like this little speedboat and then there's like the view of the Queensborough Bridge and then you see the octagon with all these buildings still like standing. That used to be part of the hospital complex and I saw it there and I was like enamored with it. I was like, wow, it was beautiful painting yeah but yeah, one of the things I've noticed.
Speaker 2:So online some people have talked about people who live there. When it was built, it was built into a condo, etc. People with dogs who live in that building have noticed that their dogs always act funny when they're walking by the building.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:The building, apparently, is probably haunted.
Speaker 1:I mean loaded, I'm sure, with like trauma and energy and all of the shit that happened there.
Speaker 2:A lot of that stuff you know gets attracted.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know dark energies, you know they attract a lot of like really nasty things. So people with dogs who live in that building they always say their dogs act crazy. They start barking at random things, especially when they walk by the octagon or when they're passing through the building.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, and I still like maintain that Roosevelt Island if you're coming to New York you don't know what to do. You've done all the big sort of tourist things like Roosevelt Island is certainly worth a visit and it's got so many awesome, awesome things to explore and learn about. Wow, incredible, you're such a wealth of knowledge. So next up, we are going to talk about the history of North Brother Island, which is something that I don't actually know that much about, but I know that it is a little bit spooky and there's some tragedy that's happened here, so I'm excited to get into it. It has such a rich history, such a spooky history, and also I didn't realize that North Brother Island, which is sort of off the coast of the Bronx, gave us Typhoid Mary.
Speaker 2:So North Brother Island was always uninhabited for most of its history. It was not inhabited until well into the 19th century. It was originally owned by, I believe, one of the Rikers families, apparently, because the currents around it were so strong nobody could settle it properly. It wasn't until the 1880s when the city bought the island. At that point you know steamships and waterway travel was a lot more sophisticated than just sailing a little sloop onto the island. So they said, yeah, we need to build this island. Cool, they bought it to use it as a hospital. One of the first hospitals built there was Riverside Hospital. That was around 1887. Previously, though, the first building built there was the North Brother Island Lighthouse in 1869. Because, again, there's currents, there's an island there, they needed a navigational light to make sure ships aren't running aground.
Speaker 2:1887 comes they built a hospital there. They started building more. 1890s they started building the hospital basically was covering three major diseases Pneumonia, typhoid and, I believe, smallpox. Now smallpox wasn't that big of a deal, but I mean subject. Now, smallpox wasn't that big of a deal, but I mean subjectively. It wasn't that big of a deal as the other ones were, but it was still being used to treat smallpox. Originally operations were on the smallpox hospital, roswell island, back then blackwell island. They moved it here around 1900, a woman named m Mallon.
Speaker 2:She is an Irish servant. She's middle-aged, she's not married. She is working in various homes. The interesting thing about Mary Mallon is she's a carrier of the typhoid germ. Now, that doesn't mean she has it. She has no symptoms of it but she's infecting everyone else around her.
Speaker 2:She's a cook. She's cooking for these, you know, upper middle class, wealthy families in Manhattan and out of nowhere. All these families get sick. Why are these families getting sick? Now, unfortunately for the time it's going to gross out a lot of people. People did not know how to wash their hands. People did not wash their hands, period. People did not know about sanitizing their hands before preparing meals, so people would basically make meals with their dirty hands. She's a carrier of typhoid, so that makes it 10 times worse. She's cooking for these families. They're getting sick. When they get sick, she basically leaves, or she gets fired or whatever. She goes to another job. Hey, I'm a cook, cool, we need a cook.
Speaker 2:Nobody knows her backstories. They say, oh, I have references, this and that, but nobody really looks into it. After a while the state starts noticing or I should say the city's, like health department starts noticing that there are people getting sick and they're dying and it's common amongst the upper middle class, and they're just like trying to find out why are they getting sick and dying? And then, finally, there was this one woman I forget her name, oh god, I forgot her name. She's working with sanitation, she's working with the health department. She's like, okay, I'm gonna find out who this is.
Speaker 2:And there's this whole team trying to find out the cause of why these people are getting sick. And then they trace it back to mary mellon and they tell her hey, have you worked in these houses? Yeah, cool, yeah, arrest her. Wait what? Yeah? So they arrest her, they conduct some tests on her in bellevue and all this, and then they're like, oh god, what? This is weird, what? She's a carrier of typhoid, but she has no symptoms. That's insane. And then they put two and two together and realized, okay, since she was a carrier, she was basically getting all these people sick yeah now.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, though, mary mellon she was an irish immigrant who's in her 40s. She's unmarried. If you're an unmarried woman in 19th century new york, or 19th century anywhere, you basically had very little means to survive. You basically had to find whatever was easy for you, and cooking was a good source of income for Mary Mallon. They told her you cannot cook. All right, you can do anything else, but you cannot cook because you're going to keep spreading this infection. Mary Mallon's like cool, I need a cooking job regardless.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So she starts applying under different names. The same thing happens again. Families are getting sick, people are dying. The city health department find, like they figure it out, oh god, it's mary mallon. Finally they tell her listen, you're a public menace, we cannot have you on these streets. You're basically infecting all these people. We're gonna send you to north brother island. And she's like no, no, no, no, no, no. She's like no, no, that's it. I'm sorry. You basically did not heed our warnings. You're gonna have to be quarantined in north brother island. She basically was sent out there like kicking and screaming. They were bringing her kicking and screaming, conducted some tests and told her you're gonna have to live here for quite a while. We have to do some research. She basically became a lifelong resident of north brother island because she was not allowed to go back into the city period. I think she died there around 1937. What's really nice, though, is that I think, after about a year or so, when they kind of concluded that she was going to be here lifelong, they built a little cottage for her. They had furniture, they had a little bookshelf. She had her own little house there, yeah, and she was basically like this really really iconic piece to the island. Like you know, this is a lifelong person who was just living here.
Speaker 2:1904 comes around. There's an excursion steamer by the name of the General Slocum. I know some of you probably know it. St Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Lower East Side in what was then called Little Germany or Klein Deutschland usually do excursions to Ian's Neck, long Island. There's a picnic ground over there and they usually around May or June.
Speaker 2:They have the parishioners get on this boat and they basically just have a picnic you know congregational picnic and everyone's bringing their families. It's mostly women and children. Some of the men come by if they can, because back in the day a lot of men really couldn't take off for this stuff If your work said hey, if you take off Sunday, don't bother coming back on Monday. So it's mostly women and children. They've been doing this for about a couple of decades, since their inception 1904, they rent out the General Slocum for use to bring the families from Lower East Side all the way down, all the way up to Long Island. The excursion's going well, the steamboat's chugging along the river when it hits Queens, a fire breaks out. The captain is warned that the fire has broken out and the first thing he says is don't bother me. The fire starts spreading around. Some of the crew decide to put it out themselves and they notice that the hoses that they had were not inspected. They were actually obsolete.
Speaker 2:They were basically just uh, when they tried using it, they basically would just tear apart right maritime law dictates that when you have certain things you know facing the elements, you have to replace them. So, like hoses, right, they had to be replaced. They were not not being replaced. Then they tell the captain again. The captain's like, okay, cool, we need to keep this boat running. His idea was he was going to run it aground so he can get everyone out instead of like having everyone jump out of the boat. But regardless, people were panicking so people started grabbing the life jackets.
Speaker 2:The scariest thing when I was a kid I was reading this this women and children were on this boat. Mostly mothers would put life jackets on their children and throw them overboard, and then they would notice the life jackets would rip apart and the children would sink. The even sadder part was these life jackets had like lead in them. Oh my god. They basically were just dragging people into the water because, for whatever reason, the court would disintegrate and, I'm guessing, the company.
Speaker 2:Through malfeasance or negligence, they would just put in lead to make it look like it's still a usable life jacket. So when the inspectors came, it was a mess. That's so tragic. When they were passing by Astoria, there was a story of this one postman who was on his bicycle on Shore Boulevard Back then it was just called Shore Road he saw the burning ship and he saw these families basically jumping into the water and drowning. He got so mad he like basically just ripped off of his clothes and started running toward the water and started going towards, tried swimming out to them and he couldn't because the currents were so strong.
Speaker 2:If he went out there he would drown, but it was something that he was so frustrated and it was agonizing to look at so a lot of people in the story were noticing the ship on fire and then they saw this agonizing scene of families just drowning in the water and people back then did not know how to swim. Swimming was mainly for sailors. If you were working in a maritime industry you knew how to swim and that was still, even then, not a lot of people knew how to swim. A lot of these women and children were basically like panicking in the water, drowning, or, if they didn't want to drown, they basically stayed on the boat and then they were burned alive because the fire was like spreading rapidly.
Speaker 2:And while this is happening, the captain his name was shank, he basically was still going on like nothing was happening. He tried getting this boat aground. Finally, at this point, the crew was ordered to abandon ship and they take the one lifeboat or I don't know how, but the crew basically abandons everyone on board and the ship is burned up to a charred remain. North brother islands nearby, a lot of the patients and the uh, the doctors and the nurses they all start forming up a rescue party, only to realize there's no survivors that are washing up on the sword there. It's mostly just charred remains.
Speaker 2:So they had to drag all these charred remains and put them on into a field and line them up so the city can come and identify them. I think there was a few hundred survivors.
Speaker 1:I think it was like 300-something right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But there was like 1,000 casualties.
Speaker 2:About 1,200 or so, something like that. But yeah, it was 1,000 casualties, 1,000 people who were killed, like a thousand casualties about like a thousand two hundred or so, something like that. But yeah, it was a thousand casualties, thousands of people who were killed. Mary mellon was one of the people who was rescuing some of the survivors, as well as bringing in the bodies washing up on shore.
Speaker 2:There's a very gruesome photo I saw when I was a kid as well. I learned this as a kid. There's a photo. There's two photos I saw. One of them was a picture of the shoreline on North Brother Island just filled with bodies washing up.
Speaker 2:Another one was of a field just filled with bodies covered in tarp and being tagged by city workers because they were going to send them out by ferry from North Brother Island back to the city morgue. The sinking was one of the worst in history at that time, up until the Titanic in 1912. It was still one of the worst in the city up until 9-11, in terms of loss of life. The captain was charged with manslaughter and he was sent to prison. Theodore Roosevelt, who was president at the time, refused to pardon him. However, the company, who were more to blame than the captain, basically got off scotch-free.
Speaker 2:The community of little Germany, Klein Deutschland, was decimated. This is a full thousand people who were killed. Fathers would come home and they would find out that their whole families were killed and some of them committed suicide. Others decided to just leave period. What was left of the german community went up north to yorkville and little germany ceased to exist. By 1910, the st mark's evangelical lutheran church remained conducting services well until the 40s. Then it became a synagogue. By then, lower east side was mainly Jewish. It's really daunting to realize how this one disaster basically wiped out a majority of the community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so tragic and again, it's like something I feel like a lot of people don't know about New York City history and it's such a huge like. I had some awareness of it, but I think mostly from Chris, to be totally honest, from Buried Secrets podcast, and I grew up kind of somewhat locally and it still was, you know, totally new information to me. So I think it's great that we're able to. Obviously it's a terrible, terrible thing, but it's important not to forget about this kind of stuff and to make sure you know it's kind of shocking that there's not huge memorials to it anywhere in New York.
Speaker 2:I think the one memorial to it is in Thompson Square Park, because I think the one memorial to it is in Thompson Square Park because it was in the heart of Little Germany.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a plaque as well by Astoria Park, but it has not been maintained, so there's like graffiti all over it now, but again, there's not that much. Yeah, riverside Hospital, all this stuff this is still going on. 1940s, the hospitals closed. In the 40s, at the end of World War II, there was a big housing shortage in America, I would say New York City specifically. Rent was skyrocketing. This was also the start of when they started doing rent controlled housing policy. So rent control, rent stabilize all that starts from that era.
Speaker 2:The island is converted into a residential housing unit for returning GIs and their families. A lot of the returning GIs and their families, a lot of the returning GIs, would go to school in the city and they would get there by ferry. In 52, the residential housing was closed. A lot of those guys are moving out to suburbs. Then the island becomes a rehab clinic for teens who are addicted to drugs. At first, you know cool. A lot of the kids who would go there were mainly Puerto Ricans, mainly lower class white kids, as well as black kids from the Bronx, harlem, etc. Around about late 50s. There's a report that comes out there was a massive riot that started from a birthday party.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, a birthday party was being celebrated with one of the patients In comes in that the city figures out that there was this riot coming out. They have to bring in a PD. Then they find out that there were a lot of conditions. There were a lot of like. The conditions in the island was not great. The kids were being abused, some of the nurses were dealing with drugs, some of the doctors were dealing with drugs, some of the kids were being bullied relentlessly by the staff and they were using a lot of favoritism amongst the patients until the city decided okay, enough is enough, there's a lot of corruption going on here. 1962, 1963, the city has orders to close it. The island is officially abandoned by 64. And today the island is fully abandoned. It is illegal to actually get on the island because it was designated as a federally protected wildlife preserve for egrets.
Speaker 1:Okay, and finally, we are going to talk about the lost estates and mansions of Astoria, queens.
Speaker 2:During the American War of Independence, though, the Black Wolves were fervently patriot and because of this, their house was confiscated by the British, and there's a door that still exists. The house was confiscated by the british, and there's a door that still exists. The house was sadly destroyed in the 1900s, but the door was saved, because the door has a, an arrow notch, oh, to mark them as traitors to the crown. The house was used by the british army. Um, it was. I think it was used as an officer's headquarters, yeah, at least for the general staff who was stationed in queens. And then the door. We're going back many decades later, when the house was demolished. The door was put into storage, and I believe it is in the possession of the Greater Historia Historical Society.
Speaker 1:You can also, by the way, there's a cemetery behind St George's Church in Astoria and it's filled with Blackwell graves, Yep. So it's very interesting to kind of see the influence of such a big family. You know, but one family in New York, and how pervasive it is, and not in a bad way, but you know.
Speaker 2:So the Blackwells, they were a pretty prominent and settler family. Yeah, then there was also a lot of Dutch ones, like the Soydems, the Rapeliers, the Kovenhovens, who were was also a lot of Dutch ones, like the Soydems, the Rapeliers, the Kovenhovens, who are, I believe, german, german-dutch.
Speaker 1:Then there were also the Lawrences.
Speaker 2:The Lawrences have a cemetery still. That is in northern Bitmars. It's on 20th Road and it's still maintained to this day by an elderly couple. I met them. They're really good people.
Speaker 1:I've been outside of it so many times longingly looking to go in. But it's. It's very cool, it's.
Speaker 2:It's not open to the public, but it's um however, if you ask permission, I believe the couple will give you a little yeah, yeah, amazing yeah so 19th century comes around young man by the name of stephen halsey.
Speaker 2:He is a fur trader and he is very well acquainted with um. His brother was part of the fur company that was with, uh, john jacob astor when they went. He is a fur trader and he is very well acquainted with His brother was part of the fur company that was with John Jacob Astor when they went to Oregon. So a lot of people they confuse the story of Queens with the story of Oregon. Right, and the reason is because both brothers were under the employ of John Jacob Astor, the younger brother. However, he was sort of a copycat.
Speaker 2:So, stephen Halsey, he lived in Flushing. He had his own fur company. They were just selling wares in Lower Manhattan and then he passed by the Story Peninsula and over in the Story Peninsula he noticed how green it was and he said you know, I'm traveling all the way from Flushing by stagecoach or whatever he had to do to get to a ferry to Manhattan. Why don't we build a community here? And he had the bright idea of putting his money to invest in building a community there. So it was a small hamlet called Hallett's Cove. It was named after William Hallett, who was an English captain. No, he was an Englishman regardless. But his wife, catherine Fones, was also a Protestant dissenter. She's also very famous because she was cast out of the colony because her husband went insane. So effectively she said he's not a husband to me anymore because he went insane.
Speaker 2:He disappeared. I'm going to marry his manager because he's there and he's been providing for me. The colony of massachusetts. The puritans were like, yeah, I don't think that's uh, uh really puritanical of you. Uh, you should leave. And they left, they I think she almost had a death warrant, wow, because she was basically committing adultery because her husband was still alive despite going insane. Right, they move to new amsterdam. It was a very tolerant colony, they had a farm and this was around like 1652.
Speaker 1:I also just want to say you're just like saying all this, you're not reading anything. I'm so impressed right now with you. It's insane, it's all straight.
Speaker 2:I'm not looking at any notes right now, this is all straight from my head. Wow, um. But yeah. So 1652, 1653, they settle around what becomes Howlett's Cove. Howlett's Cove is still named that because that's where the farm started. Now fast forward back to the 1830s.
Speaker 2:Stephen Halsley. He puts in a lot of money and he decided I'm going to build a village here and I'm going to invite as much people I can so we can build a working village. And because it's so close to Manhattan, it's going to be beneficial, because nobody wants to live in Manhattan anymore. It's crowded, it's a lot of diseases. It'd be nice if people moved out here, because here it's a lot more open land. It's still rural. 1839 comes along. He finally gets to charter from Albany. He establishes Astoria.
Speaker 2:But when it comes to the naming process, there was a big fight because people were. But then Halsey was like I don't want to name it Hallett's Cove. This is a bigger community than it should be. It should not be named after a body of water. Yeah, and he asked John Jacob Astor and he said hey, listen, I want to name this community after you. Do you mind investing in it so I can build some stuff? I need like $2,000. Astor looks at him and is like I don't care, you can name it, here's $500. Put it to your seminary, but I don't care. Astor never visited the village. However, he had a house directly across from Astoria, which is what's now like Yorkville, yeah, but he never set foot. But Halsey was like I'm naming it Astoria, names it Astoria after John Jacob Astor, and the $500 that Astor donated was put to build the Ladies Seminary School, the Astoria Institute. Halsey envisioned this to be what's going to become a well-to-do community with an upper class presence.
Speaker 2:1840s come around. A lot of mansions are being built. A lot of mansions. A lot of people from the merchant class are moving out of the city around this time. A lot of them go to what is now Brooklyn Heights. Everyone will know everything about Brooklyn Heights. A lot of the merchant class are moving out of the city around this time. A lot of them go to what is now Brooklyn Heights. You know, everyone will know everything about Brooklyn Heights. A lot of the merchant class were going there building their really nice houses. But a couple of them decided, hey, we want to go to Astoria as well. They go to Astoria. There's a lot of land there they start building a lot of mansions over there for them.
Speaker 2:There was another community down south which still exists, called Ravenswood. Ravenswood was also with that same intention of building a high class community for the merchant class. It was founded by a gentleman named Colonel George Gibbs. Gibbs was a mineralologist who basically had this huge collection, which that is his claim to fame, not the founding of Ravenswood, apparently. Apparently he builds a house in what was then called sunswick. He names it ravenswood. A lot of people have no idea why, but gothic romances were a big thing back then I was gonna say it's so gothic, it's like ravenswood.
Speaker 1:That sounds like it's a you know 1900s novel about like a, a woman and a turret, you know yeah, you're like, uh, an edgar allen poem yeah, yeah Something like that, so he names it Ravenswood, and there's a bunch of differing backstories to why they call it Ravenswood.
Speaker 2:One of them was a bishop in Asheville, north Carolina. His name was Ravencroft and he decides to name it after him. That's one story. Another one is just he probably got it off of a book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Regardless he lives there, he starts having these parcels open to whoever wants to buy. When he dies, his land gets divided up into more parcels, so a lot more mansions are being built. This is a very well-to-do community, but it only lasted for a couple of decades before the Industrial Revolution came and people thought why do we have all these mansions? We need the river to industrialize. So all these mansions were destroyed so they can industrialize the waterfront. That didn't happen too much in Astoria. Astoria's mansions were still present well until the 20th century. Stephen Halsey has a community now. It starts off with like 80 people at best.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Going up to 100. And it's kind of spread out. Parts of it is centered around where the historic peninsula is, which is where the historic houses are. That's where it started. Another part of it's centered more by Broadway and 21st Street and then another part of it's centered way out by the Bowery Bay area, which is again small, just small hamlets From the 1840s, let's say 1870s. 1870s come around Down south there is a small city town, I should say, called Hunts Point. They decide we want to make a city and let's incorporate all these villages nearby and we're going to become Long Island City. Long Island City is made and the story is a part of it.
Speaker 2:Long Island City, funny enough, had a history of corruption. There was a gentleman by the name of Battleaxe Gleeson. He was a mayor. He was very corrupt, he was very larger than life, he was a big Irish guy, he was a boxer and he was also, like, really famous for his tempers. His opponents were too afraid to really go after him because there was one case of a gentleman who insulted him and he decided to literally beat the ever-living shit out of him in front of everyone. Wow, finally they had him um impeached because the state basically had to do an inquiry because he was embezzling a lot of money. But the man was very much a friend of the people because he was using a lot of that money not only just for himself but also for the welfare of the children of Long Island City. He built the first school, which is PS1. That was built by him. Ps1 was the first public school. Then he was also building a bunch of other schools too, so there's another one that used to stand on 21st Street. I think it was PS7. And then there was a bunch of other ones that also don't exist anymore, but at least there were like three or four, I would say.
Speaker 2:1898 comes around. The city decides to annex all of Astoria and Long Island City, basically Queens. Funny enough, queens used to stretch out all the way to nassau county. Nassau county was originally part of queens. When the annexation happens, the people in nassau were like we don't want to be a part of new york city, we have no ties to them. Finally they did. They become nassau county. Queens becomes queens. It becomes a borough. It's part of new york city.
Speaker 2:Long island city is just a neighborhood that's just centered south of Astoria. So Long Island City becomes doesn't become. It just doesn't become a thing anymore. Yeah, 1900s come and Western Queens becomes increasingly industrialized. So, going back to Ravenswood, ravenswood, all these mansions on the waterfront, you know these big, beautiful mansions. They're abandoned, they're getting bought out and destroyed or they're getting bought out and they're just being used as like offices for uh factories and they're building docks and piers and a lot of like industries are being built here. Long island city becomes increasingly industrialized at a point where I think standard oil had a bunch of factories and refineries down there. They also had a bunch down by um the uh newtown creek.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were pretty much the the originators of why that creek is polluted because they used to dump a lot of like sludge and refuge and all this stuff and just to say for folks who who might not know, on the western side of the land mass, new newtown Creek is what sort of separates Queens and Brooklyn, like all the way along the East River?
Speaker 2:So 1900s come around, a lot of western Queens gets industrialized, but Astoria remains intact, so there's a lot of mansions. If you still go down there, a lot of the mansions are still centered around like a couple blocks, but there's one of them that was built by a physician family. It's really, really nice to look at. I believe it's on 12th Street, and all this is close to Astoria Park. You walk down Astoria Park and you notice all these mansions, all these stately homes. There's a bunch of other ones that were left over by the Blackwells.
Speaker 2:The one that I'm speaking of, though, it was originally one of the homes for Stephen Halsey. It was built in the 1840s. The mansion was then bought by the Bailey's family around the 1860s. By then Halsey was just like selling off his land and I think he died in the 1870s. But the Bailey's family were. There were three brothers who were physicians and one of them was a dentist, which is funny enough and they had their practice set up in their mansion.
Speaker 2:The mansion was then through a period of owners. It was still intact as this one big house. In the 80s, I'm going to say there were a couple, two gentlemen. They bought it and they were really, really big into antiques, so they furnished the hell out of this thing. But not only that, they really renovated it and it's still like that.
Speaker 2:It's still beautiful. It has the beautiful wrought iron gates in front of it and you think, oh god, who lived here I? I believe they call it terra um from the um gone with the wind book. Right, they named it after terra. But if you ever walk down there, that's one of the mansions, it's still there. Another one, too, is the robert moore blackwell house. It is now an orthodox church. The church still uses the mansion as their, as their, sanctuary. It's also on the corner of, I believe, 12th and 27th avenue. Right around there you'll also find saint george's church. Saint george's church was the parish was founded when Astorio was basically founded, and the original church, though, was burnt down in a fire. So the current church was the second iteration.
Speaker 1:Which is so common with most like still standing historic churches in New York City. Often they originally burnt down and then were rebuilt later and it's also like sort of similar like the. There's a bunch of gilded age Manhattan mansions that, like you know, went by the wayside or were totally demolished or were turned into like museums and things like the Frick Collection and the Morgan Collection here in Manhattan. But it's really cool to learn about these mansions and where they exist in other boroughs, you know, because I think it's sort of less people are, it's less talked about, you know. So it's cool now that people can take this and kind of go on walks and walk by and see kind of the pieces of history that are still standing in Queens.
Speaker 2:Right. So then there's another mansion, and this one was actually one of my favorites. Unfortunately it does not look good anymore. It used to look really nice back in the day. This was the Robert Benner Mansion. It was owned by a lawyer by the name of Robert Benner who lived here with his family. His two sons also became lawyers.
Speaker 2:He was, interestingly, a part of the Astoria and Ravenswood Horticultural Society and they were basically just landowners who had gardens in their land and they would find flowers from all around the world and just plant them and grow them and then they would showcase them in these conventions that would happen. In the neighborhood. The Horticultural Society existed, I want to say, from at least 1860s, well, until about 1880s, because a lot of them started dying off and a lot of those lands were basically sold off. Robert Benner, though his mansion, his land, I should say, encompassed all the block that 14th Street is by the 20th century. So I want to say like 1910s, 1920s, when Astoria was increasingly becoming a lot more populated, there was a population boom because the construction of the Queensborough Bridge and the Astoria Elevator, which is now the N and W, it brought a lot of people coming to Astoria. So a lot of developers were like hey, we need to build a lot of houses, apartment buildings, and a lot of these lands were being parceled off to build these row houses.
Speaker 2:By the 20s, the mansion was basically stuck in this little corner, but it was still beautiful nonetheless. His gardens were still kind of there. There was this big tree that he probably planted. That was there for many years until, I want to say, the 90s Family bought it. They kind of divided it up into apartments and the mansion, which was unfortunately decaying. Instead of like really doing work, they just kind of tore all the original stuff and put in this horrible vinyl siding. Oh, tragic.
Speaker 2:The front yard which there was a lot of beautiful like flowers and there was this big tree. They tore all that up and they made it into a parking lot. But I knew this one guy I used to know as a kid growing up he lived there and he told me there's a in the basement apartment. There's actually this big arch that's bricked up, and he thinks and he got confirmation of the historical, historical historia, historical society that that little, that big arch, yeah, was actually an entrance to a passageway. And one of the things I realized was all these mansions were connected by tunnels and they probably still exist that's like you just gave me chills.
Speaker 2:That's like why, exactly why? So my theory is they were built as service tunnels. Sure, All these tunnels were connected to a dock. They used to stand at the end of Hoyt Avenue. A lot of the shipments that would come in, you know like supplies, a lot of the servants would go through these tunnels, collect them, bring them through the service entrance, so they don't bring them through the front door. You know, back in the day. So, like anything that was deliveries, they had a separate entrance for them. Don't know why, but the decorum back then was so strict. Anywho, these tunnels were also and this is hypothetical, this is not hypothetical. I think this was also confirmed by the Historical Society it may have been used to help escape slaves.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:From the South, and this was common during the 19th century throughout Queens. We also had our own underground railroad here. We had a route that went out to Long Island, and from Long Island they would bring escaped slaves either North to New England or all the way up to Canada, where slavery was increasingly illegal because the british they abolished slavery in the 1840s. These tunnels existed for a while.
Speaker 2:Then there was a story buried secrets yeah, our friend chris, yeah, our friend chris told me that there was an article about these um tunnels. There's a story about one landowner I don't remember his name, I don't remember his house, I don't remember his house but he had this big like fortune and he had it in a vault which these tunnels were apparently connected to.
Speaker 2:And they say a lot of guys were trying to like look for this fortune. But going back to the paranormal stuff, apparently his spirit haunts the tunnels. Apparently his spirit haunts the tunnels, or they, they his spirit, hot heights, the location of this fortune. But yeah, apparently cool, so interesting. This landowner apparently had an issue. We're going back to the story. His daughter wanted to marry this one gentleman who he was not fond of and when they found out that they eloped, he actually murdered the daughter and the gentleman.
Speaker 1:Oh geez.
Speaker 2:Yeah, obviously, though back in the day he kind of got away with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very dark.
Speaker 2:Very, very dark, but this was local legend. I'm not too sure how true this is.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, urban legends certainly have a spin on them, but sometimes they surprise you, sometimes they you think they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, alan, oh, my goodness. First of all, I, you. I just feel like this was the best history class I've ever taken. So thank you so much. I'm endlessly impressed that you literally said everything that you just said off the cuff and I'm very grateful. I learned so much today and this was such a fun conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank, you, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Please, I don't need to convince you, I'm sure Alan just did, but follow Alan at Astoried Native on Instagram. I'm going to tag it everywhere. It'll be very, very easy for you guys to find it. And I also just want to say, because Chris brought us together, also listen to the Buried Secrets podcast. It's also a very excellent resource when it comes to New York City history and haunted history in general. So I will also plug that below. But, alan, thank you so much for being here. This was an absolute blast.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure. I'm really glad I got onto this podcast, yeah, and also I'm really glad that Chris got us together.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's always great meeting new people and just telling them the history of my neighborhood.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God, I love it. Yes's, you've been very, very generous. You again are. I'm so impressed by your knowledge. Um, so I feel like I have a. I have a lot to learn and I'm very excited, but we will definitely have you back on again and until then, bye everybody see, ya, see ya.
