Blackwell’s Island: Home for the Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th Century New York
Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York’s Blackwell’s Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse."
Over the course of three sessions, we will see what happens when good intentions go horribly wrong. The first session will cover the New York City Lunatic Asylum, the deadliest institution on the Island. The plan was to correct all the previous mistakes made treating mental illness at institutions around that world. Instead, inmates at the Lunatic Asylum lapsed into a “depth of degradation and neglect” that surpassed all the horrors they’d intended to put right.
The second session will cover the Penitentiary, a prison built to house those convicted of felonies, and the Workhouse, for people convicted of more minor crimes. While the Workhouse quickly became the largest correction facility at the time, the wardens soon discovered that not all criminals went to prison. We will cover who evaded punishment and why.
The final session will present the Almshouse for the poor and the City Hospital that was built to treat them. Initially foreseen as “An asylum of happiness in their declining years,” the Almshouse soon became a place where inmates longed for death, their only escape.
Over the course of the three sessions we will go over just what went wrong, and how we continue to make the same mistakes today.
Wednesdays, 5:30 - 7:00 PM
February 26, March 5, and 12, 2025
$150 (3 sessions)
Meet your instructor
Stacy Horn
Stacy Horn is a journalist and author of nonfiction books, including Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th Century New York and The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad. Her last book, described on The Bowery Boys podcast as “your page-turning horror read for the summer,” turned out to be excellent preparation for the horror read she was to write next: The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood. Mary Roach has hailed her for “combining awe-fueled curiosity with topflight reporting skills,” while others have described her work as "immaculately researched" and "several notches above the typical reporter's insights."