A Home for the Marginalized
Research from the Roosevelt Island Historical Society and Katharine Greider’s Persistence of a Dream manuscript.
The Smallpox Hospital ruin memorializes the basic impulse that drove the development of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island (then called Blackwell’s Island) throughout the 19th century in that it capitalized on Blackwell Island’s isolation to keep certain classes of people—“our standing army of paupers, criminals, and sick poor,” the reformer Jacob Riis called them in the 1890s—nearby, but distinctly apart.
The island was an outpost for the marginalized including:
the destitute aged;
those suffering from alcoholism, opioid addiction, mental illness, and senile dementia;
abandoned and sick children;
the homeless;
people with disability;
and the jobless.
Hospital Location
The hospital structure is located on the southernmost tip of the island in Southpoint Park. To the south is the human rights memorial Four Freedoms Park, designed by the architect Louis Kahn. To the north is the Cornell Technion applied sciences and technology campus.
The Smallpox Hospital structure is located within Southpoint Park, directly north of Four Freedoms Park, Southern end of Roosevelt Island, New York City, Iwan Baan
Poetically, the Smallpox Hospital rests in the shadow of both the United Nations and World Health Organization complexes.
An Accessible Island
Roosevelt Island is accessible by ferry, tram, subway and car making it one of New York’s most reachable metropolitan islands.