North Brother Island
The Last Unknown Place in New York City
Few people today have ever heard of North Brother Island, though a hundred years ago it was place known to—and often feared by—nearly everyone in New York City. The island, a small dot in the East River, twenty acres slotted between today’s gritty industrial shores of the Bronx and Queens, was a minor piece of the New York archipelago until the late 19th century, when calls for social and sanitary reform—and the massive expansion of the city’s population—combined to remake NBI as a hospital island, a place to contain infectious disease and, later, other societal ills.
Abandoned since 1963, North Brother Island is a ruin and a wildlife sanctuary (it is the protected nesting ground of the Black-crowned Night Heron), closed to the public and virtually invisible to it. But one cannot mistake its abandoned state as a sign of its irrelevance to the city’s history and culture. Traces of the extensive hospital campus remain, as do sites linked to notorious people (it was the final home of “Typhoid Mary”) and events (the steamship General Slocum sank by its shores). It has stories to tell.
Photographer Christopher Payne (Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals) was granted permission by New York City’s Parks & Recreation Department to photograph the island over a period of years. The results are both beautiful and startling. On North Brother Island, devoid of human habitation for fifty years, buildings great and small are being consumed by the unchecked growth of vegetation. In just a few decades, a forest has sprung up where once there were the streets and manicured lawns of a hospital campus.
North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City includes a history by University of Pennsylvania preservationist Randall Mason, who has studied the island extensively, and an essay by the writer Robert Sullivan (Rats, The Meadowlands), who came along on one of the rare expeditions.
Among a painter’s or a photographer’s challenges is to make us perceive three dimensions in an image rendered in only two. But Chris Payne takes us a step beyond. His subject is the fourth dimension: time itself. North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City doesn’t merely document a forgotten place. It shows past mingling with present, dissolving toward a future that leads not forward, but back—back before we ever marked this world. The circular sensation suffusing this work is at first unsettling, then transcending. We have been here. Gently, we will pass on. In our stead, all will renew—and, as Payne artfully shows, quite beautifully.
“This richly illustrated and aptly titled work takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the remarkable and varied chapters of North Brother Island’s history.”
Remnants of society’s anxieties about immigrants and epidemics still peek from the overgrowth of North Brother Island. Most New Yorkers likely will never get to explore its 40 acres first hand. Yet all should know its story--and the haunting beauty of its ruins. Payne and Mason’s North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City is an elegant tribute to a secret too good to keep.
In haunting photographs and poignant text, “North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City” (Empire State Editions, Fordham University Press) captures the character of this barren East River outcropping roughly between Rikers Island and the Bronx. . . The lushly illustrated book includes photos by Christopher Payne; a history by Randall Mason, a University of Pennsylvania preservationist; and an essay by Robert Sullivan, the urban anthropologist (the author of 'Rats' and 'The Meadowlands'), who writes that North Brother Island, 'draped in its forgottenness,' is 'a place that helps us see the rest of the city more clearly.'
“A gorgeous book: The uncannily moving photographs by Christopher Payne do full justice to North Brother Island’s haunting air of mystery, its unique play of presence and absence. The supporting texts helpfully elucidate the enigma of such wildness, abandonment, vegetative luxuriance, and architectural ruin existing in the midst of New York’s ultra-urbanist environment.”
“This stunning book captures a nearly forgotten corner of the city. Seemingly held apart from the urban rush of change, North Brother Island nonetheless reveals its layered history. In its latest incarnation, native and non-native species vie for precious island space. Amid the ruins, we find an essential New York story.”