The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and Friends of the Upper East Side Historic District are co-sponsoring a talk about Roosevelt Island’s dark history by Damnation Island author Stacy Horn on October 30 at the Good Shepherd Community Center (543 Main Street). According to the Friends Of The Upper East Side Historic District:

Join us on Roosevelt Island, just steps from the ruin of James Renwicks Small Pox Hospital, as Stacy Horn, author of Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th-Century New York, takes us into the areas macabre past, sharing insight from her new book.

From 1839, when the New York City Lunatic Asylum opened, to 1936 when Damnation Island was finally defunct, Roosevelt Island, then known as Blackwells, was home to a host of infamous institutions. Well find out how this sliver of land in the East River was filled with prisons, asylums, hospitals and almshouses, hear accounts of those who were held there, and learn how muckrakers and reformers from Charles Dickens to Nellie Bly helped expose the naked ugliness and horror of those institutions, beginning a reform movement for compassionate mental health care and social welfare that continues to this day.

Further light on that positive shift will be shed by historian Judith Berdy, the President of the Roosevelt Island historical society, who will share the history of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, and its benevolent founder, the Reverend William Glenney French.

Wednesday, October 30th 6:00 p.m.

$15 FRIENDS and RIHS members, $25 non-members

To verify your current membership status, please call 212-535-2526

or email us at info@friends-ues.org.

Click HERE to register

Here’s a 2018 NY Public Library interview with Damnation Island author Stacy Horn about Roosevelt Island’s dark history.