The Octagon: the city's first asylum

New York · USA · Sanatorium

The octagonal tower at the northern end of the island was the entrance and administration building of the New York City Lunatic Asylum, the city's first municipal asylum, opened in 1841. The institution was seen in its day as a step forward, but the reality proved otherwise: overcrowding, understaffing and neglect. When the author Charles Dickens visited the place in 1842 he described it with disgust. In 1887 the journalist Nellie Bly had herself committed by feigning insanity, and her exposé of ten days behind the walls forced through reforms. The complex was demolished in stages, but the octagonal tower was preserved and today forms part of a residential development.

Few buildings in New York carry so concrete a history of suffering as this tower. Residents and visitors have over the years described sounds in the spiral staircase that climbs up through the tower, a chill that does not seem to come from draughty windows, and a sense of being watched from the landings. That Nellie Bly met real women confined on flimsy grounds, sometimes merely for being poor or immigrants who did not understand the language, gives the place a weight that survives the elegant renovation. What was called madness here was often only poverty and powerlessness.

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Image: Dmadeo · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons