Renwick Smallpox Hospital: the quarantine ruin

New York · United States · Sanatorium

The Gothic ruin of the Smallpox Hospital, designed by James Renwick Jr., where the city quarantined its poor.

At the island's southern tip rises the Gothic ruin of the Smallpox Hospital, designed by the celebrated architect James Renwick Jr. and completed in 1856. The hospital was built to isolate and treat smallpox patients, one of the most feared diseases of the age, and the island's seclusion made it a natural quarantine site for the city's poor and its immigrants. The building treated thousands of patients a year before the care was moved elsewhere; it then became a nurses' residence and was abandoned in the 1950s. Today it stands as a stabilised ruin, New York's only building protected as a landmark precisely as a ruin, lit at night.

The ruin is the island's most photographed and most feared place, and it is easy to see why. The Gothic façade with its empty window openings facing the river looks like a set for a ghost story, and it was once full of people in quarantine, many of them dying, isolated from their families. Folklore speaks of lights seen in the empty windows, of a chill by the fence and of figures within the walls. The ruin is fenced off and viewed from outside. The real horror is not a ghost, but the thought of how lonely it was to be sent here, beyond the river, to live or die in isolation.

FAQ

Where is Renwick Smallpox Hospital: the quarantine ruin located?

Renwick Smallpox Hospital: the quarantine ruin is in New York, United States.

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Accounts are drawn from local folklore and visitor reports.

Image: Chris6d · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons