1946 to 1966 - NORTH BROTHER ISLAND

Few people, not even New Yorkers, know North Brother Island, a 25 acre dot in the East River, east of Port Morris, Bronx and west of Rikers Island. Part of its fascinating history is icing on my cake.

I’ll explain later but first, a few lightly edited excerpts from scattered articles in Wikipedia and elsewhere that summarize the island’s story.

• North Brother was the site of the wreck of the General Slocum, a steamship which burned on June 15, 1904. Over 1,000 people died either in the fire on board the ship or from drowning before the ship was beached on the island's shores.

• The North island [there is a tinier South Brother Island too] was uninhabited until 1885, when Riverside Hospital moved there from Blackwell's Island (located further south in the East River and now known as Roosevelt Island). The Hospital was founded in the 1850s to treat and isolate victims of Smallpox. It was subsequently expanded to accept more and more patients from waves of disease plagues in 1886, 1892 (smallpox), 1893 (typhus), 1903 (TB) and 1916 (polio).

• Then came Mary Mallon, a.k.a. Typhoid Mary, a housekeeper and cook who carried typhoid but was unaffected by it, and had spread the disease to estimated hundreds, causing anywhere from three to 50 deaths. She was ultimately identified as the carrier. The City Board of Health declared her a public menace, and she was placed in the North Brother Island hospital in 1907. Yes, placed.

• In 1910 she was released after agreeing not to cook for a living again. However she changed her name, broke her word, and returned to her trade. Tracked down again in 1915, she was confined (apparently without the niceties of representation) for life to the island in a home built for her. She was allowed to work washing bottles in the hospital laboratory until felled by a stroke in 1932. She died there in 1938.

• The year Typhoid Mary died the City began to build the last of Riverside Hospital's pavilions for TB patients. Just as it was completed the hospital was abandoned. It was apparently deemed nonsensical to house tuberculars in a facility surrounded on three compass points by electric generating plants belching black smoke no matter the wind direction. So in from 1943 to 1945 the buildings on the island stood uninhabited except for its coast guard station.

• When WW II war ended the hospital’s vacant three story buildings struck someone in state Governor Dewey’s administration as a good place for student housing. But not just any students. Here was an opportunity to create apartments for married veterans attending schools in the region.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      North Brother, center, floating between The Bronx and LaGuardia Airport

• Beginning in 1952, Riverside reverted to hospital use and was accepting hardcore heroin addicts; it would do so until 1963. Thereafter, Riverside Hospital was abandoned and its vine-and weed covered expanse is still rotting today.

You may have guessed that the “icing on my cake” is what happened to the Island when World War two ended.

Someone in Governor Tom Dewey's staff discovered this abandoned relic, a useless hospital complex, and decided it would make a great place for a special housing project. Apartments for students attending college in the city. The imaginative bureaucrat found a little Ferry, The Greenwich Village, to carry people on and off to a slip on the Bronx mainland. And created an island paradise.

Though our numbers have dwindled, some of us who attended college on the GI bill carry memories of that 24 acre wonderland (a stone's throw from the penitentiary on nearby Rikers' Island) housing married war veterans enrolled at one of the city’s colleges or universities, students who rode a daily ferry to the mainland and back.

Fran and I, just married, successfully applied for an apartment on the idyllic retreat. Our first visit was from ferry to land along a gangplank, the slip not quite ready. 

It was perfect. Our tiny 2nd floor flat was in one of several three story hospital buildings renovated into apartments by the state. The single phone in each building was on a stair landing. Our second floor L shaped flat rented for $28 a month, utilities included. Its front door opened to the smaller segment the L. That was our kitchen, the floored over remains of a twelve foot by twelve hospital elevator shaft. The only visible remnants of the kitchen’s original purpose were four steel girders at its outer corners. When the folks upstairs mopped, water flowed down the girders on its way to the floor below us. 

The larger part of the L formed our living/bed room and a tiny bathroom. How we 22 year olds loved it! We installed a Murphy bed, a sectional couch. I built a plywood folding desk, bookcases above it. The desk could only be lowered if the bed was raised. That was our routine. Desk in use until bed time. Then, desk up, bed down. Reverse the process in the AM.

Most of the island residents were couples, although single students roomed in one island structure. That building also housed North Brother’s only store, a grocery which most of us patronized infrequently. It was expensive.

The island seethed with intellectual excitement, all of us now free to pursue undergraduate or graduate studies in every imaginable field – and to debate politics, social policy, religion. Anything that could be discussed was. Enthusiastically and optimistically. 

The buildings also seethed with cockroaches. Dealt with in good humor. One morning I was drawn to the hall by an excited voice. It was our neighbor's cockney contralto. She had lit her oven to force them into the open and was stamping on battalions of roaches exclaiming gleefully each time her shoe hit the floor, “Gotcha ya, ya lil sunuva bitch.” Our own remedy, sprinkled boric acid, was less gladiatorial.

Heavy black soot emanating from the generators' smoke stacks coated our windowsills. We scrubbed them clean and ignored the grime, glorying in our isolated peace. The water view was free luxury. Content, enjoying the river traffic, secluded from the city’s hubbub, but very much in its mainstream each time we left the island. Our enthusiasm fed on the relief of having won a war and the privilege of building a future via hard work and the GI Bill. The only catch, a big one, was that the tenancy rules required all to move when no longer full time students. We couldn’t hold on to paradise. That’s the way things are. On earth at least.

Entering or leaving our island sanctuary was an adventure. The ferry terminal on the Bronx mainland at the foot of 134th street had two slips, one for the Riker’s Island ferry used by prison visitors, and a smaller one just for us. Our miniature ferry, fittingly named the Greenwich Village, accommodated three cars. That limitation was no hardship. Vehicles were brought onto the roadless island only for do-it-yourself repairs.

On school days, after disembarking at our stone and cinder crusted mainland parking area we fanned out. Some boarded the 138th street cross-town bus. Others, I among them, in our own jalopies. Off to build our futures at Columbia, Fordham, City College, NYU, etc. Fran drove with me to the same destination. Like many other spouses, she was a partner in study. No GI bill, but well ahead of me in graduate school at Columbia while performing at its long since departed Brander Mathews Theater.

The ferry did not always run. Breakdowns and fog were two problems. Waiting on the mainland to return was, of course, hell. But being stranded on the island for a few hours was hardly punishment. Except for one wet blanket fog that seemed ready to disrupt our idyllic lives.

Many of us, I among them, had exhausted our GI benefits just as we completed our undergraduate degrees. Remember those tenancy rules. No matriculation, no North Brother apartment. With our limited resources, my studies were to end or, at best, become part time. We would have to leave our island paradise. Shazaam, along came a Deus ex machina; a limited number of full time New York State War Service Scholarships to institutions of the recipients’ choice were to be awarded through competitive examinations at specific locations on a specific date. Thirteen of us island dwellers planned to participate. But, to our dismay on May 6, 1950 the only day of the exam dense fog hung over the river, halting ferry operations. Stranded, the thirteen of us were unable to take the exam.

This tale ends with a tip of the hat to responsive government. One of our number, a law student of course, sent a letter to the Governor’s office explaining our difficulty and requesting a makeup examination. We received this response, quoted in part: “Hence, in order that all of these candidates might receive a fair opportunity to compete for a 1950 War Service Scholarship, we have made arrangement to hold a special examination for these candidates on Saturday, May 20.”

As a result, Fran and I, and several other young families were able remain on the island post GI Bill. Who could forget North Brother Island?