Photographic archive from NYC City Hospital/Welfare Island, c. 1920, showing adult and child patients and staff: a brilliance of spirit amidst difficult surroundings.

New York, 1920. Paper . Very good +. The story of City Hospitals land is ominous, now laying in ruins to the East of Manhattan and highlighted by some as an architecturally distinct ghost tour. Approximated by completed construction, dress of subjects and presence of Queensboro bridge, the photos post-date 1909. Possibly the first time many of the residents were the subject of photography, or the first photographic documentation of the island on site. Through the 19th century, then known as Blackwells island, the island housed several hospitals and a prison, built from the stone underfoot. Buildings included the New York City Lunatic Asylum, The Smallpox Hospital, later the gothic lighthouse built again by convict labor, the last prisoners leaving the island by 1935 when Rykers is erected. During the outbreak of smallpox, the island became known as Pest Island, when nurses and workers were scarce the prison population contributed to the operations of the site. Termed Welfare Island in 1921, where the poorest in need of medical care were cast, still reachable only by aquatic means. Nelly Bly went undercover as a patient in the Women's Lunatic Asylum and reported what happened in the book Ten Days in a Madhouse (1887)Charles Dickens described conditions at the Octagon, the asylum then located on the northern portion of the island, in his American Notes (1842)William Wallace Sanger oversaw police interviews of 2000 prostitutes at Blackwell's Island and wrote up the findings in The History of Prostitution (1858)Mae West, Emma Goldman and Billie Holiday served, albeit small, time on the island.