Damnation Island

May 1, 2018

Horn (Imperfect Harmony) presents a fast-paced history of Blackwell's Island, "a lounging, listless madhouse," according to a visiting Charles Dickens. In 1828, New York purchased Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) in the East River to build state-of-the-art facilities for the city's poor residents who were considered to be insane. In 1839, an asylum was opened and subsequently overcrowded. During the next 15 years, a workhouse, almshouse, hospital, and penitentiary were constructed. Horn chronicles the horrors of the incarcerated relying on Episcopalian Reverend William G. French's insightful diary and court cases of the condemned. Inept administrators were politically appointed and budgets were meager. To save money, prison inmates were tasked with caring for the mentally ill. Journalists, including Nellie Bly, went undercover to expose egregious treatment and reformers agitated for improvements. In 1896, responsibility to care for the island's prisoners was transferred to the state in hopes conditions would be improved. "They didn't get it right," concludes Horn. VERDICT A dour yet deft telling of an often forgotten era of 19th-century America. Criminal justice advocates and historians as well as general readers interested in the history of the New York underworld will delight in Horn's timely and skillful offering.--John Muller, Washington, DC, P.L.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 12, 2018
Horn (Imperfect Harmony) creates a vivid and at times horrifying portrait of Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) in New York City’s East River during the late 19th century. Using the institutions that populated the island as an organizing principle, Horn selects colorful stories of individuals confined in the asylum, workhouse, hospital, almshouse, and penitentiary. Episodes include the heroic muckraking efforts of journalists Nellie Bly and William P. Rogers in exposing the mistreatment of the confined; tragic tales of young prisoners, like teenaged pickpocket Adelaide Irving, imprisoned for relatively minor crimes and never able to fully recover from her time there; and truly nightmarish accounts of medical experimentation, including brain surgery administered under (ineffective) hypnosis rather than anesthesia. The anecdotal rather than linear narrative approach captures the drama of the island’s inmates, but can make understanding the chronology challenging. Horn has created a bleak but worthwhile depiction of institutional failure, with relevance for persistent debates over the treatment of the mentally ill and incarcerated. Agent: Amy Hughes, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

March 15, 2018
Somber study of a dark, little-known episode in the history of New York, when Riker's Island wasn't the only warehouse for the condemned.It makes good sense, on reading Horn's (Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others, 2013, etc.) latest, why the 2005 horror film Dark Water found so appropriate a setting on New York's Roosevelt Island. In the late 1800s, writes the author, that small chunk of land, barely 150 acres, saw four kinds of unfortunate denizens: the mad were shunted off to the island's Lunatic Asylum, the destitute to the Almshouse, the vagrant or indigent to the Workhouse, and the seriously criminal to the Penitentiary. Each offered its own version of a living hell, and despite reports by early whistleblowers, not much was done to improve the condition of the inmates. "You can have no idea...what an immense vat of misery and crime and filth much of this great city is!" exclaimed a social reformer who worked on the island, and Horn's account paints an exacting portrait of just how true that was--and how summary the judgments against the lower class could be. Of interest to students of Foucauldian history is the author's contrast of what was then called Blackwell's Island with facilities for the well-to-do, such as the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum near Central Park, with its well-appointed libraries, plush chairs, and expensive artwork. No such amenities were to be found on Blackwell's, which saw appalling levels of disease, starvation, child mortality, and other ills. Despite such demerits, as Horn writes, the rate of escape from the island was low and the level of recidivism, particularly among younger inmates, high: "At ten the boys are thieves," noted one official, "at fifteen the girls are all prostitutes."Horn engagingly explores a history that, perhaps surprisingly, extended into the 1960s, when the renamed island became a site for mixed-income housing.

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Starred review from April 1, 2018
The purchase of Blackwell Island by the city of New York in 1828 was an act of great optimism. Located in the East River, the long, skinny island was intended as a utopian sanctuary for public charities and correctional facilities, and great plans were made for compassionately administered institutions, including a lunatic asylum, almshouse, workhouse, low-security prison, and hospitals. Once the plans were drawn, however, penny-pinching commissioners and corrupt bureaucrats took over, erected buildings, and filled them with unfortunates. As each enclosure opened, it quickly became crowded, and inmates soon suffered from inadequate heat, light, ventilation, meals, and nursing care. Many starved, drowned in the river, died in epidemics, or were killed in their cells. Horn (Imperfect Harmony, 2013) draws on reports from the era's clergy, undercover journalists, and government reformers to tell stories of unnecessary cruelty and the public abandonment of the old, the poor, the sick, and the mentally ill in nineteenth-century America. This is an essential?and heartbreaking?book for readers seeking to better understand contemporary public policy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)