“Horn 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. History buffs will be terrified by what occurred a century ago.” Stacy Horn lucidly, and not without indignation, documents the island’s bleak history, detailing the political and moral failures that sustained this hell, failures still evident today in the prison at Rikers Island.” "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. In Damnation Island, Stacy Horn shows us how far we’ve come in caring for the least fortunate among us-and reminds us how much work still remains. Throughout the book, we return to the extraordinary Reverend William Glenney French as he ministers to Blackwell’s residents, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Department of Correction and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man’s inhumanity to man.
Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Horn brings this forgotten history alive: there was terrible overcrowding prisoners were enlisted to care for the insane punishment was harsh and unfair and treatment was nonexistent. In the first contemporary investigative account of Blackwell’s, Stacy Horn tells this chilling narrative through the gripping voices of the island’s inhabitants, as well as the period’s officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated Nellie Bly. Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world ever seen, Blackwell’s Island quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, “a lounging, listless madhouse.”
Then, it was Blackwell’s, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals. On a two-mile stretch of land in New York’s East River, a 19th-century horror story was unfolding. Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica “A riveting character-driven dive into 19th-century New York and the extraordinary history of Blackwell’s Island.”
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