ten tragic tales of New York City’s small islands begin with the iconic Manhattan, but beyond the bustling borough lie dozens of diminutive landforms whose histories are steeped in sorrow.
ten tragic tales Overview
10 A Pox on Thee: Roosevelt Island’s Ruins
Few illnesses have left as deep a scar on humanity as smallpox. The disease claimed the lives of France’s King Louis XV and forced England’s Queen Elizabeth I to conceal disfiguring facial wounds with heavy makeup. In the United States, an estimated ninety percent of Native Americans perished after contracting the virus from European settlers, some of whom even used infected blankets as a crude form of biological warfare.
The World Health Organization finally declared smallpox eradicated in 1979, but not before the contagion made a grim imprint on New York’s own medical history.
Roosevelt Island is a narrow, two‑mile stretch sandwiched between Manhattan and Queens, boasting its own subway stop, a famed tram that once carried Spider‑Man, a handful of residential towers, and a technical campus of Cornell University. At its southern tip sit two starkly contrasting structures: a meticulously maintained park honoring Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the crumbling remnants of a nineteenth‑century hospital where smallpox patients were isolated from the rest of the city.
From 1856 through 1875 the facility—now known as Renwick Hospital after its architect—treated roughly seven thousand patients annually. Over two decades nearly ten thousand of those sufferers succumbed to the disease within its walls.
As the island’s residential population swelled, city officials relocated the smallpox ward to the even more remote North Brothers Island, leaving the original site increasingly underused.
By the 1950s the once‑busy Renwick Hospital lay abandoned, its structures succumbing to decay and the elements as the city moved on.
9 Randall’s/Ward’s Islands: Fun Present, Dysfunctional Past
A mile north of Roosevelt Island sits Randall’s Island, a shorter yet broader piece of land where Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx converge, accessible via the Robert F. Kennedy (formerly Triborough) Bridge. Today the island is best known for bustling concert venues, a popular mini‑golf course, and a myriad of sports fields used by city schools for soccer, baseball, and football practice.
That lively reputation masks a darker heritage. For many decades the city used the island as a holding ground for its most marginalized populations—those who were poor, ill, or institutionalized. Officials treated the surrounding river as a natural moat, earning the moniker “Island of Undesirables” for the area.
In reality, the nickname originally applied to its neighbor. Randall’s itself was split off by an artificial waterway called Little Hell Gate Channel, creating the secondary parcel known as Ward’s Island. Though less than a square mile, Ward’s housed the terminally ill, criminally insane, and juvenile delinquents, alongside a notorious orphanage and a potter’s field. The island even contained a sewage‑treatment plant, earning it a less‑than‑flattering reputation.
Reconnected in the 1960s, the two islands have gradually shed much of their grim past. The former asylum site now functions as the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, a facility that, while still serious, is far less decrepit than its predecessor.
8 Made for Quarantining: Hoffman & Swinburne Islands
Even though the Statue of Liberty’s famous inscription has welcomed “tired, poor, huddled masses” since 1876, New York City historically tried very hard to keep contagious newcomers at bay. Just south of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge, which links Brooklyn to Staten Island, sit two tiny man‑made islands—Hoffman and Swinburne—created in 1873 and 1870 respectively.
Before Ellis Island opened its doors in 1892, immigrants suspected of carrying disease were processed at Castle Garden on Manhattan’s southern tip. When those suspected of infection arrived, the city sent them to Staten Island, which at the time was not part of the city proper. To better isolate them, the city filled in land to fashion two quarantine islands: the larger Hoffman for asymptomatic carriers, and the smaller Swinburne for those showing symptoms.
The islands functioned as a miniature petri dish, separating the healthy from the ill. Remarkably, only about a dozen deaths were recorded there, including that of a physician. During World War I, Swinburne’s hospital treated American soldiers afflicted with venereal disease.
Today both islands lie uninhabited, serving as bird sanctuaries within the Gateway National Recreation Area, their decaying structures silently testifying to a bygone era of disease control.
7 What’s in a Name? Rat Island
A half‑mile off the Bronx’s causeway‑connected City Island, in Long Island Sound, sits a tiny 2½‑acre rock known as Rat Island. The origin of its unflattering name remains murky, with three plausible stories competing for credibility.
The most mundane explanation points to navigation. Because the island sits between the larger City Island and Hart Island, early mariners may have used rattles—hence “Rat”—as audible warnings to alert night‑time vessels of nearby shoals. This theory is championed by the island’s current owner, Alex Schibli, who suggests “Rat” shortens “rattle.”
A more colorful tale recalls the 1800s typhoid scares, when the island hosted a modest 40‑person quarantine hospital. Back then, it fell under the jurisdiction of Pelham and earned the nickname “Pelham Pesthouse.” The influx of sick people inevitably attracted vermin, giving rise to the moniker Rat Island.
The most intriguing story links the name to the nearby prison on Hart Island. In the nineteenth century, guards referred to inmates as “rats.” Escaping prisoners would swim toward City Island, using the tiny islet as a resting point—sometimes even disguising themselves with boxes to look like floating debris—earning the spot its infamous name.
6 Smallest & Oddest: U Thant Island
On August 28, 1973, New York subway riders experienced a nightmare when a concrete slab in the Steinway Tunnel collapsed, killing one passenger and trapping over a thousand commuters in searing heat and smoke for more than an hour. The tunnel, named for the piano‑making Steinway family of Astoria, Queens, had already endured a fatal explosion in the 1880s that bankrupted its contractor.When the tunnel finally survived, the debris that fell into the East River formed a 200‑by‑100‑foot mound of earth, originally called Belmont Island after the project’s chief financier.
Unbeknownst to most, the tiny island later fell within the sightline of the United Nations headquarters, completed in 1948. In 1972, activists declared it “Soviet Jewry Freedom Island” and occupied it for two‑and‑a‑half hours to protest Soviet emigration restrictions.
Five years later, followers of spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy, who served as the UN’s interfaith chaplain, leased the land and renamed it after Burmese former UN Secretary‑General U Thant, a close friend of Chinmoy. The island now hosts a modest “oneness arch” displaying personal items belonging to Thant.
5 Fake Island, Real Damage: The Black Tom Explosion
In 1916, while the United States had not yet entered World War I, the nation’s industrial might supplied vast quantities of munitions to Allied forces. Most of these shipments left from a man‑made island in New Jersey’s Hudson River known as Black Tom, allegedly named after a local fisherman of darker complexion.
Black Tom featured a bustling railroad hub perched on a treacherous rock that made navigation hazardous. On July 30, 1916, German saboteurs detonated a massive charge among the two million tons of war material awaiting shipment.
The blast registered between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale, shattering windows up to twenty‑five miles away, cracking the outer wall of Jersey City’s City Hall, and sending shrapnel that tore a hole in the Statue of Liberty’s skirt. Nearby Ellis Island was evacuated, seven people lost their lives, and the explosion caused roughly $20 million in damage.
This act of sabotage, combined with German submarine warfare and attempts to enlist Mexico against the United States, helped push America into the war the following year. Today Black Tom is part of Liberty State Park, which later served as a massive triage center after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
4 Just Offal: NYC’s Smelliest Island
Before the city became known for subways and taxis, it was a horse‑powered metropolis. By 1900, an estimated two hundred‑thousand horses roamed the streets, a fact that explains why many historic brownstones feature stairs leading to the front door—no one wanted to step out onto a floor slick with horse manure.
When these horses died, their bodies were rendered into glue and fertilizer. Between 1850 and 1930, the majority of this processing occurred on a narrow strip off Brooklyn’s southeast shoreline called Barren Island. The resulting runoff of decaying animal matter gave birth to the infamous “Dead Horse Bay,” a name that endures to this day.
Around 1900, the same tract was repurposed as a municipal trash dump. By 1930 the landfill reached capacity, was capped, and left to rot. In 1950 the cap failed, allowing slower‑degrading debris—especially glass bottles—to surface, creating a bizarre juxtaposition known as “Glass Bottle Beach.”
For years, treasure hunters scoured the shoreline, hoping to uncover vintage artifacts among the refuse. However, last year authorities shut off public access after detecting elevated levels of radioactivity in the area.
3 Among America’s Worst: Riker’s Island
The island synonymous with incarceration in New York City was not always the notorious prison complex it is today. Originally owned by Dutch settler Abraham Rycken, who bought the land in 1664, the island remained in the Rycken family until the city purchased it for $180,000 in 1884.
During the Civil War, the island served as a training ground for New York troops. Its fortunes turned in 1925 when city officials, seeking to replace the overcrowded and dilapidated prison on what was then called Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), selected Riker’s as the new site for a modern correctional facility.
At the time of the prison’s opening in 1932, the island was already a dumping ground. By 1930, roughly 1.5 million cubic yards of refuse—more than the debris displaced to build the original World Trade Center—had been piled there, much of it coal ash that sparked spontaneous phosphorescent fires.
Today Riker’s houses ten separate city jails, ranging from minimum‑security to maximum‑security facilities. Until recently, many detainees were low‑level offenders unable to afford bail, languishing in the city’s notoriously backlogged courts.
2 A Mile Long, a Million Dead: Hart Island
Just a half‑mile east of the more populated City Island lies Hart Island, a mile‑long, one‑third‑mile‑wide parcel that arguably bears the most macabre history of any New York City landmass.
The island first entered public use in 1864 as training grounds for Black Union troops during the Civil War. That same year, a prison camp for Confederate POWs was added after Union leaders refused to exchange Black prisoners, prompting a halt to prisoner swaps.
Over the ensuing decades Hart Island hosted a tuberculosis sanitarium, a jail, a homeless shelter, and a boys’ reformatory. Its most infamous role, however, was as a potter’s field, where the remains of over a million individuals—unclaimed, indigent, or disease‑ridden—were interred in shallow mass graves.
Burials continue today, albeit at a reduced rate of roughly 1,500 per year. Inmates from nearby Riker’s Island perform the gravedigging, meaning prisoners literally dig the final resting places for the city’s dead.
Recently, a concerted effort has begun to identify as many of those buried on Hart Island as possible, featuring an interactive map that tracks progress and honors the countless forgotten souls.
1 Hart‑breaking: Hart Island, COVID & AIDS
In the previous entry we noted that Hart Island’s burial rate had slowed—until March 2020, when the COVID‑19 pandemic flooded New York City with unprecedented numbers of deaths. The city’s morgues quickly overflowed, forcing officials to store bodies in massive freezer trucks and other improvised facilities.
By March 2021, officials projected that one in ten COVID victims in the city would be laid to rest on Hart Island. Media outlets displayed haunting images of workers in protective gear digging shallow graves, as 2,300 adults were interred there in 2020—2.5 times the 2019 figure and a full 1,000 more than the peak year of the AIDS crisis in 1988.
The year 1988 marked the height of AIDS‑related deaths in New York. Starting in 1985, the city began shipping its AIDS victims to Hart Island, burying them in a secluded section of the potter’s field and using deeper graves—several feet of earth—rather than the customary three‑foot depth.
Hart Island holds only one marked grave: a modest concrete slab commemorating the city’s first pediatric AIDS victim, inscribed simply with “SC (special child) B1 (Baby 1) 1985.”
These intertwined tragedies—COVID‑19 and AIDS—underscore Hart Island’s enduring role as the final resting place for New York’s most vulnerable, cementing its reputation as a somber testament to the city’s hidden histories.