Smallpox Hospital ruins

The Smallpox Hospital was built by the prisoners it neighbored — Blackwell's Island inmates quarried, cut, and laid the stone for James Renwick Jr.'s Gothic Revival building between 1854 and 1856, the first major hospital in the country dedicated to the 'speckled monster.' The wards took charity cases on the lower floors and paying patients above; the disease didn't respect the distinction, and neither did the island — the prison, the almshouse, the lunatic asylum, and the hospital all stood on the same two-mile rock in the East River.

The hospital ran for two decades — through the Civil War waves of sick soldiers and immigrants, through the 1871 epidemic — before the city moved the patients and turned the building into a nursing school, one of the first in the country. It was abandoned in the 1950s and burned in the seventies; what's left is the stone shell the Landmarks Commission called 'a picturesque ruin, one which could readily serve as the setting for a 19th-century Gothick romance.'

The ruin is the only landmarked ruin in New York — a designation made in 1976 specifically to keep the walls standing as a ruin, floodlit at night in green. The city stabilized it in the 2000s; the Gothic tracery, the crenellated parapets, the pointed-arch windows stand empty against the Manhattan skyline, the architectural equivalent of the disease it held: spectacular and gone.

What the ruin holds isn't a ghost story — it's the memory of what Blackwell's Island was: the place New York put the things it didn't want to see, the madhouse and the penitentiary and the smallpox dead, in a building Renwick designed to be beautiful because even quarantine deserved architecture.