Renwick Smallpox Hospital

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The year is 1856.
You are huddled with hundreds of sick people on a ferry along the East river.
The distant foghorn blasts 3 times and as you push yourself closer to the edge of the boat, the mist begins to lift and reveal land and a castle…
People are there to greet you, people and crates.
Actually those aren’t crates, they are coffins, they are definitely occupied and there are hundreds of them.

This was the scene at the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, which was located at the southern tip of Blackwell Island, halfway between Manhattan and Queens.

Designed by the architectural genius, James Renwick Jr., the hospital was built for the modest sum of $35,000 from 1854-6. Of course, it’s easy to keep your overhead low when you have free labor from the island’s prison population and a quarry of gray gneiss at your doorstep.

James Renwick Jr. entered Columbia at the ripe age of 12, and was a major player in the Gothic revival period. His first commission was New York’s Grace Episcopal Church and he continued his amazing career by designing St Patrick’s Cathedral, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institutional Building among others.

The Renwick Smallpox Hospital was the first in the nation to accept patients with this plague or other contagious diseases like scarlet fever, measles, and typhus. It was built to hold a few dozen patients, but from the beginning it was severely overcrowded. Records indicate that it treated 3000-4000 patients in the 1850’s and over 6,000 during the 1860’s. If you were rich and sick, $1 a day would get you onto the top two floors. If you were poor, you were relegated to the first two floors, where several patients would be assigned to one bed in truly appalling conditions. $5 extra a week got you marginally better food, but the percentage of people to walk out Renwick’s doors cured was barely over 60%.

The Renwick Hospital became known as Deadhouse and The Pest House because of the thousands of coffins it ushered out its doors. Even though there was a cure for smallpox in the early 1800’s, it was expensive and 1 out of 100 would die from the vaccine itself. George Washington survived the smallpox disease, and Lincoln battled a mild case 2 days after giving the Gettysburg address.

Over time, and with the decline of this disease, the hospital was expanded and turned into a very respectful nurse’s training facility. However, Renwick’s Hospital was feeling the weight of its years and was seriously antiquated by the 1950’s and starting to crumble in the 60’s. In those years there were very few preservationist groups and few landmarked buildings, but by the 1970’s the Renwick Smallpox Hospital was officially declared a Landmark.

An anonymous donor in 1993 had floodlights installed to cast an eerie evening glow onto the facade of the Hospital. Spectacular views of “Manhattan’s Castle” can be seen at night driving along East side river or flying into LaGuardia Airport.

Since moving here in 2001, I have been fascinated with this building and have tried to shoot it. However, walls and barbed wire fences have been most prohibitive. In late January 2008, a good friend and fellow pinholer, Tom Persinger suggested a Smallpox Hospital Photo Shoot. His father lives on the the former Blackwell Island, now called Roosevelt Island, and said the southern tip was quite accessible. The State is currently in the process of a $12.9 million ‘Phase One’ project to stabilize the Renwick ruins and build a public park and have already landscaped pathways at the southern end of the Island. This project is trying to be sped up due to the collapse of Renwick’s north wall on December 26 of 2007.

So Tom and I ventured out on a cold afternoon with the talented Holga and Zone plate phenom, Erin Malone. There’s a chain-link fence surrounding the Smallpox Hospital and I, of course, quickly found a not so legal way around it. Not much was left inside the Hospital but piles of bricks and plenty of trees. The facade, the framework, was really all that remained. I was having some technical difficulties shooting that day and vowed to come back…at night.

I went on a scouting mission on February 6th, 2008 to see if it was even accessible at night. The sun was setting by the time I arrived at 5:30pm. The main gate to the southern tip of the island was over 10′ tall and had barbed wire, but it was open. With tripod and my new Canon G9 in hand I quickly rushed down the 60+ yards to the Hospital. I didn’t want to break in at night, I just chose to shoot through the fence and test the exposures. The floodlights were bathing the Hospital in what seemed like white light but my camera was reading as eerie shades of blue and green.

An hour later I was still shooting when the cop car drove up beside me, “We closing up bossman” said the driver.
What? Bossman? I wasn’t being arrested?
Technically, I wasn’t trespassing.
I asked the cop what time they shut down the park to which he replied, “Around sunset, or when it starts to get dangerous.”
“Dangerous?!” I replied, “Well, thanks for the warning.” and started to walk back towards the gate.
Unfortunately the gate was now closed and locked.
Uhmmm… I definitely was assessing the situation and it didn’t look good. But then the cop car came back around from doing his loop and thankfully unlocked the gate.

The next week I returned with my fellow Nocturnalist, Andre Costantini, who was featured previously here with our Red Hook Night shoot.
As luck would have it, February 12th, 2008, was one of the few days in which it snowed in the city. Did that deter Andre and me? Hell no! We arrived at 5pm, set up, and witnessed an amazing sunset through the snow clouded night. It was truly spectacular, and the images featured here are the best of both or our work from that evening.
(Click on each of the photographs above to see the artist and larger image size and details.)

It truly was a great shoot under the aura of this ancient castle. Of course the same cop, Ray, came to get us at 7pm, “We are closing up bossman.” he said again from the police car. Because I knew the drill and it was cold outside, I asked Ray if he could give us a lift to the train station which was a 5 minutes drive away. “Come on in, did you get some good shots tonight?” Ray asked as Andre and I jumped into the cop car and headed home.

(Historic information regarding this blog was taken from several of Jami Bernard’s articles from Roosevelt Island’s Independent newspaper, Main St WIRE and from the Roosevelt Island Historic Society.)

the end of youngtown road

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How far back does it go?
20 years ago my family bought a couple acres of land on this dirt road, in a small summer town named Alton; population 3,000 in the winter, 5,000 in the summer. Alton is located at the southern tip of Lake Winnipesauke, the largest lake in New Hampshire. For the enthusiast, there are plenty of outdoor activities like skiing, hiking, camping, etc. Besides the lake and mountains, the region is also known for being the setting of the book, Peyton Place.
When we moved up here from Boston, I left a graduating class of 500+ for an all time high of 54 at Alton Central High School. And when I told classmates that I lived on Youngstown road, they would whisper back, “The one with the haunted house at the end?”
We lived in the last house on the left. Only a wooden plank, with Youngstown Road painted on it, marked the dirt road. This ill-marked entrance was easy to miss as it was hidden up the hill and behind the bend. It was a quiet street, about a mile long, and ended at a makeshift wooden barrier. Beyond, the road became almost entirely overgrown; the woods seemed to push you along until it emptied out onto this open field.
An abandoned Matador car lay in a heap to the left, an ancient tree to the right, and in the middle of the meadow the 200-year-old farmhouse stared down at you.
It definitely looked eerie.
You couldn’t see the house from ours, the woods were too thick, but you knew it was there. As a big brother, I used to scare my sisters with talks of summoning the ghosts and monsters of the house.
It wasn’t until later, when I was into photography and playing with plastic Holga cameras, that I overcame my own fears and visited the house again.
It was the perfect ruin.
Peaking inside the windows revealed the years gone by: pots still on the stove, clothes hanging on the door, and did that curtain just move?
I never went in.
I was often times by myself in the meadow; the only sound was me trudging through the snow or mud as I took photos of this lonely place.
My younger sister told me later that she and some of her friends broke in. She was pretty spooked being inside, it must have been a serious dare. Inside they found a diary. It was the typical turn of the century talk of taking the horses down to town and how she missed her husband. No talks of spirits, but you could definitely feel them.

Youngstown became paved 13+ years ago and when they put a real street sign at the beginning of the road it now read Youngtown Road. The mile long street had now grown from 6 houses to 12.
Three years ago, my mother called to tell me that a family had purchased the house at the end of Youngtown road and the surrounding 200+ acres of land.
I was surprised and sad, for it was my secret little ruin no more.

On one of my next visits the Matador had been removed, and the house’s chipped paint was gone. The family that had purchased it was very keen to keep the original structure of the farmhouse. In fact the owners, Angie and Bob, talked about keeping the land as a nature reserve and offering camping sites for visitors.
In a small town, people look after each other. Even though my sisters were only 20-30 minutes away, my parents lived alone and it was nice to have life at the end of the road. That’s just what Angie and Bob did with my folks, especially helping them remove the snow that can bury the houses in the winter months of Northern New Hampshire.
During the first year of renovating, Angie and Bob invited my mother and I into the house. They really loved “this old house” and had heard that I had taken many pictures of it. Along with their 8-year-old daughter, Cassie, they gave us a tour. The house was barren inside. Gone were ancient artifacts of its previous owners. It was now clean and fortified. They weren’t living there yet but they talked excitedly about the whole renovation process. There was no talk of the house being haunted.
It seemed like the ghosts were gone.

Until Friday.
Sometime before 7am, shots were heard in the woods.
Cassie, was running through the woods, leaving a trail of blood that led to my parent’s door.
Her mother had shot her father.
She had tried to shoot her daughter, claiming the spirits were making her do it.
In the end, she took her own life.

It was a shock to my family, to the people of Alton, and Cassie…how do you survive?
We will forever wonder what went wrong at the end of Youngtown Road. Will the house continue to stand, hiding the secrets in its old beams, to be told only to those who listen in the silence of the night?

The Holy Grail of Photography, Darkness Darkness, and 20×200

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The father of war photography, Robert Capa, has finally come home. Over 3,500 negatives dating from 1936 –1939 and taken during the Spanish Civil War have been found. Thought lost during the Nazi invasion, the negatives are in surprisingly good condition. They have been transferred to the Capa Estate and are in the hands of the International Center of Photography as they decide how to archive them.
Capa, whose famous mantra was “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was never a man to hang on the sidelines. The swashbuckling photographer also created the most important photo agency of our time, Magnum.
Magnum revolutionized the Photography Industry by becoming one of the first photography agencies that let the photographers control the rights to their negatives. A standard we now take for granted.
Thanks to Tim Atherton for posting this news.
You can read the full NY Times article here.

In other news, photos by Joe Reifer and Andy Frazer were accepted into a Contemporary Night Photography exhibit titled Darkness Darkness. It opens on March 18th in Cambridge, Mass. Did I mention it is at Harvard? Congrats guys for making it in!
The show looks phenomenal, a literal Who’s Who in the Night Photography World. For a preview and more info click here.

Finally, looking for good cheap art? Check out the 20×200 online gallery.
Every Tuesday and Wednesday they feature 2 new pieces of work from two artists, one photo and one work on paper. Each image is available in 3 sizes with the smallest size being reprinted the largest batch, an edition of 200, for 20 bucks. 20×200 features a lot of new artists but as usual, good art goes quick, especially for $20.