Smallpox Hospital Ruins

On the southern tip of Roosevelt Island — a narrow strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens — stand the Gothic Revival ruins of a hospital built to quarantine smallpox patients from the rest of New York City.

The Smallpox Hospital was designed by James Renwick Jr. and built between eighteen fifty-four and eighteen fifty-six. Renwick is the same architect who designed St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and Grace Church on Broadway. The hospital could accommodate one hundred patients — charity cases on the lower floors, paying patients in private rooms above.

The building was abandoned around nineteen fifty-six. The roof collapsed. The floors rotted away. Only the outer walls and foundation remain, standing open to the sky behind a chain-link fence. In nineteen seventy-six, it was declared a New York City landmark — described as "a romantic and picturesque ruin, evoking memories of the past." Since nineteen ninety-five, the ruins have been illuminated at night.

You can see it from the Roosevelt Island Tramway — a cable car that crosses the East River from Second Avenue and Sixtieth Street in Manhattan. The tram ride itself, which costs the same as a subway fare, gives you one of the most unusual perspectives on the city.