The History of Holes, Part 8: Prison, Blackwell’s Island, East River, NYC

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 886

This image shows two different forms of holes, neither being good and one being decidedly worse than the other.  It shows one of the multi-tiered decks of cells in the prison at Blackwell’s Island, a nicely designed place of hideous treatment, a thousand prisoners squeezed into a 600-foot long building on a very skinny island in the East River in New York City. 

 The island has a long history, ownership going back and forth a bit from Indians to the Dutch tio the English and to Mr. Blackwell, before being bought by the city of New York in the early 19^th century.  The prison was built in 1832, an unhappy affair followed shortly thereafter by an even unhappier thing. Blackwell was the site of America’s first publicly-funded hospital for the insane, a large stone-and-brick structure completed in 1839.  It was intended to be a showplace for the care of the mentally challenged. Dr. John McDonald, a consulting physician in the design of the Blackwell Island asylum, was more insightful and thoughtful than most of his colleagues.  Even so, his reaches into the sensitive treatment of the mentally challenged, while advanced for its day, looks painful to the modern reader. “He suggested that patients be divided into four specific classes: the ‘noisy, destructive, and violent,’ ‘the idiots,’ ‘the convalescents,’ and an intermediate class for ‘those in the first stages of convalescence and such incurables (who) are harmless and not possessed of bad habits’ “

The ideals for the hospital dissipated with its funding, and the place almost immediately slipped into the template of the standard institutionalization--even less so, as the guards are orderlies were supplied by the neighboring prison, meaning that it was criminals who were policing the “patients” at the hospital in a situation that went from bad to worse.

The prison and the insane asylum, needless to say, were bad places to be.  A famous expose was written by Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman, 1864-1922) documenting the horrendous conditions at the hospital, written after her undercover infiltration of the place.  Committed as a patient for ten days, she documented her experiences (in book form, following a series of articles that appeared in the New York World in 1887)) in Ten Days in a Mad-House¹, (published with "Miscellaneous Sketches: Trying to be a Servant," and "Nellie Bly as a White Slave), causing an enormous scandal and resulting in systemic overhauls at the hospital. 

Back to the holes:  we can clearly see the holes in the massive cell doors; on the bottom tier, though, the cell doors a re solid, which would make the cell into the dreaded “hole”. 

The hospital would receive its attentions over the decades, as would the prison, though the prison suffered longer under the weight of functional neglect, abuse, and inhuman demoralizations and abuse—and this deep into the 20^th century, so far so that John Garfield starred in a movie detailing the disgust of the place (“Blackwell’s Island”) in 1939.  The Blackwell’s Island prison proved that a hole isn’t just a hole. (Also there is more than just a slight resemblance from the inside of the prison to its exterior--a reminder of what is to be found within.)

NOTES

1. The full report is found here.  The conditions were spectacularly bad.  Bly describes, for example, her first meeting with a physician (an “insane expert”), an examination in which she felt sure to be detected—her eyes, tongue and pulse were examined, and she was simply sent on her way to the island.  After just ten days in the place, Bly felt sure that even if you weren’t crazy going in, the hospital would make you crazy in short order.  One detail that really stuck to me:  the non-violent women prisoners were all given white straw hats to wear when they went outside.  The effect of the hats, Bly wrote, was to make the women anonymous—she couldn’t tell one person from another because of the headgear, further isolating already-isolated people.  Bly was a fascinating person, a proto-feminist, socially-conscious newspaper reporter who married great wealth after she became famous.  She’s up in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, buried like any other person, and evidently went into the ground without a headstone.  A very modest marker was erected by the New York Pres Club in 1978 to stand over her grave. 

Comments

[Joy Holland]

Great stuff John. This makes me think of Julius Wilcox, a journalist who may well have known Nellie Bly as he also worked for the World newspaper, we think. He took some fine photographs of Blackwell's Island around 1892. Here they are:

http://tiny.cc/r10eD

[Joy]

I forgot to mention that I recently did a blog post about Wilcox featuring hiss photograph of "Johnny the Horse" at Blackwell's Island:
http://brooklynology.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/post/2009/12/14/Julius-Wilcox-a-man-of-many-parts.aspx

[John Ptak]

Thank you Joy! Brooklyn hits a home run, as always.

[John Ptak]

Joy: the photo of Johnny the Horse is quite something. Doesn't look much like a Hoss...the way his legs are folded over one another makes it look as though he could fold himself in half horizontally.