The miles of cable that now lay unseen somewhere beneath their feet were making some people nervous. Workers for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company had spent more than a year ripping up the streets of lower Manhattan. Damnation Island shows how far we’ve come in caring for the least fortunate among us-and reminds us how much work still remains. And we follow the extraordinary Reverend William Glenney French as he ministers to Blackwell’s residents, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Department of Correction and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. We also hear from the era’s officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated undercover reporter Nellie Bly. Agent: Amy Hughes, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.“Enthralling it is well worth the trip.” - New York Journal of BooksĬonceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York’s Blackwell’s Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, “a lounging, listless madhouse.” Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island’s inhabitants. Horn has created a bleak but worthwhile depiction of institutional failure, with relevance for persistent debates over the treatment of the mentally ill and incarcerated. The anecdotal rather than linear narrative approach captures the drama of the island’s inmates, but can make understanding the chronology challenging. Rogers in exposing the mistreatment of the confined tragic tales of young prisoners, like teenaged pickpocket Adelaide Irving, imprisoned for relatively minor crimes and never able to fully recover from her time there and truly nightmarish accounts of medical experimentation, including brain surgery administered under (ineffective) hypnosis rather than anesthesia. Episodes include the heroic muckraking efforts of journalists Nellie Bly and William P. Using the institutions that populated the island as an organizing principle, Horn selects colorful stories of individuals confined in the asylum, workhouse, hospital, almshouse, and penitentiary. Horn ( Imperfect Harmony) creates a vivid and at times horrifying portrait of Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) in New York City’s East River during the late 19th century.
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