The Mysterious Blackwell Island Lighthouse

In 1828 New York City faced the problem of a smallpox epidemic as well as a lack of facilities for the mentally ill, convicts and debtors. The city fathers purchased the East River island on which James Blackwell ran his farm. For $32,500 they acquired adequate land to erect a smallpox hospital, an insane asylum, a debtors house and a prison.


Seven years after he had designed the breath-taking Grace Church on Broadway, James Renwick, Jr. was given the commission for the Smallpox Hospital, completed in 1850, the Workhouse, and the City Hospital. In 1872 he was consulted again, this time for a lighthouse on the northern point of the island.

Renwick designed a 50-foot tall Gothic structure using the same gray gneiss use for the other city-owned structures. The stone was quarried on site by the prisoners, greatly reducing the costs of the buildings. The octagonal lighthouse used rough-cut stones to imitate a centuries-old building; its entrance sheltered by a modest Gothic arch.

At this point the myth and the history of the Blackwell Island Lighthouse become blurred.

Two years before construction began, in 1870, the warden’s report of the Lunatic Asylum clearly indicated that an "industrious bur eccentric” inmate had constructed a well-built seawall which reclaimed marsh land. The warden commented that the patient “is very assiduous, and seems proud of his work, and he has reason to be, for it is a fine structure, strong and well built.”

Some legends contend that instead of a seawall the inmate, who feared a British invasion, built a fortress.

Whichever (if either) story is correct, the structure had to come down to make way for the lighthouse.

Traditional folklore on Roosevelt Island (the last name given to Blackwell Island) goes on to say that the inmate, John McCarthy, was bribed or paid to destruct his own fortress; and then he was given the allowance to build Renwick’s lighthouse.

The legend becomes more muddled when the name Thomas Maxey, Esq. is added to the mix. Both Maxey and McCarthy are named as the builder (Maxey was apparently also an inmate); and there is the possibility that both are the same man.

An inscription in stone at the lighthouse reads:

This is the work

Was done by

John McCarthy

Who built the Light

House from the bottom to the

Top All ye who do pass by may

Pray for his soul when he dies.

Whoever built the Blackwell Island Lighthouse did a professional job. Additionally, the concept of a single man building such a structure is difficult to accept. Nevertheless, there is no surviving documentation to confirm or refute the legend.

The lighthouse was in use (although occasionally not working) until around 1940. In the 1970s, when most of Roosevelt Island’s historic buildings were falling into disrepair, a modest restoration was done using private donations. A complete restoration was initiated in 1998 through an anonymous donation of $120,000, making the light functional again.

The mysterious lighthouse was designated a New York City Landmark in 1975, at which time the Landmarks Preservation Commission said “The rock-faced stone and the sparing uses of boldly scaled ornamental detail give the lighthouse the strength and character of a medieval fortification. In its isolated setting the lighthouse is a prominent and dramatic feature of Roosevelt Island.”

The 1796 Blackwell House - Roosevelt Island

Photo Olivier Perrin

Sitting squarely in the middle of the East River in 1637 was a lush, green island that the Dutch called Varckens Eylandt, or Hog Island. That year Governor Wouter van Twiller bought the land from two local native chiefs and within only two years it was being farmed under land grants from the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company.


Four farmers worked the land here until 1658 – Francois Fyn, Jonas Bronck (whose name became attached to the Bronx River and the borough of The Bronx), Laurens Duyts and Jan Alteras. The farmers did not fair extremely well in their two decades on the island. Laurens Duyts was ousted from the entire province for “selling his wife into immoral slavery and for gross immoralities committed by himself” and the last of these farms fell into default.

The English wrested control over New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1665, renaming it the City of New York. Two years later they took over the 107 acre Hog Island and occupied it until the end of the Revolutionary War. In 1668 British Governor Nicolls granted Captain John Manning a patent for the island.

Five years later the captain's fortunes turned. He bungled the defense of Fort James against a Dutch attack in 1673; allowing them to take possession of the fort without firing a shot. Captain Manning was disgraced at his court martial and, afterward, publicly shunned. He retreated to his private island and, apparently with the help of drink, was able to endure his self-imposed exile. One of Manning’s few visitors, the Reverend Charles Wolley, mentioned in 1701 that the captain’s “entertainment was commonly a bowl of rum-punch.”

Upon Manning’s death on February 20, 1688 his step daughter inherited Hog Island. While she and her husband, Jacob Blackwell, were there the British used it to incarcerate American prisoners of war. By 1784 Blackwell’s sons, James and Jacob, had inherited the property which by now boasted “two small Dwelling Houses, a Barn, Bake and Fowl House, a Cyder Mill, a large orchard, stone quarries and running springs.” Twelve years later James Blackwell erected his clapboard farmhouse on what was now known as Blackwell’s Island.

The 1796 home was simple and unassuming. The main house was two stories with a peaked roof punctuated by two dormers on either side. A single-story kitchen sat to one side. A simple bead board under the eaves, six-over-six windows with plain wooden frames and an unembellished doorway established the rural character of the building. A deep wooden porch running the length of the east side caught the breeze on hot summer days.

James Blackwell ran his farm until 1828 when the City of New York purchased the island for $32,500 as a site for desperately-needed institutions for the rapidly growing population. Before long the Smallpox Hospital, the Almshouse, a penitentiary and other public buildings were erected. In the meantime the Blackwell House was used to house wardens of the various facilities. At some point before the Civil War a simple, Greek Revival-style wooden pedimented porch was added to the west entrance.

Blackwell House - west entrance

Another name change for the island came in 1921 when it became Welfare Island, and again in 1972 when it was renamed Roosevelt Island. By now the house had sat abandoned and derelict for years. Porches rotted, windows were broken out and sashes smashed. Inside water, vermin and vandals were taking their toll.

The New York State Urban Development Corporation instigated a survey of structures on Roosevelt Island – one of which, the Renwick-designed Smallpox Hospital had collapsed to a ruin out of sheer neglect. Architect Giorgio Cavaglieri was commissioned to completely restore the Blackwell House.

Saved at the 11th hour, the house is now a community center and represents a fine example of 18th Century New York farm architecture.

The Gothic Ruins of Blackwell's Island

Thousands of motorists driving along the FDR Drive do a double-take when they glance across the East River to Roosevelt Island and see the brooding grey, gothic ruins across the water.  Totally out of place and time, they look more like a scene created by Emily Bronte or Mary Shelley.

Photograph by opacity.com

In the decade before the Civil War, smallpox was a deadly and terrifying disease, a "loathsome malady."  Its rapid spread among the new immigrant population and the poor resulted in more stringent isolation of the victims.  Drawing on the centuries-long tradition of quaranteening contagious victims on islands, a wooden hospital was erected on Blackwell's Island in the East River. 

The conditions were subpar, according to resident physician William Kelly, who called the hospital "a pile of poor wooden out houses on the banks of the river."  In 1850 plans were underway for a more adequate facility.

James Renwick, Jr., who had already designed the beautiful Grace Church on Broadway and in a few years would complete his masterwork, St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, drew up the plans for a new smallpox hospital.  The island would soon be filled with Renwick-designed institutions: the Workhouse, the Lighthouse, the Charity Hospital and the Smallpox Hospital.

Because the grey gneiss stone was quarried on site with labor of inmates from the Workhouse, the cost of the structure was kept at $38,000.  354 feet long and 122 feet wide, the three story hospital was topped by a crenellated cupola and could accomodate up to 1200 patients.  Visitors would enter through an impressive, heavy stone porch. 

NYPL Collection

A devastating fire necessitated the transfer of the one hundred patients of the original wooden hospital to the new building while it was still under construction.  Dr. William Sanger  assessed the unfinished building and decided it was "admirable."

Unlike the other institutions on Blackwell's Island, the Smallpox Hospital was not just for charity cases.  Because of the contagiousness of the disease, paying patients were admitted as well.  The charity cases were housed in wards on the lower floors -- men to the east, women to the west -- while the upper floor had private rooms for the paying patients.

NYPL Collection

In 1871 another smallpox epidemic raged through New York City straining the adequacy of the hospital and endangering the general population of Blackwell's Island.  A year later, 7,000 patients were being treated of whom 450 died annually. 

That year on March 3 hearings were held on the corruption and mismanagement of the Smallpox Hospital.  Patients received little or no care without paying the nurses or doctors.  Relatives of the deceased were extorted a fee for a last look at the dead.  Former patients and relatives lined up tell stories of the horrors endured there.

Margaret Rich testified that "washing was impossible as more than a cup of water could not be obtained except by payment."  Although her husband regularly brought food, she "never saw an apple, an orange or a cake in the Hospital," and "The nurses were nearly always drunk, and none of the night nurses were ever sober."

A new facility was built on North Brother's Island and in 1875 the Board of Health took charge of the Renwick building.  It was converted to the Home for the Nurses and the Maternity and Charity Hospital Training School.

NYPL Collection

In 1904 the large south wing was added. The architects York and Sawyer admirably blended it to Renwick's original design making the addition nearly seamless.  A year later a matching north wing was added by Renwick, Aspinwall & Owen, the successor firm to James Renwick, Jr., creating a U-shaped complex.

By the 1950s the buildings on what was now known as Welfare Island were becoming obselete.  New, modern facilities were erected in Queens and the grey, stone Renwick Smallpox Hospital was abandoned.  Empty, with no maintenance and left to vandals and the weather, the hospital rapidly deteriorated.  A decade later, with no floors or roof, it was in serious danger of collapse.   The Landmarks Preservation Commission deemed it worthy of preservation and the New York State Urban Development Corporation hired architect Giorgio Cavaglieri to direct efforts to reinforce the walls.

Despite this, in 2008 a section of wall collapsed, drawing the wrath of preservationists.  Speaking to The New York Times, Peg Breen, President of the New York Landmarks Conservancy said “This is a real failure of stewardship. They shouldn’t get by, saying, ‘We don’t have enough money’ or ‘It’s too late.’ They should bring in the cavalry and fix this important landmark.”

A chain-link fence surrounds the property today and climbing vines cover its stone walls.  It has become a romantic, picturesque ruin on par with any found in an English setting.  On November 25, 1975 the Smallpox Hospital ruins were designated landmark status -- the only such structure so designated.




Photograph opacity.com

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