Bloomingdale Asylum was a project that grew out of New York Hospital, that was intended to be a site of "moral treatment," a more humane approach to the care of mental illness than the dominant punitive, carceral approach (short thread, I guess): https://mhdh.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/bloomingdaleasylum https://twitter.com/cyreejarelle/status/1247140958241796096
The idea was that a care facility should be designed for the comfort, nurture and health of its patients to alleviate suffering, rather than punishment, imprisonment or control - it was a relatively recent concept
But very quickly the directors of the Bloomingdale Asylum, located where Columbia University is now, realized that the wealthy patients they relied on to fund the asylum didn't want to be side by side with "pauper" patients, and the asylum was supposedly open to all
They resorted to keeping "pauper" patients in decidedly un-"moral" conditions in the asylum's cellars, and the more inconvenient patients (those deemed violent, or loud) imprisoned in external "lodges" out of sight behind the main asylum building
It's another subject, but luckily for the asylum's directors, Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) soon opened and constructed a penitentiary, workhouse, hospital, almshouse and asylum (they always go together!) to take the city's inconvenient populations
Blackwell's Island Asylum was also originally, at least partially, intended to be a site of "moral treatment," and the second resident physician of Bloomingdale advised its architects
But the initial construction of the asylum on Blackwell's Island was only half of the design, and was immediately filled to capacity as soon as it opened. Any pretense of "moral treatment" was immediately abandoned
Blackwell's Island's institutional complex, which eventually fell under the NYC Department of Public Charities and Correction (worth considering why those things were ideologically linked!), is the direct predecessor of Rikers Island
New York Herald Tribune, Feb 8, 1936, h/t @MAHGAHN - Riker's Island will be the "last word in modern penology:"
(Blackwell's Island was renamed Welfare Island in 1921, in a bit of Progressive Era propaganda)
It's incredible now, as the city's answer to horrific conditions on Riker's Island is to close the island and simply open more jails, to look back on the very same discourse taking place as the horrifying Blackwell's Island complex was shuttered in 1936
Some of the information in this thread I took from a pop history about Roosevelt Island called Damnation Island, by Stacy Horn. I recommend it with reservations
I'm looking for better academic sources about Blackwell's Island, and carceral history that also includes hospitals, workhouses, almshouses and asylums, so if you happen on this thread and know of any, please recommend them.
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