Book Talk Discussion About Roosevelt Island's Dark & Macabre History With Damnation Island Author Stacy Horn Wednesday October 30 Presented By Roosevelt Island Historical Society And Friends Of The Upper East Side Historic District - $15 For Members, 25 For Non Members

On 10/30, 6PM, I’m giving a talk about Roosevelt Island’s dark history (the subject of my recent book) in one of the few remaining 19th cent. buildings on the island: the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. pic.twitter.com/HNjXpFCsJS

— Stacy Horn (@StacyHorn) October 26, 2019

The Roosevelt Island Historical Society and Friends of the Upper East Side Historic District are co-sponsoring a talk about Roosevelt Island's dark history by Damnation Island author Stacy Horn on October 30 at the Good Shepherd Community Center (543 Main Street).

According to the Friends Of The Upper East Side Historic District:

Join us on Roosevelt Island, just steps from the ruin of James Renwick’s Small Pox Hospital, as Stacy Horn, author of Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th-Century New York, takes us into the area’s macabre past, sharing insight from her new book.

From 1839, when the New York City Lunatic Asylum opened, to 1936 when Damnation Island was finally defunct, Roosevelt Island, then known as Blackwell’s, was home to a host of infamous institutions. We’ll find out how this sliver of land in the East River was filled with prisons, asylums, hospitals and almshouses, hear accounts of those who were held there, and learn how muckrakers and reformers from Charles Dickens to Nellie Bly helped expose the “naked ugliness and horror” of those institutions, beginning a reform movement for compassionate mental health care and social welfare that continues to this day.

Further light on that positive shift will be shed by historian Judith Berdy, the President of the Roosevelt Island historical society, who will share the history of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, and its benevolent founder, the Reverend William Glenney French.

Wednesday, October 30th 6:00 p.m.

$15 FRIENDS and RIHS members, $25 non-members

To verify your current membership status, please call 212-535-2526

or email us at info@friends-ues.org.

Click HERE to register

Here's a 2018 NY Public Library interview with Damnation Island author Stacy Horn about Roosevelt Island's dark history.

This week's episode of The NYPL Podcast features @StacyHorn discussing her book, Damnation Island, which looks into the dark past of Blackwell's—now known as Roosevelt Island. Horn also walks us through the NYPL archives used to write this chilling story. https://t.co/c8ckY2R1aB

— NY Public Library (@nypl) June 6, 2018