Ten Fascinating Locations in Old New York, Part Two

In my novel, A Predator's Game, set in 1896, my characters, Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle, visit several noteworthy sites in New York and the surrounding areas. These locations range from the exotic to the macabre. In my previous post, I presented The American Tract Society Building, The Suicide Curves of the Ninth Avenue El, and The American Museum of Natural History. Today, I will deal with the fringes of Old New York and how the city handled its dead and mentally ill.


The Locations.

In today's post.
Location #7. The Bellevue Morgue.
Location #6. Hart Island.
Location #5. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.


In a future post:
Location #4. Tesla's Laboratory on East Houston.
Location #3. The Eden Musée.
Location #2. The Adams Power Station.
Location #1. Goat Island and Terrapin Point, Niagara Falls.

7. The Bellevue Morgue.

The Bellevue Hospital complex resided along the border of the East River. This included the hospital and psychiatric institution to the north and the city morgue on the southern end. Here is its description from the book:

The Bellevue morgue served the entire city of Manhattan, handling eight thousand corpses a year. Situated by the East River, it lay south of its namesake hospital and mental ward, and was housed in an imposing building. Long, broad, and a single story, it stood as a virtual bunker.

Here are the totals of the traffic of bodies as detailed in the 1896 Annual Report.

From the State Charities Aid Association's Report on the Department of Public Charities of New York City, 1896

For the bodies that landed in the morgue, 48 hours were given for relatives to claim them or else they were shipped out to be buried in mass graves on Hart Island. With no system for notification, less than half of the bodies were claimed. Conveniently, the ferry to Hart Island docked just outside the back door.

Selling the dead to medical schools was a profitable venture and the high demand ensured that most corpses were obtained illegally. From time to time, the morgue had scandals regarding trafficking cadavers and skeletons. In 1896, scandals at Bellevue Hospital and the morgue came to a head, resulting in the dismissal of the long time keeper of the morgue, Captain Albert N. White.

Identifying bodies in the Bellevue Morgue

6. Hart Island

Hart Island is one of the most fascinating and troubling pieces of New York history. It is a small, flat island set at the northeastern extreme of what, in 1898, became the city. It became the repository for every aspect for which the city wanted to turn a blind eye. Over the years portions have been used as an internment camp for war prisoners, a boy's reformatory, a woman's workhouse, a sanatorium, a penitentiary, and a silo for nuclear missiles.

In its ongoing function from the 1860s through today, it has served as New York City's pauper's graveyard. Over one million individuals have been buried on its land, their coffins deposited like refuse in long ditches. For one hundred fifty years, prisoners have been used as the burial detail. I suppose I have strong feelings about this as voiced in my novel by Captain McEvoy of the Fidelity.

We launch out on two trips a day. In the afternoon we gather up the bodies from all the islands and their institutions, everyone who was terminally reformed. We haul 'em off to the Bellevue morgue. Those corpses stay two days to fester them up a bit and in hopes someone will claim them. Only as part of a sick joke, no one gets told they are there. So each morning we cart away the ripened from a previous harvest. Packed in the cheapest of coffins, we haul them off to the cemetery at Hart's Island. Only it's not a cemetery, it's a wasteyard, where the coffins get piled one on top of the other in vast pits. Not even St. Peter with his Book of Life could sort out their bones.

People ask me if ferrying bodies don’t give me the chills. The rot of dead flesh don’t do nothing to affright me. It's better than the rot of the living—the cheap bastards who tally up the cost of every grain of rice and strip the names from the dead to save a squeezed penny. I fear those dead souls in Tammany who’s got the power to transform humans into rubbish.

Prisoners on the grave detail, Hart Island. April 1, 1900, New York Tribune.

The coffins placed in ditches. April 1, 1900, New York Tribune

Captain McEvoy aboard the good ship Fidelity docked at Hart Island. April 1, 1900, New York Tribune.

The Hart Island Project is dedicated to making the public aware of the ongoing burials on Hart Island and to provide a memorial for the more recently buried.

Location #5. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.

To investigate the conditions at the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum, the intrepid reporter Nellie Bly had herself locked up as a patient. The scandalous conditions and the resulting sensational stories prompted the shutting down of the facility and in early 1896 the State Lunacy Commission opened the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane on Wards Island. With 4,400 patients it became the most-populated psychiatric hospital in the world. Among its famous occupants, Scott Joplin would die there in 1917.

Ward's Island. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane is on the right.

1897 Photo of the East Building

Continued in Part Three.

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Nikola Tesla, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Henry H. Holmes are all characters in my thriller, A Predator's Game.

A Predator's Game is available in soft-cover and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers.

A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

Martin Hill Ortiz, also writing under the name, Martin Hill, is the author of A Predatory Mind. Its sequel, set in 1890s Manhattan and titled A Predator's Game, features Nikola Tesla as detective.

Continue reading →

Ten Fascinating Locations in Old New York, Part One.

One of the joys of writing my novel, A Predator's Game, involved immersing myself in the Manhattan of 1896. With so many exotic locations, I was able to pick the best to set the scenes of my story.

Background.

In 1896, Manhattan and New York City were one and the same. The consolidation that would include the five boroughs took place in 1898. This was also several years before construction of the subway system had begun. Although no underground trains existed, there was an extensive system of overhead trains. Most trolleys were pulled by horses, with a single cable car traveling up and down Broadway and one on the Brooklyn Bridge. The latter converted to electric-power that year.

With the invention of the elevator and improvements in construction techniques, a new sort of building, the skyscraper, started going up all over the place and the tallest building one month would soon be overtaken the next.

The Ten Locations.

Location #10: The American Tract Society Building.
Location #9:  The Suicide Curves of the Ninth Avenue El.
Location #8: The American Museum of Natural History.
(to be continued with:)
Location #7. The Bellevue Morgue.
Location #6. Hart Island.
Location #5. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.
Location #4. Tesla's Laboratory on East Houston.
Location #3. The Eden Musée.
Location #2. The Adams Power Station.
Location #1. Goat Island and Terrapin Point, Niagara Falls.

Location #10. The American Tract Society Building.

A background theme of my story is the perils of technology. The appearance of tall buildings were a source of wonderment in the 1890s: evidence of unrelenting progress while at the same time changing the public's concept of the city, suddenly there was such a thing as a vertical landscape. I searched for a building that would describe both the awe and the shock of the new, firmly planted in the 19th century but calling out to the future.

From the book:

  As inventors of the religious pamphlet, the American Tract Society delivered the Good News to the masses. . . . The Society decided to construct their own Tower of Babel nearby City Hall and Newspaper Row and not far from the launching point of the Brooklyn Bridge, perfectly positioned as a prestigious address and guaranteeing them a regular income as landlords. ...

  When completed in August of 1895, the American Tract Society building stood twenty-three floors, its roof higher than any building in the city save those with steeples. Its elevators gave a jolt when they shot the passengers up to the heavens at an alarming speed and made a terrifying drop when they returned them to earth. Or else they simply crashed.

Deaths in elevators and deaths in falling from man-made heights were new and exotic fears and the Tract Society received bad publicity from both with articles published in the local papers, The Engineering News and The Scientific American. The builders had installed the wrong type of elevator hydraulics for so tall a building. Thus the owners had trouble renting the upper floors and eventually had to sell the building at foreclosure. It still stands today, albeit with better elevator brakes.

The American Tract Building (in back), 1890s.

Location #9. Suicide Curve.

Nothing better defined the progress of the 1890s with its wonder, its convenience, and its hell, than the elevated trains. Not needing to stop for pedestrian nor horse, these trains invented commuting and expanded  the city, so that houses and buildings crowded out the cornfields and open lands of northern Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. They also blotted out the sky for those who worked and lived below. Their coal engines belched sulfurous clouds as they passed.

One of the Spidery Monsters that Made Up the Elevated Train System.

Along the Ninth Avenue El, at 110th Street, the train tracks rose to perilous heights and took a pair of sharp turns. These were called the Suicide Curves. In my novel, a runaway train approaches the turn.

  Tesla stared up the line. “Changing direction while maintaining velocity is a form of acceleration with the additional force directed outwards from the curve.”

  “What does the hell does that mean?” Conan Doyle asked.

  “When we hit the curve that velocity will be directed toward tossing the train from its tracks and over the edge of the railway. To execute the turn with a margin of safety, we need to cut our speed in half.”

  The track sloped upward atop spindly metal legs, ascending to over one hundred feet above the streets below, seemingly suspended in midair, higher than the roofs of the nearby tenements.

Suicide Curve on the 9th Avenue El at 110th

A Satirical View of the Oppressive, Belching Elevated Trains

#8. The American Museum of Natural History.

Having opened in 1877, the American Museum of Natural History underwent a period of rapid expansion in the mid-1890s. From the novel:

  The American Museum of Natural History filled the five floors of a long main building and an eastern wing. Scaffolding surrounded the stub of a west wing. A pair of rounded towers bracketed the main entrance, where a stairhead platform spread out in front of a series of six tall arches. From here, a cement staircase divided in two and toppled down to the street level.

American Museum of Natural History, an 1898 drawing showing its West Wing complete.

  Immediately upon entering the museum, they were greeted by a monstrous elephant, its head bowed for the charge, its glass eyes gleaming. Its tusks twisted inwards and nearly touched, like a pair of filaments with a narrow spark gap.

Tip, the Killer Elephant at the Public Entrance to the Museum. After having gored and killed seven people at the zoo, Tip was given a trial and then executed and stuffed.

Continued.

-----

Nikola Tesla, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Henry H. Holmes are all characters in my thriller, A Predator's Game.

A Predator's Game is available in soft-cover and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers.

A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

Martin Hill Ortiz, also writing under the name, Martin Hill, is the author of A Predatory Mind. Its sequel, set in 1890s Manhattan and titled A Predator's Game, features Nikola Tesla as detective.

Continue reading →