![]() ![]() What breaks my heart is that as awful as it was then, life inside many replacement institutions today is worse. ![]() This quote captures just how bad it was on Blackwell’s Island. I recorded Titicut Follies, a 1967 documentary about the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, but I can’t bring myself to watch it. Films made of asylums 100 years later for instance, are horrifying. I also think about it from time to time because we keep making the same mistakes repeatedly. I’ve been thinking about Blackwell’s Island again because I recently recorded a podcast for the Gotham Center (the whole series is great, in my opinion, and well worth listening to). This was the period when the island was owned by the city and they used it to build and run a lunatic asylum, a couple of prisons, and hospitals for the poor. I wrote a book about Blackwell’s Island (what Roosevelt Island was called in the 19th century) called Damnation Island. ![]()
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