North Brother Island: NYC’s Forbidden Island, New York

In the East River, between the Bronx and Rikers Island, is a 20-acre island most New Yorkers have never set foot on. In the mid-1880s, Riverside Hospital moved here from Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island. The hospital had started as a smallpox facility and later treated typhoid and tuberculosis. Patients sent to North Brother were cut off from the city by water. Its best-known patient was Mary Mallon, known as Typhoid Mary. She carried typhoid without getting sick, and in 1915 she was declared a public menace. She spent more than two decades confined on the island and died there in November 1938. Within sight of the island in June 1904, the steamship General Slocum caught fire. About 1,021 people died from the fire or by drowning near North Brother. After World War II, the hospital buildings housed veterans attending local colleges, along with their families. In the 1950s, the island became a treatment center for teenagers addicted to drugs. That center closed in 1963, and the island was abandoned. The forest took over. Trees grew through rooftops, and vines covered the walls. From the 1980s into the early 2000s, North Brother had one of the region’s largest black-crowned night heron colonies. The herons left by 2008, but the island stays protected as part of NYC Parks’ Harbor Herons preserve. In 2016, a city study looked at opening it to the public, but the cost appeared prohibitive. In March 2025, a fire on the island caused a roof to collapse.