A pile of rubble lies next to the collapsed north wing of the former Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island. (Photo: Judith Berdy/Roosevelt Island Historical Society)
The hauntingly abandoned, Gothically forbidding Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island — perhaps New York City’s most romantic ruin — turned far less romantic and even more ruined last month when part of its crumbling gray stone facade fell to the ground.
The collapse, which seems to have been a matter of gravity picking up where negligence left off, came as the publicly owned landmark hospital was closer than ever to being stabilized and preserved as part of the new Southpoint Park planned on the island.
Preservationists, who have been trying for years to salvage the building, disclosed the damage on Thursday and expressed outrage and heartbreak that what should have been an 11th-hour rescue had turned instead into a last-minute crisis.
“This is a real failure of stewardship,” said Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy. “They shouldn’t get by, saying, ‘We don’t have enough money’ or ‘It’s too late.’ They should bring in the cavalry and fix this important landmark.”
Stephen H. Shane, the president and chief executive of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, the state agency that oversees the island, said he was “perfectly willing to declare this an emergency situation and skip the usual government requirement of bidding in order to get the ruin stabilized as quickly as possible.”
He promised that the fallen stones would be numbered like those at the Temple of Dendur and, with the help of pictorial surveys of the structure, returned as closely as possible to their original locations on the north facade.
There are no longer floors or doors or windows at the Smallpox Hospital. Or a roof. Outside is in. Inside is out.
On a modest scale, it calls to mind the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in England. Some architectural features are being propped up with lumber struts. And others, on the newly damaged north wing, seem newly imperiled.
“There’s not much holding up the cornice right now,” said Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. She said she feared the effects of freezing and thawing on the already weakened masonry.
Designed by James Renwick Jr., the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Smallpox Hospital opened in 1856, with room for 100 patients, on what was then known as Blackwell’s Island. It was converted in 1875 into nurses’ housing and a training school associated with the much larger City Hospital nearby.
A south wing was added in 1904 and the north wing — where the recent collapse occurred — was added a year later, designed by Renwick, Aspinwall & Owen. Both buildings were abandoned in the 1950s. City Hospital was later torn down.
But the Smallpox Hospital was given official landmark status in 1976 as “a picturesque ruin” that “could readily serve as the setting for a 19th-century ‘Gothick’ romance,” in the words of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Under the current master plan for Southpoint Park by the Trust for Public Land, the ruin would be stabilized, though the building would not be rebuilt. There is $12.9 million available for the entire first phase of park development, which is to begin this year, of which $4.5 million has been set aside for the stabilization project.
And Mr. Shane said that the salvage of the latest collapse would have to come out of that money. “I can’t spend budget dollars I don’t have,” he said.
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