Join us on Saturday, May 26th, with author Stacy Horn for a discussion about her book Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, & Criminal in 19th-Century New York, followed by a walking tour of Blackwell Island itself. The discussion will center around Blackwell Island, now known as Roosevelt Island, which as we know it today is an odd stretch of land resting in New York’s East River. At 2 miles long and 800 feet across at its widest point, it’s a place you might go for a quiet, residential escape from nearby Queens and Manhattan. But in the 19th-century, it was a place to which you were sentenced—a place for the criminal, insane, and deathly ill. Then called Blackwell’s Island, it housed a lunatic asylum, two prisons, a poor house, and a number of public hospitals. It was conceived as the most modern, humane facility the world had ever seen, but quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, “a lounging, listless madhouse in all its naked ugliness and horror.” After the discussion, Stacey Horn will take interested participants on the Q102 from the bookshop to the Island where she will go deeper into its wrought roots, and disturbing history.