The Deadhouse (17 page)

"Let me tell you what the project is, and what Lola Dakota's
involvement was with us."

Nan took the pointer from Mike's hand and began her description of
the river-bound fragment of land. "The island is two miles long and
just eight hundred feet wide. See? It parallels Manhattan from
Eighty-fifth Street, on its northern tip, to Forty-eighth Street in the
south. That lower border of land is directly opposite the United
Nations. Great views.

"Today, it's got several high-rise residential structures, parks,
two hospitals for the chronically ill, a tramway that connects it to
Manhattan, and a footbridge that links it to Queens. But what
fascinates some of us most are its bones."

"Skeletons?" Chapman asked.

"Not human ones. The remnants of the unusual buildings that
dominated the landscape here a hundred years ago—well, almost two
hundred years ago. As New York grew into a metropolis, it experienced
all the social problems and ills that we connect with urban America
today—crime, poverty, disease, mental illness. By 1800, the city
fathers came up with the idea of walled institutions to confine the
sources of trouble. The compound at Bellevue housed contagious
yellow-fever patients and syphilitics, and Newgate Prison, in Greenwich
Village, was home to rapists and highway robbers."

"My kind of town." Chapman was riveted.

"And did you know that 116th Street and Broadway was the original
site of the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane?"

"A nuthouse, right where Columbia stands today?" Mike asked. "Now
why doesn't
that
surprise me?"

"Then it occurred to these urban planners that they didn't need to
use the valuable real estate of Manhattan to segregate their
untouchables. There were a number of small islands that would relieve
the growing city of its criminals and its crazies. So they looked to
the river for property to acquire—to Wards and Randall Islands, to
North and South Brother Islands, to Rikers and Hart Islands"—her
pointer moved across the riverscape— "and the very first one the city
purchased, in 1828, was Blackwells.

"From a bucolic family farm, the island was immediately transformed
into a village of institutions. Enormous structures, forbidding and
secure. A penitentiary, an almshouse for the poor, a charity hospital—"

"That wonderful Gothic building that you see from Manhattan? The one
that looks like a castle?"

"No, Alex. That one came a bit later, for a different purpose. And
then, of course, there's
my
pet. The Octagon—the lunatic
asylum that was built to replace Bloomingdale's."

Nan walked to her desk chair and opened a drawer, removing from it
an oversize notebook with sepia-toned blowups of old photographs. "The
asylum was designed to be the largest in the country. It had arteries
stretching out in every direction—one to house the most violent of the
patients, another for females, a third for the foreign insane."

"Wasn't everyone a foreigner?" Mike asked.

"I think it's always the case, Detective, that some are more alien
than others. Did you know that whenever an immigrant was found alone in
the streets, unable to communicate because of the language barrier, our
benign forefathers just placed him in the asylum until someone could
make out what he was saying?

"The other discouraging thing about this place was that there was a
very small medical staff. The patients were actually cared for by
prisoners from the penitentiaries. I can only imagine the abuses."

"Is the asylum still there?" I asked, studying the photo images of
the primitive outbuildings.

"All those wings are gone. What remains today are the ruins of the
Octagon Tower. It's a stunning rotunda, built in the Greek Revival
style, with an elegant winding staircase, all columned and pedestaled."
She showed me the interior photographs, which looked like a shot up
five spiraling flights of cast-iron steps. "It was once considered the
most elegant staircase in New York. Now that broken frame climbs up to
the open sky. Completely deteriorated and neglected."

"I guess the theory of the day was to treat the inmates like
animals, but do it with charm."

"Exactly. There were vegetable gardens and willow trees and an
ice-skating pond so that the external appearance seemed like an oasis
of calm and care. But within the walls, it was truly a madhouse."

"What interests you about it? Why the dig?"

"It's everything an urban anthropologist craves. There aren't many
places to burrow into in Manhattan these days, much as I'd like to.
This offers a very confined site with a fair amount of known history.
We've got records of an early Indian settlement there, before the
Colonials came to America. We're already finding those artifacts—tools,
pottery, weapons. Then you have the agricultural community which
existed there for another century.

"And, of course, the asylum years, for most of the nineteenth
century. Remember, many of these patients who were not indigent went
there with all their possessions. They were served on china plates, not
the tin cups of their almshouse neighbors. When these buildings were
all abandoned, much of this stuff got left behind, buried in place.
Scores of dignitaries visited the island to see this innovative social
welfare setup, and some of them, including de Tocqueville, wrote about
it extensively.

"You really must—both of you—come out to see how we work and what
we've found. The dig is at a bit of a standstill with this frigid
weather we're having, but I can have one of the students tour you
around the Octagon. The whole island, if you like."

"We'll take you up on that offer. But we'd also like to talk to you
about Lola Dakota, Nan."

"I'll tell you the little that I know," she said, sitting down at
her desk and motioning us to take seats opposite her. "Of course, I
first met Lola when she was on the Columbia faculty. Bit of a wild
card, personally, but a talented scholar."

"Did you socialize with her?" "Not much. Without even knowing about
their marital problems, Howard never trusted Ivan very much. He always
seemed to be hustling people. Looking for the quick score. We were
occasionally invited to the same dinner party, but the four of us never
spent any time together."

There was something different about the tone of Nan's responses when
she talked about Lola. She did not seem quite as open as she had when
discussing the history of New York. "Were you here for the funeral?"

"No. No, I left for London on Friday evening. That was the day she
was killed, wasn't it? I didn't learn of her death until one of
Howard's phone calls." She fumbled with paper clips in the top drawer
of her desk.

"We've only spoken to one of her sisters and a couple of students.
What was she like as a colleague or peer?"

"Well, her style was a lot flashier than my own. I wouldn't say that
we had much in common." Nan was a brilliant scholar, nationally
renowned in her field, and as modest as she was good. "But one-on-one,
she was perfectly pleasant to work with. She never confided in me, if
that's what you mean. I don't think I had seen her in more than a year
after she moved to King's College. It was the Blackwells Island project
that brought me into contact with her again."

"How did that get started?" Mike asked. Nan looked at the ceiling
and laughed. "Several years of wishful thinking on my part. Hard to
remember which of us pushed the idea forward first. Let's see. Winston
Shreve helped to organize the plan. He's the head of the anthropology
department at King's."

"Have you known him long?"

"Fifteen years. Very impressive credentials, which is why they
recruited him for the school. Undergrad and graduate degrees are both
Ivy League, if I remember correctly. Spent some time at the Sorbonne.
Helped with the excavations at Petra. He's wanted to do something on
the island for as long as I have. Like me, one of those New Yorkers in
our profession who's always wanted to get his hands in some local dirt,
but just keeps watching apartments and office towers get planted on top
of every square inch of historical soil that we covet.

"Yes, Winston and I have been talking about digging on the island
for as long as I've known him."

"And the others?"

"It was a four-department program. Multidisciplinary, as they like
to call it these days. Something for everybody. We each seem to have a
special place on the island that attracts us for a different reason.
Winston and I run the anthropological courses. My favorite site is the
northern tip, from the lighthouse to what remains of the Octagon Tower.
Skip Lockhart chairs the American history segment. His heart seems to
be attached to the people who passed through here, their stories and
what became of them. Thomas Grenier is in charge of the biology
students."

That's a name we hadn't heard yet. "Who's Grenier?" Mike asked.

"King's College. Head of the biology department there. Out of UCLA,
if I remember correctly. Haven't seen him around in weeks, but I think
it's because he's been on sabbatical this semester. Might not even be
in town." Mike was writing the name in his notepad.

"Why biology?" I asked.

"The scientific piece is as important as all the digging we're
doing. Maybe more so. By the 1870s there were almost a dozen medical
facilities here. Every 'incurable' patient from the city was sent to a
hospital or clinic on Blackwells. One was for scarlet fever, another
for epilepsy, a separate place for cripples, for cholera and typhus
sufferers. There were tuberculosis facilities, and a special building
for lepers. It even had the first pathology laboratory in the country.

"Then there came your ruin, Alex. Eighteen fifty-six, to be exact.
Smallpox continued to be a societal scourge throughout the nineteenth
century."

"What about Jenner? I thought there was already a smallpox vaccine
by that time."

"Yes, the vaccine was being used in America by then, but the
constant influx of poor immigrants who had been infected in their own
countries brought the disease here from all over the world. Because it
was so wildly contagious, patients in New York City had always been
quarantined away from the population. They were generally sent to live
in wooden shacks on the banks of the two rivers, until it became even
safer to ship them off to the island of undesirables."

"Blackwells?"

She nodded. "Renwick designed a stunning home for those latest
outcasts. The Smallpox Hospital. You see it lighted up so dramatically
at night from Manhattan, with its pointed, arched windows and
crenellated roofline. A great gray monument to disease. Small wonder
the biologists want to study the place."

Nan moved to the giant map and ran her finger up the narrow piece of
waterway that separated Manhattan from the grim institutions of the old
Blackwells Island. "How are you on Greek mythology?" she asked. "The
River Styx, Lola used to say this was. Souls crossing over from the
realm of the living on their way to hell. To what she called the
deadhouse."

13

"What
was
the deadhouse?"

"Just Lola's name for Blackwells Island, I guess. It was a
nineteenth-century expression that meant a place for dead bodies."

"Did she refer to it that way?"

"I know you had met her, Alex. She had this tremendous flair for the
dramatic. Used it to great advantage in the classroom whenever things
got dull. We were all brainstorming about the dig one night—I think we
were downstairs in my own dining room— going through a pretty good case
of red wine—and that's when I heard Lola use the expression for the
first time."

"Was it an actual place on the island?"

"Not on any map that I've ever come across. Imagine the scene, as
Lola used to say. There you were, raging with fever and blistering with
pustulant sores, as epidemics swept through communities in the crowded
city dwellings. Smallpox was spread both by direct contact and by
airborne virus, as you probably know. Public-health workers separated
out the ill and infected—rich and poor alike—to isolate them from the
able-bodied."

The image of a plague-ridden city was chilling.

"Then, Lola would describe the bedlam on the piers in the East River
as the afflicted were loaded onto boats to bring them over to the
hospital. Most of them knew that for the diseased, it was a sentence of
death. Some tried to escape from the officials at the docks. From time
to time, one or two dared to jump in the water and brave the fierce
currents of the East River rather than be ferried to hell. The once
tranquil farmland had become a zone for the dead and dying. Boats went
out loaded with contagious patients. As these untouchables neared the
shore, their first sight was the stacks of wooden coffins piled by the
edge to be loaded on for the ride home. Chances were good that if your
destination was Blackwells Island, as Lola said, you were going to the
deadhouse."

We were silent until Mike spoke.

"So she had the fourth piece of the project? Government, political
science."

"Exactly."

"Any particular interests, like some of you others?"

"Lola had a special preoccupation, I'd say, with the prison and the
madhouse. Disease and the hospital conditions revolted her, she said.
But a lot of famous people passed in and out of both the asylum and the
penitentiary, and she loved to learn their stories. I've never seen
anyone do research about these places the way she did. Lola read all
the books, she devoured letters and diaries of the time that were
original source material, she even found some old survivors who had
lived or worked on the island in the 1920s and thirties."

"Do you know who they were?"

"No, but surely someone in the department must have catalogued
names. I'm too busy belowground to talk to people. We left that to
Lola. As long as this place was mentioned, she didn't care whether it
was the notebook of a nurse or the autobiography of Mae West-"