Boroughs of the Dead Adds 'LOST SOULS' Roosevelt Island Tours in September

Due to popular demand, Boroughs of the Dead has added two more Island of Lost Souls: A History of Madness and Medicine on Roosevelt Island tours in September 2017.

Starting at 6:00pm on Saturday, September 9th and Saturday, September 23rd, these early evening tours are the perfect way to experience this eerie island in the waning light of autumn.

Extensively researched and led by our expert guides, this tour will elaborate on the macabre medical history of this "City of Asylums." While our tour visits the sites of the former hospitals, laboratories, and asylums whose remnants still dot the island, we'll also go beyond basic history to discuss how the legacies of these institutions have left a lingering psychic impression.

Stories of hauntings attach themselves to places like this as a matter of course. Perhaps the sinister 19th century architecture simply begs for such tales, or perhaps there is something more to these rumors: an anxiety about the way we deal with the poor and sick, a fear of being trapped in faceless bureaucratic systems, or a discomfort with our own desire to keep unpleasant things hidden from view.

More than just a historic sightseeing tour, this two-hour walk through Roosevelt Island will investigate the intersections between the histories of these institutional spaces and the urban folklore that surrounds them, unearthing the secrets of our cities - and ourselves - that isolated islands and swiftly moving rivers sometimes hide.

Now a pleasant, tight-knit residential community, Roosevelt Island was once an island of institutions inhabited by convicts, lunatics, and the destitute.

City leaders in 19th century New York viewed the small East River island as an ideal locale for their social "outcasts," and filled the island with a smallpox hospital, an almshouse, a penitentiary, and a lunatic asylum. A narrow spit of land surrounded by swirling waters with troublesome currents, Roosevelt Island certainly seemed the place to hide the city's undesirables away. These days the island retains vestiges of its institutional past, some only recently restored and opened to the public for the first time in decades.

Our tour visits the sites of these former almshouses, hospitals, laboratories, prisons and asylums, beginning with the eerie, romantic, and moody-looking neo-Gothic ruins of the smallpox hospital, moving to the site of the first laboratory in the country focused on pathological and bacteriological research, and finally to the site of the New York City Lunatic Asylum, built in 1841, which reporter Nelly Bly called a "human rat trap... easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out."

Along the way, we will see one of the oldest farmhouses in New York City, built in 1796 and still standing, hear the tale of a criminal housed in the penitentiary so notorious she was referred to as "the monster in human shape," and find out what happened to the bodies of the approximately 450 smallpox victims who died annually from 1856 to 1875.

DATES, TIMES, AND TICKETS:
Saturday, September 9th at 6:00pm
Saturday, September 23rd at 6:00pm
TICKETS AVAILABLE ON OUR WEBSITE
Advance purchase is strongly recommended

Boroughs of the Dead is a unique tour company devoted to strange, dark, and unusual walking tours of New York City. Visit www.boroughsofthedead.com for more information.