Things to do nearNorth Brother Island

North Brother Island sits in the East River in the Bronx, New York, and carries one of the most layered histories of any uninhabited place in the city. It first entered public consciousness in 1904 when the steamboat General Slocum caught fire nearby, killing over a thousand passengers, most of them German-American women and children on a church excursion. The island's Riverside Hospital received survivors that terrible day.

Riverside Hospital itself operated for decades, originally treating patients with smallpox and tuberculosis. The facility later became notorious as the place where Mary Mallon, known as Typhoid Mary, was quarantined twice, spending the last two decades of her life there. The hospital closed in 1963, and the island has been left largely untouched since, its wards and staff cottages slowly consumed by vines and weather.

Today the New York City Department of Parks manages North Brother Island as a designated bird sanctuary. The ruins make it an extraordinary subject for photography tours that pass through the East River, offering views of collapsed rooflines and overgrown courtyards that few New Yorkers ever see. The nearby Hell Gate Bridge frames the scene with industrial grandeur. North Brother Island stands as a rare place where nature and urban history have merged into something genuinely unforgettable.