The DeadHouse

12

I rang the bell at the Kramer-Rothschild town house shortly before 7:30 P.M. Nan opened the door and I introduced her to Mike Chapman.

"We might as well go upstairs to my study. All the information about our project is there. I've lost my husband to a new client this evening. He's working late." We declined her offer of a drink and followed her up to the second floor.

"Could I trouble you for a television, ma'am?"

"Let's stop in the den first, then," she said, leading us around the corner and clicking on the set. "Something breaking on the news about your case?"

"No. Alex and I have a standing bet on the Final Jeopardy! question. It'll only take a few minutes."

We caught up on small talk while we waited for Mike to find the station and then for the commercial to end. Trebek was reminding the three players that tonight's category was Famous Firsts.

"Twenty bucks, Coop. Could be anything."

"Be generous, in the spirit of Christmas. Make it forty."

Trebek stepped aside and the answer was revealed on the screen. "First woman in America to receive a medical degree."

"I'm toast, blondie. I can never beat her on this feminist trivia, Nan. Probably right up your alley, too."

Neither Chapman nor the flight attendant from Wisconsin even ventured a guess. "Who was Elizabeth Blackwell?" I asked, before the Maine fisherwoman or the Virginia enologist gave their wrong answers.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, folks," Trebek said, chiding the three contestants for their failure to come up with the right answer. "Born in England, Elizabeth Blackwell immigrated to this country, and in 1849, she became the first woman in the United States to get a medical degree, at Geneva Medical College in New York. So let's see how much money that leaves-"

"The Blackwell family settled on Martha's Vineyard after that. Right near my place in Chilmark."

"Not a bad lead-in to my story," Nan said, as Mike clicked off the television and we walked down the hall to her home office. "This dig we're working at is over on Roosevelt Island. But it wasn't given that name until 1973. Before that it was Welfare Island, and in the period we're studying, it was called Blackwells Island. Different Blackwells, of course. This piece of land was owned by a colonial merchant named Robert Blackwell, whose family lived there in the 1680s. Their original wooden farmhouse is still standing."

"And before that," Mike interrupted, "the Dutch called it Hog Island. It was a pig farm in the early 1600s. Covered with swine."

"You two will be light-years ahead of me," I explained to Nan. "Mike knows more about American history than anyone I've ever met. The fact that he's familiar with the island probably means it had some significance in military life. That's his real specialty."

Nan shrugged her shoulders. "Not that I'm aware of."

Mike lifted a ruler from Nan's desk and pointed to the southern tip of Manhattan on the huge map of the city she had pinned to the wall. "In 1673, when the British and Dutch were still at war, the sheriff of New York was a guy named Manning. The Brits put him in charge of the fort down at this end, the entrance to New York Harbor. The Dutch launched a naval assault to regain control of what had once been their colony, New Amsterdam. Manning surrendered without a battle. So King Charles court-martialed the disgraced commander and banished him rather than put him to death." He moved the pointer up to a place in the East River, halfway between Manhattan and Queens. "He was exiled to your little island to live the rest of his life."

Nan responded, "It's always been a place for exiles. For outcasts. That's part of its tragic background. Do you know much about it?"

"Nothing at all. I look at it just about every day, on my way up and down the Drive. It can't be more than the length of a football field away from Manhattan, and yet I've never set foot there. When you see it at night, there's a hauntingly romantic look to it."

"It's got a wonderfully romantic aura, I agree with you completely. It's a bit like the He de la Cite, in the heart of Paris. A sliver of land, in a river, right in the midst of a great city. And a quiet, small-town pace that makes you think you're in a private enclave, not an urban neighborhood. It's even more dramatic from the heart of the island. You get to see the magnificent skyline of Manhattan from every angle, and then off to the other side, there's the industrial backdrop of Queens that lines the river's edge-factories, smokestacks, and barges.

"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."