Inside the psychiatric center (Photo: Courtesy of Project Senium)

It was Thursday afternoon, on the second to last day they had planned for the shoot, and most of the crew was out sick. But Joe Trimble and Nicolas Levasseur had been at the abandoned psychiatric center at sunrise, and now they were trying to get on top of one of the buildings.

There was a hatch, maybe 15 feet up, that they wanted to get themselves and their gear through. They had found a junked-up firehose on the ground, and tied it to their loaded-up MoVI stabilizing rig. As the gear lifted into the air, Trimble realized: We're hauling $15,000 worth of gear up on a firehose that's at least 20 years old. What are we doing?

Normally, Trimble, Levasseur and their friend and colleague Jesse Miller spend their time making films in places where they're not putting their gear at quite as much risk—and where they're not trespassing to begin with. But with Project Senium, they wanted to use their production skills to push the boundaries of urban exploration video. This wasn't going to be one of those shaky tours made with a phone camera or a GoPro. "The goal was to try new things that weren’t necessarily being done," says Trimble. Using drones and a camera with what Gizmodo calls "mind-boggling low light performance," this is what they created:

Project Senium from Project Senium on Vimeo.

As urban exploration has become more popular, the frontier for what's cool and impressive has moved. There's a premium on discovering places no one's been before, and where 10 years ago, a few people were publishing photos of urban explorer ("urbex" for those in the know) adventures, now Instagram's made moody shoots of crumbling #abandonedplaces commonplace.

Increasingly, too, the video footage coming out of these places is more ambitious and made with nicer gear. It helps that the technology's getting better and that great video cameras and drones are now relatively affordable. But, with so many more people undertaking the same sort of adventures, there's also a push to do something different.

The first shot of Project Senium's film, for instance, is of the tallest building on the property, the Kings Park Psychiatric Center. But the team carefully planned the second shot to pay homage to a shot by the photographer Tim Kirsch, who's been documenting abandoned places at his site Opacity for years.

"We started following him, 8 or 10 years ago, and he had this really iconic photo of that main building," says Levasseur. "That stuck in our heads so long that we wanted to make a shot that looked just like it, but be a moving, cinematic shot. We wanted to take what he did, kind of give an ode to him, and take it a step further."

 
During production, the gear was broken down and reassembled. (Photo: Courtesy of Project Senium)

Getting all their gear into the site, though, was a production in itself. They would break down the gear, load it into a few backpacks, make their way to the location, and reassemble everything they needed. Friends helped—both by carrying gear and watching it while the actual shooting went on.

At this point, the center's relatively well trafficked, sometimes by people intent on messing up the place. One time, before the actual shoot, Levasseur was there with five or six people, the MoVI stabilizer and some other expensive gear. His group had gone to a different part of the building, while he stayed behind to talk to a couple of people he'd met previously online. While he was standing there, with maybe thirty grand worth of gear, a group of eight guys, on with a golf club in his hand, came through. "I can defend myself against two people, but if these guys wanted to take my gear and run off, I was going to be in a bad spot," says Levasseur. "We were in a big abandoned building, we were trespassing to begin with, and if someone did happen, we couldn't just go to the cops."

Besides the threat from less-than-friendly humans, the building itself posed a risk. The dust and asbestos coated the gear: afterwards, they sent out lens to be professionally cleaned. At one point, part of the ceiling—something heavy, Levasseur says—came down and hit someone on the shoulder.

But to the Project Senium team, it was worth it. As urbex becomes more popular, their sense is that it might accelerate the destruction of this place—both because some people want to do more than just explore and because more traffic puts more pressure on authorities to simply tear the buildings down. The film they made is a document of a facility that may be gone. "If in five years, the whole thing is leveled, you'll be able to show: this was all here," Trimble says. "It was real."

The peak of Mauna Kea, Hawaii (Photo: apasciuto/Flickr) 

Britton Hill is a blip on the side of Florida’s County Road 285, a small highway near the state’s border with Alabama. The site is modestly appointed with a granite, tombstone-like marker and two park benches. The average Florida tourist, bound for a hot beach or the splashy allure of Disney World, might stop to stretch their legs. But more likely, they would just roll on.

Unless they were a highpointer. Unremarkable as it seems, at 345 feet above sea level, Britton Hill is the highest natural point in the state. A highpointer, driving for hours or perhaps days, maybe from the other side of the country would arrive triumphant and leave their mark in the register. One point closer to victory..

As the name suggests, highpointers are people who aspire to climb the highest natural points in every state. The drive to get really, really high up is an old one; to quote the famed climber George Mallory, the motivation of looking at a mountain and wanting to reach the top boils down to “because it’s there.” But on the state level, the history is a bit more recent.  In 1936 A.H. Marshall became the first man to climb all of the then 48 state highpoints. At that time, there was no official network, although all over the country, people were individually making the decision to seek out these places.

Jack Longacre was working for the shipbuilding division of Boeing in Seattle when he started mountaineering in the late ‘80s. After retiring, he drove across the country, racking up highpoints as he went. Most highpoints have a trail log at their peak for visitors to sign and Longacre was seeing a lot of familiar names. He posted a notice in the back of Outside magazine in 1986 seeking people similarly elated by elevation. After several people responded positively,  in 1987, a group of about eight decided to gather at Mount Arvon, Michigan’s highest point. (Highpoints are determined by geological surveys, and therefore they occasionally change. For years, nearby Mount Curwood was thought to be the highest point until a 1982 resurvey revealed Mount Avron to be one foot higher.) The Highpointers Club was born, and the meeting is considered the club’s first convention. “Guru Jakk,” as he was known, pecked out club missives on his typewriter and sent handwritten notes to new members. He was fond of using a “k” in lieu of a “c”, urging people to “Keep Klimbin’!”

Longacre died in 2002. Today, the club has about 2,500 members.

Highpointers on the summit of Mount Katahdin, Maine during the 2013 Highpointers Konvention (Photo: Tim Webb)

An avid hiker, Tim Webb spends a fair amount of time poring over his Rand McNally road atlas. He always felt the tug of the highpoints, clearly marked on each state map. The urge eventually led him to the Highpointers Club, where he is the current president. For $20 a year, members receive the “Apex to Zenith” newsletter and an annual directory packed with tips and contact information.The club also holds an annual “Konvention” at a state highpoint where members meet, swap stories, and recognize “completers” who have achieved the benchmark or 48 or 50 states in the past year.

Webb has 46 highpoints under his belt. Montana, Alaska, Washington and Wyoming (the four “tough ones”) remain. His wife, daughter and son have all climbed 36 highpoints. (His daughter made some of those journeys as an infant strapped to her father.) Everyone has their favorite highpoint for different reasons, he says, but for him it’s Mount Whitney, the highest point in California and also the highest in the lower 48. It’s also where Webb hit his “half way” mark of 25 highpoints.

Steve Gamble, Tim Webb and Highpointers Club Founder Jack Longacre on the summit of Mount Hood, Oregon (Photo: Tim Webb)

“I must have liked it,” he says, “Because I named my daughter Whitney.”

The diversity of highpoints is staggering. The highest point in the 50 states is Mount McKinley in Alaska. The lowest is Britton Hill, the hump in Florida. There’s a weather station and an observatory on top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Wild ponies roam Mount Rogers in Virginia. There are highpoints like Borah Peak in Utah where many climbers abort their trek when they hit the aptly-named Chicken Out Ridge. And then there are high points like Delaware’s Ebright Azimuth, barely a hill and about nine minutes from a Starbucks.

There are as many kinds of highpointers as there are highpoints, according to Webb. Some members save all year to attend the big meeting and some “have more money than they know what to do with.” There are whole families. There is a brother and sister from the Netherlands. There are more male completers than female, but women have been gaining ground.

Tim at the summit of White Butte, North Dakota, with his wife Rebecca and daugther Whitney (Photo: Tim Webb)

Highpointers do seem to share one trait, though..“Highpointers seem to be list or goal oriented,” he says. “We’ve got these 50 highpoints and we need to get all of them.”

Highpointers are so obsessed, they’ve created lists within lists. There are highpointers who aim to hit the most highpoints in 24 hours. (The record is eight.) Matt and Mike Moniz collected all 50 in the shortest amount of time: 43 days, 3 hours, 51 minutes and 9 seconds. (The slowest on record is Mike Bialos, who took a leisurely 52 years and 10 months to complete.) But highpointing doesn’t have to begin and end with the state landmarks. Many state highpointers have moved onto or are concurrently conquering county highpoints. And many highpointers also tackle international targets—from storied Mount Everest to Zugspitse, the highest point in Germany, which can be summited via a picturesque gondola ride. 

People on the ridge of Knife Edge, Mount Katahdin Maine (Photo: Tim Webb)

Tom Harper didn’t consider himself an “outdoorsy” person. Growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, an occasional picnic at a state park was as intrepid as things got. But like Webb, Harper found himself fixating on the high points marked in his road atlas. In 2003, he decided to climb Mount Davis, the highest point in Pennsylvania. He has since traveled to 34 highpoints and is a member of the Highpointers Club.

At Chimney Pond in the bowl below the summit of Mount Katahdin, Maine with several highpointers, during the 2013 Highpointers Convention (Photo: Tim Webb)

“Before I started this, most of my exercise was taping keys,” says Harper, who works as a computer programmer and says his job keeps him “tethered to civilization.”

Chasing highpoints motivated Harper to “get out and see America, really see America, not just the cities, the tourist traps, the amusement parks.”

The peak of Mount McKinley, Alaska, the highest point in the 50 states (Photo: Nic McPhee/Flickr)
 

Harper speaks as wistfully about the flats of the Oklahoma panhandle (home to high point Black Mesa) as he does of Hawaii's Mauna Kea where he felt like he was at the edge of the world, surrounded by a night sky unlike he had ever seen.

When Harper reaches the top of a highpoint he snaps a picture. Many highpointers keep track of their travels through photography, often taking a portrait with an elevation sign or USGS benchmark. Others fill in states on a map or keep journals.

Webb and Harper are still whittling down their lists. Webb says he hasn’t “committed” to Alaska, but hopes to cross off Montana next year, when the state convention is held in that state. Harper is still knocking off state milestones and is also tackling county highpoints. A few years ago, he climbed the Stafford County, Virginia highpoint with a fellow summiteer who was 83 at the time.

“This is what I want to do when I’m 87,” says Harper. “I want to travel the country and still hike and take in the world around me, I don’t want to be sitting in a rocking chair or dead.”

This is the first of a biweekly series on unusual travel subcultures called Extra Mile. Want to suggest one? Email edit@atlasobscura.com. 

Update, 6/1: The original version of this article misidentified the state of Mount Arvon, the location of Chicken-Out Ridge and the number of highpoints that Tom Harper has visited. We regret the errors.

Aerial view of Roosevelt Island (Photo: Philip Capper/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus,” a poem that would eventually be engraved on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty. In her famous lines, Liberty herself—the “Mother of Exiles”— declares:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

While the words are appropriate for Ellis Island, other islands around New York City seem to operate with a different message. These are places to which the “wretched refuse” have been banished, not welcomed. Roosevelt Island,Randall’s Island, Ward’s Island, Rikers Island, and Hart Island have all been places where the tired, poor, sick and criminal are sent to be treated—or sometimes just confined—far from glittering Manhattan. The water has served as a kind of moat, as well as insurance against NIMBY protestations. These islands aren’t part of anyone’s backyard, which has made them a perfect place for the unwanted, nestled in plain sight of one of the world’s great cities.

 
A map of the islands that are featured in Atlas Obscura's 'Islands of the Undesirables' series (Photo: Map Data © 2015 Google)

This is the first part of a five-part series based on this past weekend’s Obscura Day event. First up: Roosevelt Island. 

 
Prison and garden on Blackwell's Island (today Roosevelt Island),
1853 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

According to most sources, the original inhabitants of what is now Roosevelt Island, the Canarise tribe, called the place Minnahannock, which translates to “it’s nice to be here.” (As with many things reported about Native Americans during this time period, it’s wise to take this with a grain of salt.) The Dutch called the place Varcken Eylandt, or Hog Island, because they raised hogs there, while the British called it called Manning's Island, after Captain John Manning, who owned the island starting in the 1660s.

It was during the tenure of Manning’s son-in-law, Robert Blackwell, that the island came to have darker associations, becoming the site of lunatic asylums, prisons, and other institutions.

The first European owner of the island was Wouter Van Twiller, the Director General of the New Amsterdam colony, who bought the island from the Canarsie tribe, as he did with what’s now Ward’s, Randall’s, and Governors Islands. Once the English took over, they granted the island to John Manning, sheriff of New York, but he ended up in disgrace. In 1673, while commanding Fort James, Manning surrendered the colony to the Dutch (to be fair, he only had about 80 men to defend the place). The English sent him back to the mother country to be court-martialed, then to New York to be publicly disgraced, with his sword broken in a City Hall ceremony. Manning was told he could never hold public office again, and banished to his island. According to one Rev. Charles Wooley, written about in a book called The Other Islands of New Yorkby Stuart Miller and Sharon Seitz,  the former sheriff’s chief entertainment was “commonly a Bowl of Rum-Punch."

The island’s next owner and namesake was Robert Blackwell, who married Manning’s daughter Mary. A house built by his descendants still stands on the island, and is the sixth-oldest house in New York City. It looks forlorn but well-maintained, the glass wavy with the pressure of centuries. The Blackwell family lived and farmed on the island into the 19^th century, although they repeatedly tried to sell it without any takers.

The house built for James Blackwell between 1796-1804 still stands on Roosevelt Island (Photo: Doug Kerr/Flickr)

Finally, the city bought the whole island in 1828 as a location for charitable and corrective institutions. Their plan was to create a “city of asylums.” In part this was a desire to create more humane institutions for the criminal and the mentally ill, although these places don’t necessarily look humane to today’s eyes. Within a few years of the purchase, two fairly grim institutions opened up—a penitentiary and a lunatic asylum. While the island was eventually home to more than a dozen different institutions, these two are among the most storied. The penitentiary was erected as a state prison in 1832, and by the early 1900s there were a series of scandals involving inmate overcrowding, drug-dealing, and favoritism. Riots and escape attempts were common: there are reports of people breaking off doors to use as floatation devices on their way to Manhattan, and gangs of nude men swimming for their freedom. A report issued in 1914 by Correction Commissioner Katharine Davis (incidentally, the first woman to head a New York City Agency) described the penitentiary as “vile and inhuman” and “wet, slimy, dark, foul.” Later that year, 700 of the 1,400 prisoners joined an uprising that lasted for days.

Prisoner's returning from work to Blackwell's Island, 1876 (Photo: Library of Congress) 

One small, but telling, example of the endemic corruption is the fact that two mob leaders imprisoned in in the 1930s kept flocks of homing pigeons in the prison for smuggling drugs and messages. One was Joseph Rao, a Harlem racketeer and member of the Dutch Schultz gang, who turned the prison hospital into his headquarters, where he enjoyed silk shirts and dressing gowns, lilac toilet water, monogrammed stationery and his own pet goat. He kept his homing pigeons on the roof, while Irish mob leader Edward Cleary was less extravagant and kept the pigeons in his room. 

Other celebrity prisoners include Emma Goldman and Mae West, the latter sentenced after complaints about her play Sex. She dined with the warden and his wife every night, and her prison labor consisted of dusting the books in the library. On her release, she gave only one interview, to the magazine Liberty, for which she charged $1,000 and donated the proceeds to the establishment of the Mae West Memorial Prison Library.

By 1921, there had been enough scandal that the city hoped changing the name to “Welfare Island” would provide an image boost. But there wasn't any real reform until the 1930s, under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. He appointed a new Commissioner of Correction, Austin H. MacCormick, who conducted a surprise raid on what he called “the worst prison in the world.” As the New York Herald Tribune described it at the time, “boss gangsters lived in luxury, swaggered around, and at the same time there was an almost incredible condition of misery and degeneracy.” After MacCormick raid, the inmates were moved to new facilities on Rikers Island, and the prison was demolished. 

The lunatic asylum, parts of which still stand, is another story. It opened in 1838 as a humane refuge for the insane, although there doesn't seem to have been much actual treatment—mostly patients were just supposed to rest. Women outnumbered men two to one, in part because some husbands committed their insubordinate wives.

The asylum on Roosevelt Island, c 1893 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

No less than Charles Dickens visited not long after the opening (as a tourist, not a patient). In his American Notes of 1842, he wrote:

“Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.''

An 1866 account in Harper's New Monthly Magazine was a little more cheery: it reported that patients caught lobsters and fish, played quoits, built furniture and grew their own vegetables, including 200 bushels of tomatoes a year. Patients were also enjoying new clothes—instead of wearing striped outfits like that of the nearby penitentiary inmates, the men wore navy blue get-ups and the women calico gowns. That may have been little comfort for one woman who, according to Harper’s, thought she was a china teapot, and sat for hours each day with her right arm positioned as a spout and her left as a handle, always in fear she would be knocked over.

The asylum’s most famous patient visited in 1887. That year, journalist Elizabeth Cochrane (better known under her pen name Nellie Bly) showed up at a women’s boarding house in the city pretending to be an insane Cuban immigrant. She was committed to the asylum, where she spent more than a week gathering notes for what would become her famous expose, Ten Days in a Madhouse.

Elizabeth Cochrane (pen name Nellie Bly) c. 1890 (Photo: Library of Congress) 

Cochrane described the asylum as "a human rat-trap,” with “oblivious doctors” and massive orderlies who “choked, beat and harassed” patients. According to Bly, anyone who wasn’t already insane would be driven crazy by the enforced isolation, rancid food, dirty linens, plentiful rats and buckets of ice-cold water frequently poured over them. Bly dropped her “crazy” act as soon as she arrived at the asylum, but still had to be freed by an attorney. The exposé, which ran in The New York World and still serves as a landmark in investigative journalism,led to a grand jury investigation and a massive increase in the Department of Public Charities and Corrections budget, which helped improve conditions.

The cover of Nellie Bly's "Ten Days in a Mad-House", published in 1887 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

The asylum moved to Wards Island not long after that, and the building became the Metropolitan Hospital, which in turn left for Harlem the 1950s. But the original asylum’s octagon, built of blue-grey local schist, still stands and is now a part of an upscale apartment complex near a beautiful community garden.

Other 19^th century facilities on the island included an almshouse and a hospital, which later became City Hospital, for a time the largest hospital in the country. The nurses and servants there were mostly people who had originally been confined to the almshouse; according to one report, they received “no wages but a pretty liberal allowance of whiskey.” A smallpox hospital, built by James Renwick Jr. (the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan) in the 1850s still stands on the tip of the island. Known as Renwick’s Ruin, it’s fenced off so that visitors can’t come too close to the dilapidated structures, but they still make a beautiful, ivy-covered sight.

The remains of the Smallpox Hospital (Photo: Jessica Spengler/Flickr)

Another interesting building on the southern tip of the island is the Strecker Memorial Laboratory, constructed in 1892 as the nation's first institution devoted to pathological and bacteriological research. A special division of City Hospital, it was solely devoted to studying infectious conditions. There was a specimen examination room, autopsy room, mortuary, library, and even a museum. Later it became the Russel Sage Institute of Pathology, before closing in the 1950s. The MTA took it over in the late 1990s to house a substation.

Detail of the Smallpox Hospital ruins (Photo: Bess Lovejoy) 

Nowadays, the asylums, research labs and prisons have given way to, of course, condos. In 1969, the city leased the island to New York State's Urban Development Corporation for 99 years. Their idea was to build a residential community they referred to as the “new town in town”—a vision that eventually came true. The island, whose name was changed to Roosevelt in the early 1970s, is now home to more than 10,000 residents, with five public parks and a popular tramway, tennis club, sculpture center, festivals, and thriving volunteer organizations.

The change for the island came slowly, but by the 1980s it became a relatively desirable place to live, known for being peaceful and offering great views of Manhattan, once only offered to those banished from its center. 

The Scythians were really into gold, both for jewelry and ritual opium consumption (Photo: Д.Колосов/Wikimedia)

In southern Russia, archaeologists have dug up a small pile of gold objects used by the Scythians—including gold vessels coated with the residue of opium and cannabis, a sort of ancient bong.

These artifacts, National Geographic reports, were likely used in rituals described by the famous Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that the Scythians were able to create a sort of smoke that “transported” them. The Scythians lived nomadically in the Eurasian steppe from the 9th century B.C.; Herodotus wrote, “According to the account which the Scythians themselves give, they are the youngest of all nations.”

The grave mound in which the gold vessels were found was first located by archaeologists in 2013, and had already been partially looted, so the discovery was not announced publicly. According to National Geographic, the archaeologists found “bucket-shaped gold vessels” filled with smaller gold objects under a “thick layer of clay.” 

Bonus finds: A slave ship that went down with slaves still aboard, a really poisonous spider across the ocean from its home, a stolen Purple Heart medal

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

The spider 'Cebrennus rechenbergi' cartwheeling down a sand dune in Morocco (Photo: Ingo Rechenberg/ WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every spring, the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry releases a list of the top ten new animal discoveries, and this year’s is a great one, including a chicken-like dinosaur, a spider that cartwheels into any predator dumb enough to threaten it, and a nine-inch-long walking stick insect.

Luckily, even after 250 years of professionals documenting thousands of new plants and animals every year, the rate at which new species are discovered remains relatively stable. Somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 new species are identified each year, with about half of those being insects. However, that number is somewhat misleading: it also includes the correction of taxonomic mistakes, movements from one family to another, and decisions that will end up being overruled in years to come.

The new species are scattered all over the globe, with animals from the top ten list hailing from Morocco, Australia, eastern China, central Mexico, and elsewhere. But where would you go if you wanted to find a brand new animal species?

The 'Anzu wyliei' dinosaur, dubbed the "chicken from hell", discovered in North and South Dakota (Photo: Mark Klingler/Carnegie Museum of Natural History)

There are many scenarios that can lead to a new species being discovered. The archetypical researchers clad in multi-pocketed khaki clothing heading into the jungle certainly do locate new creatures, but they’re not the only ones.

“There are cases of new species being found in museum collections, where they were collected 50 or 100 years ago and at the time nobody looked at the specimens closely enough,” says Christopher Waxworthy, a curator in the herpetology department at the American Museum of Natural History, who frequently goes out on fieldwork expeditions to look for new reptiles and amphibians.

Technology has led to even more animals being identified. New species today are regularly detected through DNA. Often, two species live relatively near to each other and look exactly alike, which means they were formerly categorized as only one genus. But analyzing their DNA shows enough dissimilarities in their genes to now classify them as separate species.

Zoologists at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. actually spent years being frustrated about their resident olinguitos’ inability to mate. But the olinguito is a small carnivore in the raccoon family, commonly confused with its identical-looking cousin the olingo. They were trying to mate the olinguito with an olingo, not realizing that it was an entirely different species.

An Olinguito (above) not to be confused with an Olingo (below) (Photo: Mark Gurney/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

(Photo: Jeremy Gatten/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

That doesn’t mean the well-explored parts of the world have no surprises left for us: just last year, a new species of frog was discovered in New York City, of all places. However, if you want to discover a new animal, less-trodden areas are a better bet. The most rewarding spots tend to be the tropics, since there are a wider variety of plants and animals there than in temperate regions.

There are plenty of places in the tropics that haven’t been thoroughly sifted through, though. “Typically, if you were interested in finding new species, a very good thing to look at would be to understand where people have done research and surveys in the past, and then find the holes, the blank areas of the map that have been under-studied,” says Waxworthy.

The reasons why some places remain unexplored are not what you would expect. Inaccessibility, for example, is not really a problem in the modern age. Sure, there might not be any direct flights from a research institution to Motuo, China (no roads go there) or the desolate Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean (you can only get there with a six-day boat ride from an island off the coast of Madagascar), but that doesn’t bother contemporary researchers much.

The remote Kerguelen Islands are one of the most isolated places on earth, and lie more than 2051miles away from the nearest populated location (Photo: MapData © 2015 Google)

“People who really enjoy fieldwork, they enjoy exploration, so they'd be up for the challenge,” says Waxworthy. And with the relatively cheap cost of international travel (compared to decades past, at least), a geographically remote place wouldn’t discourage researchers intent on finding new species–it might even encourage them.

So if it’s not physical inaccessibility, why are there still blank spots on the map? “I think a lot of it is really driven by politics,” said Waxworthy. The political situation can unnerve researchers far more than a long and uncomfortable boat ride, and national and regional instability can lead to waves of scientists alternately heading to (or avoiding) large swaths of land.

In the next few years, for example, expect to see a whole clutch of new species emerging from Cuba. American or U.S.-based researchers have long been barred due to economic sanctions from entering the country. But with the loosening of travel restrictions, a new crop of scientists are lining up to visit. Waxworthy, a U.S-based Englishman, is hoping to head to Cuba to study the island’s reptiles and amphibians within the year, and he won’t be the only one.

 Cuba is an extreme example; more often, areas become possible to explore in stages as they become more stable. “In Mexico, different regions of the country fall under the control of different drug barons,” says Waxworthy. “So one year you can go to this mountain and do work over there, and the next year that's totally off limits and would be really dangerous to go there.” Tropical Africa falls along the same lines. Much of the Eastern Congo is frustrating for scientists, as it’s comparatively unexplored and likely to host a wide variety of new species, but dozens of warring factions make it an exceptionally dangerous destination.

Then there are the parts of the world that, right now, are simply a no-go. “I think for example, if you wanted to do work right now in a place like Somalia, you'd be crazy,” said Waxworthy. Northern Mali, near Timbuktu, is also largely off-limits thanks to the high chance of getting kidnapped. Afghanistan would be another tough one. But stability comes in waves, and at some point, it’ll become more safe for researchers to head out there—and as soon as they can, they will, and we’ll start seeing more new discoveries from those areas.

A map of Mali, a potential area for new species (Photo: Serban Bogdan/shutterstock.com)

Dustin+Andi 4EVA (Photo: Dustin Gaffke on Flickr) 

The idea of a "love lock" is that you and your beloved clamp a padlock on a permanent structure (usually a bridge), and throw away the key so that your love can be as eternal as that lock. Unfortunately, not everyone is as sold on your cutesy gesture.

In fact, most sites that find themselves accumulating love locks often try to get rid of them, for the simple reason that padlocks are heavy and there is a already lot of love in this world. Which means that after not too long, the weight of all that affection tends to destroy whatever it is attached to. (There is a metaphor in there somewhere.) One of the most famous love lock locations in the world got taken down this week, after the never-ending stream of whimsical gestures continued causing damage to the historic Pont des Arts Bridge in Paris. Whether you think this is a pragmatic move that protects civic architecture, or a heartless war on pure love, let's take a look at six lock lock collections from around the world that have inspired both anger and adoration.

PARIS PADLOCKS OF LOVE
Paris, France

 
Who needs love when you have an accordion? (Photo: Ben Francis on Flickr)

The Paris love locks bridge, mentioned above, is probably the most famous example of the phenomenon, which probably also explains why it is at the forefront of the war on the tradition. As theNew York Times reports, the massive panels of locks that had been accruing since the last time they cleared the bridge of love were removed to a warehouse while their fate was decided. This is not the first time the bridge's delicate ironwork had undergone a cleansing of the locks, but it may be the last. The city plans on placing fiberglass panels over the ironwork so that no more locks can find purchase. But good luck, Paris, the whole point of love is that it find's a way.   

I'm sure every one of these couples made it. (Photo: David McSpadden on Flickr)

That's a lot of love. (Photo: Connie Ma on Flickr)

COLOGNE'S LOVE LOCKS BRIDGE
Cologne, Germany

 
I'm not sure what that says, but their love looks, REAL pink. (Photo: Rachel Titriga on Flickr)

In stark contrast to the Paris dismantling, is the Hohenzollernbrücke Bridge in Cologne, Germany, which embraces the trend. The tradition only came to the historic bridge in 2008, but the protective grates have already accumulated tens of thousands of locks, weighing at least two tons. Despite the possible structural issues that might arise from the weight of the lovers' tokens (not to mention the growing bed of keys at the bottom of the Rhine below), the city has chosen to embrace the trend, advertising it on their official tourism website and all. It may be only a matter of time before the weight of all this everlasting commitment starts to make the city planners nervous, but in the meantime, love is in the air and on the bridge.    

Germany is for lovers. (Photo: Gerhard Kemme on Flickr)

Picking a spot for your first love lock is a moment you'll never forget. (Photo: Rachel Titriga on Flickr)

LOVE LOCKS OF EAST LONDON
London, England

 
But especially his lock buddy. (Photo: MsSaraKelly on Flickr)

It doesn't take a fancy historical landmark to inspire people to clamp their love on a fence. This chainlink fence in London's East End neighborhood of Shoreditch has begun to collect some love locks of its own. The barrier protects a vacant lot across from a train station, and is nearly a more pure example of the trend with the locks clearly left by locals as opposed to sightseeing tourists. The fence is likely not as permanent as the historic edifices elsewhere in the world, but hopefully the couples who put locks here will be.

Love isn't in quite such crushing abundance out in Shoreditch. (Photo: Mark Hillary on Flickr)

I like this love love lock fence because it's scrappy. (Photo: Berit Watkin on Flickr)

PADLOCK TREE PARK
Moscow, Russia

That is one big padlock. Must be REALLY in love. (Photo: Jason Eppink on Flickr)

In order to combat lovelocking on Moscow's Luzhkov Bridge, instead of just telling people they couldn't put locks on the bridge, they gave them a better option. Beginning in 2007, metal frame trees were installed on the bridge for the express purpose of holding the affections of amorous couples. The trees soon became laden with locks, creating strange, bulbous arbors that stand as testaments to the love of countless couples. For a country that is often thought to be pretty cold, the number of relationships these trees represent is pretty heart-warming.   

Like metal berries of love. (Photo: Jason Eppink on Flickr)

Love looks a little wilted in the daylight. (Photo: A. Savin on Wikipedia)

MOUNT HUANGSHAN LOVE LOCKS
Hefei, China

 
Love in rarified air. (Photo: Yabbox on Wikipedia)

This Chinese love lock site is located high atop one of the country's most picturesque and revered mountains. Clipped to the chain guard rails along the high trails, the locks are some of the most unique in the world. One would think that given their more natural setting that the locks would cause more concern, but the tradition has been embraced by the local guides and has begun being associated with a local legend of lost love, despite the more accepted origin in an Italian romance novel. Where many of the other love lock collections seem chaotic, the locks on this mountain seem positively peaceful.  

Now this little steel nub is a bit harder to cut down. (Photo: Yabbox on Wikipedia)

BROOKLYN BRIDGE LOVE LOCKS
Brooklyn, New York

 
Poor Stephanie never loved again... (Photo: Michael Asuncion on Flickr)

Nothing gold can stay, and that goes double for the locks on the Brooklyn Bridge. Of course love locks were bound to start appearing on this world famous span, and almost as soon as they did, they began being removed by the city. Nonetheless, New Yorkers are not daunted that easily, and they continue to appear in small clusters. There may not be as many on the Brooklyn Bridge as there are in other places, but in an effort to make them more difficult to remove, the locks began appearing on precarious places, hovering over rushing traffic.   

In New York, the love locks are a bit more daring. (Photo: Hannah Frishberg on Atlas Obscura)

(Photo: Hannah Frishberg on Atlas Obscura)

The Volvo Ballet, 2015 (Photo: Courtesy of Kendra Lin)

It's summer in America, and in towns small and large, parades of firetrucks, baton-tossing marching bands, and distinguished old automobiles move haltingly down Main Streets. In Ithaca, New York, the town parade happens on the first day of the yearly Ithaca Festival, and, like so much else in the city, a college town sometimes referred to as "ten square miles surrounded by reality," the parade has its own unique spin on tradition.

The Ithaca Festival parade includes hula dancers and stilt-walkers, a He Man Chainsaw Marching Band, and bongo drummers. But of all the weirdly wonderful sections of the parade, however, the creatively gender-bending Volvo Ballet is the most famous.

In the ballet, the Volvos—there are usually five or six—wear "tutus," giant pastel fringes that encircle their metal forms. They move in pairs, dancing down the street, by criss-crossing in each others' paths or taking turns leaping forward and holding back. They are accompanied by a corps of dancers, sweaty and increasingly exhausted young men, who run and jump and ride on cars moving slowly down the street in simply choreographed moves.

In practice, the Volvo Ballet is not graceful. It's a goofy tradition. But it's unlike anything other float in the parade—probably in any summer parade, big or small. "Mostly I tell all the new dancers—you’re supposed to be a really bad dancer that takes themselves really seriously," says lead ballerina and float organizer Abel McSurley-Bradshaw. "Never smile. You’re trying to communicate through your exquisite leaps."

The Ballet was first created in the mid-1980s, and although the ballerinas are a key feature, the Volvos are the stars. Accurately or not, Ithacans believe that they have an unusually high number of Volvos per capita. 

The first time Abel McSurley-Bradshaw saw the ballet, in 1999, he remembers middle-aged men of larger size, spinning around and holding giant, two-and-half-foot cardboard wrenches they would used to "fix" the Volvos. For the past 15 or so years, though, the dancers have been younger—teenagers and twenty-somethings who ride, jump and slide on the cars. "Me and my friend Ben got to be ballerinas when we were in middle school," says McSurley-Bradshaw.

Responsibility for organizing the Volvos has been handed down from Ithacan to Ithacan over the years. Before McSurley-Bradshaw took over organizing the cars this year, Briony Walsh was the organizer and "careographer" for six years. She first got involved when she found a note on her Volvo: "Hey, nice car," it read. "Want to be in the Volvo Ballet? Call Evan."

"I was so excited about it, I didn't even trust that this was legit," she says. "The Volvo Ballet seemed so mythic." But it was real, and Evan was moving to California, so within a year, she was in charge. She adopted the little toy cars Evan had used to model the Volvos' moves for the drivers, and she improved the tradition—she made mini-tutus for them.

The cars' tutus are stored in plastic bags by the festival organizers, and neither organizer knows where they originally came from. "They've seen some things," says Walsh. "I've had to repair them a lot over the years."

The Volvos change from year to year, as some drivers come back and others don't. A few years ago, Walsh says, it was more common for the cars to be "classic" Volvo 240s, but as those cars have lived out their natural lives, they've become more scarce. This year, McSurley-Bradshaw rustled up a 1978 240, an early 80s car, a nicer, newer Volvo, and a couple of others. The cars do, sometimes, take a beating, as the ballerinas jump onto them, slide off, and generally have their way with them. 

"There is a lot of hurling," McSurley-Bradshaw says."Hurling is very important."

The Volvo Ballet, 2015 (Photo: Courtesy of Kendra Lin)

For half his life now, every summer, McSurley-Bradshaw has put on a leotard and tutu and danced around and onto the Volvos as they crawl down the mile of the Ithaca Festival Parade route. At this point, he has standard Volvo Ballet moves, like sliding down the back of the 240s and performing handstands through the sunroof. Harassing cops is also a regular part of the ballet. 

Usually, Abel's brother, Wade, joins him. And a few years after he first started, he says, more of his peers started wanting to participate. It's actually an intense activity: after this year's ballet, Abel had bruises on his limbs and torso (probably, he said, from trying to dive through a Volvo window, which worked better when he was younger). Doing a handstand through a Volvo sunroof takes a fair bit of upper body strength. Men in tutus, Abel found, baffled the audience but interested them, too. And soon enough, more of Ithaca's young men rotated through the Volvo Ballet corps—participating became a thing to do.

"It got really addictive — the fanciness and the androgyny that we were promoting," he says.

By the end of the route, the dancers themselves are usually exhausted and stretched out on the roofs or hoods of the cars. But they still get plenty of attention from onlookers. "We've still got the music playing, and the dancers are sitting on top, just relaxing," says Walsh. "It's the victory lap. It's a great moment."

The Volvo Ballet, 2015 (Photo: Courtesy of Kendra Lin)

The envelope for a Western Union Telegraph, c. 1861 (Photo: Library of Congress)

Today, where disposable instant messaging, emails, texts and tweets are all around us, it is a pleasant surprise to find out that the grandfather of quick communication is still with us. 

Yes, it is still possible to send a personal, hand-delivered telegram.

A telegram sent to Atlas Obscura's Editor-In-Chief from Luke Spencer on 22 May, 2015 

On January 27th, 2006, the world’s most famous telegram agency Western Union announced that it “will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services..” For over 150 years the world’s greatest joys, deepest condolences and proudest successes had been hand delivered within their iconic yellow envelopes, written in its own distinctive brief prose.

At one point in the 1920s, Western Union and its army of uniformed messengers were sending more than 200 million telegrams every year. But the advent of faxes, then emails and finally SMS messaging saw the numbers dwindle, bringing to an end the golden age of the telegram.

But a handful of companies are carrying on the tradition. Principal amongst them is the International Telegram Company who inherited and still operate Western Union’s former telex and cablegram network. They are well aware of their own anachronism: “Most people are pretty surprised to learn that telegrams still exist, and in fact are still pretty widely used in some parts of the world,” says Colin Stone, Director of Operations.  Overall, he says that about 20 million telegrams are still delivered every year.

And this isn’t just a gimmick; text messages and e-mails might work for saying hi but when it comes to urgent hand-delivered messages, the telegram is still the gold standard. “People use them for canceling contracts and sending legal notifications because a copy of the message is retained in our files for 7 years and can be legally verified,” explains Stone. Everything from legal notices to social correspondence for births, funerals and weddings are being routinely sent by telegrams. In the U.S., Stone says that people still send telegrams for a simple reason, echoing the famous quote about why humans climb Mount Everest—"because they can."

Samuel Morse, c. 1840 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Prior to the invention of the telegraph, long distance communication was as slow as the horse which carried it; the Pony Express could deliver a message across America in roughly 10 days. This was obviously not ideal. In 1825, an aspiring painter was in Washington, D.C. working on a commissioned portrait of the famed French general Marquis de Lafayette when he got an urgent message from his father saying, “Your dear wife is convalescent.” Leaving the painting of Lafayette unfinished, the painter rushed home to New Haven, Connecticut, to find that his beloved wife was not only dead but had already been buried. He devoted himself to creating a faster method of long-distance communication, and would lend his name to an invention that deliver messages almost instantly; his name was Samuel Morse.

Morse learnt that over in England, inventors William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had installed the world’s first commercial telegraphy system on the Great Western Railway in 1838. Their patented system involved a series of needles that pointed to letters of the alphabet on a board, spelling out a message. Samuel Morse developed a single wire electrical telegraph that proved more simple and popular. Along with his assistant Alfred Vail, they created the Morse code signaling alphabet, and patented his electric telegraph to deliver it. In May 1844, Morse sent the ominous sounding message from the floor of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington to Baltimore, “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.”

William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone's electric telegraph from 1837, which is now held in the London Science Museum
(Photo: Geni/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0) 

Almost overnight telegraphs transformed the way the world communicated. In 1846 there was only Morse’s experimental line between Baltimore and Washington, but by 1850 there were 12,000 miles of cable and over 20 companies in the United States alone. Tom Standage, in his 1998 book The Victorian Internet, described how  “it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime....romances blossomed over the wires and secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others.” 

The method of sending a telegram was simple. By visiting the office of a telegraph company, or later, by over the telephone, you would compose a message as briefly as possible, for telegrams charged by the word. The message was then conveyed by the electric wire in Morse code to its destined office where it would be written or typed, stuck to a form and hand delivered, usually by a boy on a bicycle.  If you were living in Pittsburgh in the 1850s it was entirely possible your telegram would have been delivered by a young Andrew Carnegie. Or over in Port Huron, Michigan, a boy of the name Thomas Edison. 

A group of Western Union telegraph messengers in Norfolk, Virginia, photographed by Lewis Wickes Hine in 1911 (Photo: Library of Congress) 

So prevalent was the number of aspiring cable companies, that Standage notes in the 1852 US Census, “the telegraph industry even merited 12 pages to itself.” One such company was the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. Gradually buying up its competitors, it would come to virtually monopolize the entire telegram industry under its new name, Western Union.

Known today principally as a money wiring service, Western Union was once the premier American telegraph operator. In 1861 it completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in the U.S., instantly rendering the Pony Express obsolete. Such was its success that in 1884, it was one of the original 11 stocks on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (The shareholders were no doubt delighted to read of their profits on the stock exchange ticker, especially as it was Western Union which had invented it.) By 1930, Western Union had moved into an opulent example of art deco architecture on 60 Hudson Street, New York. With the tagline “Telegraph Capital of the World,” it came complete with over 70 million feet of cable, its own gymnasium and an auditorium for the instructing of messengers.

The Western Union Telegraph Building in New York City, photographed in 1931 (Photo: Library of Congress)

In 1854 in a house overlooking Gramercy Park, the industrialist, philanthropist and inventor of such varied creations as the first U.S. steam locomotive and Jell-O, Peter Cooper, met a prominent New York financier named Cyrus West Field. Together with a team of three other backers, including Samuel Morse, they created a 400-mile underwater telegraph line connecting Newfoundland with Nova Scotia. Three years later, West started laying the first telegraph wire along the Atlantic ocean floor.

A map of telegraph connections in 1891 from Stielers Hand Atlas (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

Just 14 years after Morse’s first telegram, Queen Victoria sent a message of congratulations to President James Buchanan. The first transatlantic telegram was met with such hysteria in New York that impromptu parades and fireworks accidentally set fire to City Hall.

Photograph showing the White House telegraph office and staff during Theodore Roosevelt's administration, 1902 (Photo: Library of Congress)

It’s hard to imagine now, but the birth of the telegram transformed language as much as business. Just as instant messaging today has developed its own abbreviated lexicon of terms such as IRL, IMHO, and ICYMI, so to did telegraphy. Due to telegrams being priced by the word, brevity was the order of the day. Companies soon did a thriving business in publishing code word directories.

In one thrifty telegram comprising of the word COQUARUM the poor recipient would be reliably informed that the ‘engagement broken off.’ In business you might well ask someone to LOZENGE (“what shall we do with documents and bills of lading attached”) to which the stern reply GIGGLE would instruct, “Use your discretion as to delivery of documents.”

AWestern Union telegram from 1930, announcing the Millsaps College beats MSU (then Mississippi A&M) in football
(Photo: NatalieMaynor/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

Soon a Hemingway-esque prose developed, with brief, terse sounding messages omitting expensive pronouns and adjectives. Guide books such as Nelson E. Ross’ 1928 How to Write Telegrams Properly had whole chapters devoted to “Extra Words and Their Avoidance”, and “How Unnecessary Words Creep In”.

Under the ethos that “Brevity is the soul of Telegraphy”, social formalities in letter writing such as “Dear Madame” and “Yours very truly” were quickly done away with. Shortness and pithiness were the order of the day. During the filming of The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the labyrinthine plot was so confusing that director Howard Hawks cabled author Raymond Chandler asking who killed the chauffeur. Chandler sent a simple telegram back— “NO IDEA”. 

The shortest telegram exchange sent is attributed to Oscar Wilde. Living in Paris, he is supposed to have cabled his publisher in London to see how how his new book was doing. The telegram simply read “?” to which the reply cabled back was “!” (Although the story might be apocryphal; the same telegram has been attributed to Victor Hugo.)

While the majority of telegrams were used for everyday conversation and business, some are particularly poignant. Such as this desperate message telegraphed on the night of April 14th, 1912:

SOS SOS CQD CQD TITANIC. WE ARE SINKING FAST. PASSENGERS ARE BEING PUT INTO BOATS. TITANIC.

During wartime, the most dreaded telegram of all was hand delivered on behalf of either the War Department or the Navy Department. The message began “The Secretary of War (for soldiers and airmen) or Secretary of Navy (for sailors and marines), regrets to inform you that [name, rank and serial number of the man in the military service] was killed in action (or missing in action).”

Other telegrams changed world history. One of the most infamous was a telegram consisting of a secret message in groups of coded numbers that Western Union delivered to the German Ambassador to Mexico on January 19th, 1917. Sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman it was intercepted by British intelligence and sent to President Woodrow Wilson.

The Zimmerman telegram January 19, 1917 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The telegram spelt out that Germany would offer US territories to Mexico in return for joining the German side. The telegram was published in the US press on March 1st, 1917, and a month later, despite Wilson being elected under the banner ‘He Kept Us Out of the War’, the United States declared war on Germany. In his book The Codebreakers, David Kahn rightly states that,”no other single cryptanalysis has had such enormous consequences......never before or since has so much turned upon the solution of a secret message.”

Telegrams may not be as widespread as they once were, but through companies such as the International Telegram Company they remain perhaps the most elegant way to send a message since 1844.

A Tasman Peninsula Dusky Antechinus (Photo: University of Queensland)

The antechinus, the tiny Australian marsupial that looks like a cute-enough cross of a rat and a mole (if moles could hop), has a very strange sex life. In the summer, these creatures spend about two or three weeks "speed-mating"—a frenzy of copulation that leaves the males, as one scientist puts it, "physically disintegrating."  The stress hormones they work up trying to have as much sex as possible end up destroying the males' immune systems, and they die, leaving the local supply of delicious insects to their offspring.

The antechinus was first discovered in 1803, and for many years there were though to be only two species. But scientists at the University of Queensland have been pushing to discover "cryptic taxa" among the antechini, and they've now identified two additional species—Tasman Peninsula Dusky Antechinus and the Mainland Dusky Antechinus—bringing their total of antechinus species discovered up to five.

Like many species newly described by science, these are relatively rare and at risk of disappearing altogether. These live on mountains in southeast Queensland, in "perhaps the smallest distributions of any Australian mammal." Their sex frenzy, in this context, isn't necessarily an advantage: it means that the species' survival depends entirely on the next generation—every year, the antechinus females need to produce enough males for the deadly orgy to come.

Bonus finds: 12,000-year-old arrowheads, a Byzantine shipwreck, 13th century gambling pieces

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

An aerial view of Randall's and Wards Islands seen towards the bottom right. (Photo: Doc Searls/Flickr)

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Scattered around the five boroughs are a set of islands—Roosevelt Island, North Brother Island, Randall’s Island and Wards Island, Rikers Island, and Hart Island— that have all been places where the tired, poor, sick and criminal are sent to be treated (or sometimes just confined). These are the Islands of the Undesirables. The water has served as a kind of moat, as well as insurance against NIMBY protestations, physically close to glittering Manhattan but also very, very far the cosmopolitan city. 

This is the second installment of five-part series based on this past weekend’s Obscura Day event. Yesterday was Roosevelt Island, today we look at Randall's Island and Wards Island. 

A map of the islands that are featured in Atlas Obscura's Islands of the Undesirables series (Photo: Map Data © 2015 Google) 

Until the 1960s, Randall’s and Wards were two distinct islands, with the stretch between them known as Little Hell Gate. But even before Manhattan dumped its construction rubble to fill that gap, both islands have long histories as drop-off points for unwanted items from the big city.

Orphans, people dying of smallpox, the criminally insane and juvenile delinquents all resided on this slip of a place, less than a square mile in size. The land was deemed more suitable for the dead than the living, as 100,000 bodies were transferred here at one point.

And if all of that wasn’t enough, eventually city planners built a sewage treatment plant on its shores.

At first, though, the islands lived bucolic lives. They were purchased from the Native Americans in 1637 by Dutch Governor Wouter Van Twiller and used primarily for farming, with Wards known as “Great Barn Island” and Randall's as “Little Barn”. Randall's earned its first undesirable association in the spring of 1776, when George Washington established a smallpox quarantine there, but that usage didn’t last long—the British drove the Americans from both Great Barn and Little Barn a few months later. Captain John Montresor, prominent in the British military, had bought Little Barn in 1772 and used it to secretly survey New York for invasion sites. During the Revolution, he set up an officer's hospital on the island, while the British used it to launch amphibious invasions. Great Barn, meanwhile, became an army base. 

The Inebriate Asyulm on Ward's Islabd, 1869 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Like the other “islands of the undesirables,” both Randall’s and Wards were then privately owned until the city bought them in the 19^th century (Randall’s in 1835, Wards in 1851). Randall’s used to be owned by a farmer named Jonathan Randel, and the current name comes from a spelling error by the city. In the 19^th century, the island housed an orphanage, an almshouse, a potters field, an Idiot Asylum (yes, its actual name) and a children’s hospital. But its most notorious tenant was the House of Refuge, a reform school completed in 1854 and run by the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents.

 
A wood engraving of House of Refuge on Randall's Island, New York, from 1855 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The House of Refuge—in reality, it was anything but—housed in both actual criminals and street urchins by the hundreds, and both groups were largely comprised of Irish teenage boys. The children spent four hours a day in religious and secular classes, and six and a half hours caning chairs and making shoes for outside contractors. Children who misbehaved were hung up by their thumbs. In 1887, business finally forced the state to stop using House of Refuge inmates as workers (perhaps because the streets of New York were already flooded with cheap immigrant labor) and conditions improved slightly, though there were still reports of inhuman treatment by drunken officers and armed revolts by the boys.

During the same time period, Ward Island (its name comes from former owners Jaspar and Bartholomew Ward) was used for burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies relocated from the Madison Square Park and Bryant Park potters fields, beginning in the 1840s. Overall, 100,000 bodies were moved to approximately 75 acres on the southern tip of Wards Island. (It’s unclear whether the bodies are still there.) Besides the burial of the indigent dead, the island was also the site of a hospital for sick and destitute immigrants, known as The State Emigrant Refuge (the biggest hospital complex in the world during the 1850s). Other tenants included an immigration station, a homeopathic hospital, a rest home for Civil War veterans, an Inebriate Asylum, and The New York City Asylum for the Insane.

 
From 'King's Handbook of New York City', published in 1893 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In 1930, the Metropolitan Conference on Parks recommends that the islands be stripped of their institutions and used only for recreation. Parks Commissioner Robert Moses saw both islands as key to his plan to link Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens by bridge, providing access to his new system of parkways on Long Island. He pushed a bill through the state legislature that forced out the House of Refuge and many of the other institutions, sending many of the patients and inmates to overcrowded facilities elsewhere. Since then, the islands have had a different feel.

A 21,000-seat stadium (known as Triborough and later Downing) was constructed, opening with Olympic trials in 1936. The trials were a mess, thanks largely to a malfunctioning public address system, but they did feature Jesse Owens earning his Olympic slots. Two years later, Downing Stadium also hosted what is considered the first outdoor jazz festival, the 1938 Carnival of Swing. The 5-hour, 45 minute memorial for George Gerwshin starred Duke Ellington, Count Basie and other jazz legends. Newsreel footage of the event on YouTube provides a glimpse back in time to what seems like a marvelous event, and a far cry from the island’s historical uses.

Randall’s want on to host other major concerts and events, including Lollapalooza for several years in the 1990s. In 2005, Downing Stadium was replaced by a $45 million track and field arena called Icahn Stadium, and the island is now also home to a golf center, tennis academy, and athletic fields. It’s also home, at least this year, to the Frieze Art Fair, the Governor’s Ball, and several other music-and-art festivals.

These days, then, the vibe at Randall’s and Ward is much different than for most of the last century, although remnants of its dark past remain. The New York City Asylum for the Insane later became the world’s largest mental institution and is now the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, still located on the island. The Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center is also on Wards, housing the criminally insane.

Wards is also home to a major sewage treatment center, which takes up about a quarter of the island, and several homeless shelters, some of which are “emergency” shelters that have nevertheless been there for decades.

But the island is now known for something quite unique: a NYC Fire Department training academy packed with structures simulating the various environments that firefighters encounter within the city, including a subway tunnel (complete with tracks and two subway cars), a helicopter pad, and a replica ship. The danger there is carefully controlled—unlike the state-built institutions that had previously lived on the island.

Aerial view of the Hell Gate Bridge and one span of the Triborough Bridge, between Astoria Park in Queens and Wards Island. At the top of the photo is the pedestrian Wards Island Bridge (Photo: WikiCommons) 

Mermaids? (Photo: Walter on Flickr)

For centuries, mermaids have captured the imagination of both sailors and landlubbers, fascinated by the idea of hidden fish people beneath the waves. Yet the exact nature of these underwater humans has varied pretty wildly over the years. Even though the fantastical beings are clearly fiction, there are still places all over the world where you can visit actual mermaids in some form or another whether they are Barnumesque hokum, frolicking manatees that inspired the myth in the first place, and even some South Korean fisherwomen that have come to be known as mermaids. All across the world, mermaids are real!

1. TENSHOU-KYOUSHA SHRINE
Fujinomiya, Japan

(Photo: Justin Arnold on Atlas Obscura)

If the legends surrounding this hideous little goblin found in Japan's Tenshou-Kyousha Shrine are to be believed, it may be the oldest mermaid on this list. As the story goes, this creature is 1,400-years-old and once appeared to a local prince claiming to have once been a regular fisherman who was cursed after fishing in protected waters. The mermaid is said to have asked the prince to build the shrine as a reminder of his mistake, displaying the cursed corpse for all to see. However this is more likely a taxidermy abomination. 

(Photo: Justin Arnold on Atlas Obscura)

(Photo: Justin Arnold on Atlas Obscura)

2. BIG BEND POWER PLANT MANATEE VIEWING AREA
Apollo Beach, Florida

(Photo: Walter on Flickr)

Possibly one of the least expected places to see so-called mermaids is in the waste water pools of this Florida power plant. It is widely believed that the myth of the mermaid is primarily inspired by manatee sightings as the bulbous, fleshy sea-cows gracefully floated beneath the waves. A large group of the animals continues to do so today outside of this Florida power plant as the heated waste water from the facility drains out and creates a comfortable environment for the creatures, which from such a close vantage point, are definitely some unattractive mermaids.  

(Photo: Walter/Flickr)

(Photo: Walter/Flickr)

3. FEEJEE MERMAID AT THE NATURE MUSEUM
Grafton, Vermont

(Photo: J.W. Ocker on Atlas Obscura)  

This classic feejee mermaid located in Vermont's quaint Nature Museum was taken from a fraternal lodge. The ugly beast bears all the hallmarks of a Barnum-esque hybrid from the sickly fish tail to the desiccated body, cobbled together from unknown animal parts. Although the likely culprit is some type of small monkey. Unlike many feejee mermaids, this one has a mustache, although its hard to say whether facial hair is a gender indicator within fake mermaid physiology. It should be noted that this little guy is held in storage in the museum's basement but brought out from time to time.

(Photo: J.W. Ocker on Atlas Obscura)

4. JEJU MERMAIDS
Jeju-si, South Korea

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 

As opposed to the other creatures on this list, these South Korean "mermaids" are actually just human women who come to be known as impressive fisherpeople. Flipping the traditional South Korean gender roles, the "Haenyo" of Jeju-Si island are responsible for the community's fishing duties, earning their fantastical nicknames thanks to the practice of free-diving for their catches. Unfortunately the traditional practice is nearing extinction due to the younger generation increasingly leaving the island to work in the bigger cities. This of course has left only elderly fisherwomen to continue on as the Jeju Mermaids, although their age makes them only the more incredible.    

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 

5. BANFF MERMAN
Banff, Canada

 (Photo: Eviatar Bach on WikiCommons)

This is the only merMAN on the list, but you can hardly tell by looking at him. This feejee-mermaid-type chimera, located in a Canadian shop was said to either have been acquired or actually created by the store's original proprietor, Norman Luxton. The gross looking monster, with its clearly carved grimace is a far cry from the lovely merpeople of legend, but it is beloved none the less.

6. WEEKI WACHEE
Weeki Wachee, Florida

(Photo: Robin Wendell on Flickr)

Florida's "City of Mermaids" is probably the closest one is going to get to seeing the idealized Western version of a sea maiden in the flesh. Since 1947, the tiny town, with its population in the single digits, has been nome to a live mermaid show where women don glittering tails and flit around a giant aquarium that is fed by a natural spring. The mayor of the little berg is even a former performer from the city, making Weeki Wachi possibly the only city in the world to be governed by a mermaid. 

(Photo: Nancy Spaid on Flickr)

7. THE LITTLE MERMAID
Copenhagen, Denmark

(Photo: Nervous Energy on Flickr)

This is of course the quintessential mermaid from which most all other mermaids are judged. The famous Copenhagen statue was inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson tale of a comely mermaid falling in love with the surface world. The statue is the essential vision of a mermaid as the Western world knows them. A beautiful young girl on top, and a massive fish on the bottom. A classic.  

 
(Photo: Benson Kua on Flickr)

After Fromme's Sept 5, 1975, attempted assassination (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In September of 1975, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme was on the front page of the New York Times: earlier that month, she had brandished a .45 caliber automatic pistol at President Gerald Ford, and now she had been judged competent to stand trial for the attempted assassination. Normally, this might have been above-the-fold news. But on that same day, the Times was profiling Sara Jane Moore—the other woman who had attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford that month.

It's a historical fact that many forget: Two women attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford, in the same month.

Both attempts had occurred in California, Fromme's in Sacramento, Moore's in San Francisco. Fromme had not fired a shot; Moore had, and it went wide. The two attempts were not connected to each other, but both women had been involved in the strange subcultures of 1970s California.

Fromme, 26 at the time, was a member of the Manson Family, and although she had not been implicated in the group's murders, she was one of Charlie Manson's oldest and most devoted supporters. Moore was older, 45, and she had immersed herself in the world of San Francisco's leftist political groups, in part out of a personal fascination and in part because the FBI had recruited her as an informant.

It's hard to outmatch a Manson Family member in a contest of unsettling personalities. And Fromme holds the distinction of being the first woman charged with the attempted assassination of a U.S. president. But between Ford's two would-be assassins, it's Moore who, ultimately, is the more mysterious and troubling figure.

Fromme was a small, red-headed woman who, by 1975, had etched an "X" on her forehead in support of Manson and taken to wearing a red hood and cape. But, in a way, her story's familiar enough. As reporter Jess Bravin recounts in Squeaky, his autobiography of Fromme, she grew up unhappy, in an abusive household. By high school she was inconsistently attending class, trying drugs and spending her time with older men. She was what we'd now call a cutter, and she tried to slit her wrists. When she left home and ended up on Venice Beach, she met a charismatic older man—Manson—who, for many years, made her life interesting and better than it ever had been. She remained loyal to him even after he started leading the people who gathered around him down a dark path; her defense, in her trial for the assassination attempt, was that she was not interested in hurting Ford but in attracting attention to Manson's cause.

Moore seems like a more sympathetic character. Externally, she looked like an average member of American society. When she stood in the crowd while waiting to shoot the president, she was wearing "baggy tan pants and a neatly pressed blue raincoat," the scholar Philip H. Melanson wrote in his history of the Secret Service—she dressed like a mom. And she was: She had four kids, which was normal enough in 1975. But only one of them still lived with her—the other three had been officially adopted by their grandmother, which would have been more unusual. She had also been married and divorced five times. Even if she dressed the part, she was not the picture of normalcy.

Born in West Virginia, Moore (a name she assumed after her fifth divorce) was always, as the reporter Geri Spieler writes in Taking Aim at the President, seen as someone who was a "little odd." Her first two husbands were in the military; the second two worked in the film industry, one as a bookkeeper, the other as a sound engineer. Her fifth husband was a doctor: Moore lived with him in a staid San Francisco suburb and volunteered for the senate campaign of a Republican candidate.

After the divorce, Moore volunteered to work at People in Need, a feed-the-hungry organization that Randolph Hearst created to try to appease his daughter's kidnapper. From the beginning, here too, she acted strangely. When she showed up, she told the people in charge that God had sent her; soon, she had forced her way into a role as PIN's press person. The operations of PIN were dominated by leftist groups, but Moore maintained her mom uniform of blue slacks, a camel blazer, and a string of pearls, Spieler writes. She gained the trust of Hearst himself. But within PIN, she was known for swerving erratically between hyper-professionalism and irrational anger. She later became the organization's bookkeeper.

However much she was enjoying her new life as a left-leaning activist, it seems that she pushed deeper into San Francisco's political scene in part because the FBI asked her to. Her PIN activities caught the attention of agents, who recruited her as an informer: they asked her to start attending the meetings of various leftist groups, taking notes on who came, and befriending fractious elements. (She wasn't paid for this work, but the bureau did pick up her expenses.) Moore, Spieler says, had a "chameleon ability to charm everyone she met," and soon she was both informing on the radical groups to the FBI and confiding to the radicals she knew about the FBI's interest in them. At one lefty hangout, she was even known as "the FBI Lady."

One interpretation of Moore's assassination attempt is that she had made a choice between the two sides—she had decided to throw her lot in with the leftists and wanted to demonstrate her allegiance. In the days before she shot at Ford, Moore called up the San Francisco Police Department and told the officers there she was considering a "test" of the president's security system. They took away her gun; she bought another one, and with that gun in her car, sped through downtown in the hopes, she later said, of being apprehended. While she stood waiting to fire her shot, she was thinking about whether she'd be on time to pick up her son.

In contrast, Fromme, at least by her own account, had a clear motive for wanting to shoot Gerald Ford. "I just wanted to get some attention for a new trial for Charlie and the girls," she'd tell reporters later. The chamber of the gun she used was empty—although there were more cartridges in the pistol's clip and the Secret Service agent who stopped her said she was fumbling to load it.

Both Fromme and Moore were both judged psychologically sound enough to stand trial; Fromme defended herself. (Mostly, she tried to make political statements about environmental issues, which didn't go over well with the judge.) Dr. Gustave Weiland, a psychiatrist who evaluated Moore, said that people like her "cannot be described as psychotic." They were strange, yes, "seldom at ease with themselves," and they had hard time making strong relationships. But on some level, Moore knew what she was doing.

What's so unsettling about Moore is that it's hard to reconcile the person she presents to the world with the person who decided to kill President Ford. "You look like someone's grandmother," Matt Lauer told her, in a 2009 interview, and he's right. He asked Moore why she agreed to the interview, and she explained that “one gets tired of being thought of as a kook, a monster, an alien. I’m a human being."

Just watching the interview, it's hard not to sympathize with her. But she's good at creating that impression. Before Spieler wrote her book, she spent years talking with and visiting Moore, informally. It was Moore's idea that she write the book. But as soon as the process started, and Spieler made clear that Moore wouldn't have control over who she talked to or what would go into the story, Moore cut her off: "I am no longer home to you," she said, and never talked to Spieler again.

Once you know that Moore can turn on a dime, it's hard to watch her and not feel uneasy. Fromme seems like the sort of person who might think it was a good idea to brandish a gun at a president. With Moore, you're just left to wonder.

The view from North Brother Island at dusk. (Photo: Christopher Payne)

This is the third installment of a five-part series about NYC"s Islands of the Undesirables, the hidden-in-plain-sight places that we have used for asylums, prisons, detention centers, medical research facilities and other unsavory destinations right on the edge of glittering Manhattan.  The series is based on an Obscura Day event. Monday was Roosevelt Island, and yesterday we looked at Randall’s and Wards Island. Today, we’re bringing you to North Brother Island in the Bronx.

 
A map of the islands that are featured in Atlas Obscura's Islands of the Undesirables series (Photo: Map Data © 2015 Google) 

North Brother Island is an uninhabited patch of land located smack dab in the middle of the East River between the Bronx and Rikers Island. It was the site of the infamous Riverside Hospital for quarantinable diseases—the place where Typhoid Mary finally succumbed to her namesake illness in 1938. After WW2, up until 1951, the island was repurposed as housing for veterans and their families. The island then played host to a rehabilitation center for adolescent drug addicts. After the facility closed in the 1960s (amid allegations of corruption) the island became a bird sanctuary, permanently closed off to the public.

But photographer Christopher Payne has been able to spend years documenting the place, as he was granted access to document the island by the New York City Department of Recreation in 2006. His haunting photos, taken over a few seasons, illustrate the inevitable decay of architecture in a place devoid of humans. Payne’s work is featured in his book North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City.

 
Nature has reclaimed the buildings. (All photos: Christopher Payne) 

Can you give us a pocket history of North Brother Island? Who lived there before Europeans, how did it get its name, etc.? 

At first glance NBI is the most unexpected of places: an uninhabited island of ruins in New York City, a secret existing in plain sight that hardly anyone knows. Yet it was once an ordinary part of the city, and for over eighty years, from the 1880s until its abandonment in 1963, thousands of people called it “home”.

The navigator Adriaen Block, the Dutchman who explored the Atlantic Coast between 1611 and 1614, named North Brother and its smaller sibling, South Brother, “de Gessellen”, which translates as “the wayfarers” or the “journeymen” or “brethren,” or in the usage that New York City maps retain today, “brothers.”

Little is known about North Brother before the mid 19^th century, and it seems to have served no formal use until a lighthouse was erected on the southern portion in 1869. In the 1880’s it began to get more attention, as public health issues of an exploding population regularly made headlines. Like other islands in the harbor, it was perfectly suited as a buffer against contagions, and from the 1880s through the 1930s it was used primarily as a quarantine hospital (the infamous Typhoid Mary was confined there). After WWII it provided a temporary home for veterans and their families, and from the 1950s it was used as a juvenile drug treatment center until its closure in 1963. Over the years, new uses have been proposed for the island, but by and large it has been forgotten. Thanks to a threatened species of shorebird, the black-crowned night heron, North Brother has been designated as conservation land, to protect nesting grounds for the herons, which have unwittingly helped to preserve the island’s forgotten fragments of New York’s history. Today the island is overseen and maintained by the New York City Parks Department.

The spiral staircase in the Nurses Home.

The Tuberculosis Pavilion lobby, which was part of an infamous quarantine unit where Typhoid Mary died.

What stands out about that history to you? What do you think is special about North Brother Island?

Its history is really not much different from any of the other harbor islands used for social welfare purposes—in New York and other American cities. What I find special about North Brother is the splendid sense of isolation you feel when you penetrate the perimeter vegetation and arrive in a peaceful, canopied forest. The juxtaposition of decaying buildings with the lush landscape makes for a sublime experience. 

It’s also a window into the future, into a city without people, as if people suddenly vanished. 

A door with patient's names carved in abandoned Tuberculosis Pavilion .

An English grammar book from the 1930s.   

When did you start visiting? How did you find out about it? 

I first learned about North Brother in 2004, when I was commissioned to photograph industrial sites along the East River by the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. The island's unique ruinous landscape immediately appealed to me, given the similar work I was doing at the time on abandoned state mental institutions.

After an initial trip with the NYC Parks Department, I was hooked, and in 2008 they granted me approval to take pictures. The deal we struck was that I would provide transportation in return for access (they didn’t own a boat, but I had a friend who did!). And so from 2008 to 2013, my friend Todd would drive up from Washington DC, with a boat strapped atop his minivan, and ferry us back and forth. We probably made at least two-dozen trips in all.

 
The only remaining side of the island's church. 

What did it feel like to visit somewhere that has had no continuous human presence for 45 years, and that has such a dark and sad history?

As a photographer, it was frustrating, because the buildings are very dilapidated and few artifacts remain to indicate how the spaces were last used. Everything portable of value has been stripped away by vandals. Nature and neglect have done the rest.

Walking amid such empty, “charged” spaces, it’s easy for our imagination to fill the void and assume the worst. Yet when I spoke with a veteran and his wife who lived on the island as newlyweds just after WWII, they recalled it fondly as an idyllic place to raise a family. I also met a man who was sent there in the 1950s as a drug addicted teenager. He said his experience there—and the compassionate care he received from a social worker—changed his life and helped him kick his habit for good. 

A Bronx Yellow Pages (now burnt orange). 

 The auditorium of the Service Building.

What were some of the challenges when shooting somewhere so dilapidated? What kind of precautionary measures did you have to take?  

Most of the buildings were in very bad shape so we had to be careful where we walked. Floors and roofs were caved in, stair treads were missing—the usual dangers one encounters. But the real challenge was poison ivy, which seemed to be everywhere. As a precaution, I’d wrap my equipment in plastic bags. Over the years, I came to enjoy shooting in the late fall and winter more than summer. It was easier to get around, and the buildings weren’t covered in vegetation, allowing light to get inside.  

Boiler roof interior. 

Why do you think people are fascinated with ruins?

This is a very broad question: they’re evocative, romantic, spooky, etc. The list goes on and on. My interest in ruins is a by-product of the subjects I am most drawn to: industrial infrastructure and processes, and older buildings. Many of these places were designed for a specific purpose at a particular time. Over the years, they have become outdated and obsolete. North Brother Island is a perfect example as a quarantine hospital for infectious diseases. The need for a self-contained island community, in the middle of New York City, simply doesn’t exist anymore.

The exterior of the Tuberculosis Pavilion, the legendary quarantine facility. 

What do the ruins of North Brother Island show about New York City in the late 1800s?

 North Brother Island was one of many institutions (public schools, asylums, hospitals, universities, prisons) erected in the late 19^th century in New York City as a social buttress to counter the perceived ills of disease, urbanization, immigration, and population growth. This kind of civic investment, whatever its motivating cause, was executed on a scale unheard of now. The location and use of North Brother Island, as a quarantine hospital, also speaks about the city’s social geography and how it was organized much differently than it is now. Back then, less savory people, activities, and neighborhoods were relegated to the peripheries of the city, like the waterfront and islands. Now these edges have been reclaimed as coveted land for public access and high-end living. It’s basically an inversion of the old order.

A classroom with books.

Tuberculosis Pavilion balcony. 

Do you think public access should be allowed?

I think access should be allowed but I hope the island will be preserved as a natural sanctuary. I would love to see the Tuberculosis Pavilion restored and adaptively reused, with the other structures stabilized as ruins, like the smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island. Buried sidewalks and roads could be cleared, but not too much so that it becomes sanitized like Ellis Island. That’s what makes North Brother so wonderful: it’s isolated and wild, and moving along at its own natural pace, separate from the rest of the city.  

 
A street on North Brother Island. 

Update, 6/3: The original version of this article misidentified that the island was abandoned until the 1950s. We regret the error. 

The Valley of Whales (Photo: Egypt's Ministry of Environment Official Facebook page) 

In Egypt's Valley of Whales—Wadi al-Hitan—the fossils of giant, ancient whales have sat for millions of years; they were first discovered by scientists in 1902.  Since then, there have been 10 fossilized whales found in the area, according to the Cairo Post. But on Tuesday, Egypt's Minister of Environment announced that a new fossil had been found—a 60-foot-long basilosaurus, a type of early whale, complete down to the relatively tiny vertebrae of the tail, that's estimated to be 40 million years old.

The fossil was uncovered by an Egyptian research team, and, along with the fossil, they found the remains of crabs and sawfish inside the whale, along with smaller whale. (It's not clear whether the smaller whale was a fetus or a meal.) Nearby were a collection of sharks' teeth, indicating that the whale's carcass was consumed by sharks after it died.

Wadi al-Hitan was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site a decade ago — archaeologists have also found fossils of crocodiles and turtles there, giving them clues to the evolution of marine life.

Bonus finds: a 17th century noblewoman with her shoes still on, Australia's first natural sea pearl, an amphibian that hasn't been seen by scientists in 50 years

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

The entrance to the George Bush Presidential Library at College Station in Texas. (Photo: Jujutacular on Flickr)

In May, the Obama Foundation announced that Chicago will be the future location of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, which will include a library and museum. The center will become the 14th institution in the National Archives and Records Administration’s presidential library system, which includes centers dedicated to all presidents from Herbert Hoover onwards.

Over the years, millions of public and private dollars and ostensibly, man hours, have been spent curating these institutions. Which begs the question: why?

Franklin D. Roosevelt began this tradition when, in 1939, he decided to hand over his personal and presidential records to the federal government when leaving office. Two years later, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum was built in Hyde Park, New York to house these records. Before Roosevelt, presidents would take their documents with them when they departed from the White House, leaving them vulnerable to dumping and decay. (An 1819 letter from Bushrod Washington to one-time president James Madison confessed that his uncle George Washington’s presidential documents were “very extensively mutilated by rats and otherwise injured by damp.”)

There are two main components to a presidential library: the library itself and the museum. The library component is essentially a storehouse for a federally mandated data archive—following the implementation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, presidents must turn over all their records to the National Archives when leaving the White House. Archivists then begin the colossal task of processing documents and electronic files for public viewing under Freedom of Information Act requests, which, if there are no restrictions placed on the relevant documents, can be fulfilled from five years after the president leaves office.

The museum is a different story. This is where you find the fun stuff, such as the wooden bench shaped like Hillary Clinton, the jelly bean portrait of Ronald Reagan, and the crates that held a pair of giant pandas sent from the Chinese to Richard Nixon. The museum is also where you will find exhibits dedicated to showing how strong and bold and brave the president in question was during their administration. Scandals, blunders, and impeachments are sidelined in favor of hagiographic exhibits that together paint a picture of an infallible leader. Because the presidential library is often located in the president's hometown, there tends to be a "local kid done good" feel, with a bit of generic national pride thrown in. The Herbert Hoover library in Iowa, for example, bills its collective offerings as "the extraordinary story of an orphan boy who lived the American dream."

 
A jelly bean portrait of President Reagan, on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. (Photo: Ryan Dickey on Flickr)

The positive, patriotic curation approach is inevitable when you consider who puts the museum part of a presidential center together. The creation of a center begins with the establishment of a foundation while the president is still in office. That foundation raises money for construction and endowments—around $500 million, in the case of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas—and finds donors to fund exhibits in the museum. The day-to-day administration of the library and museum, however, is handled by the National Archives.

This partnership between the presidential foundation and the National Archives can understandably result in competing interests. When addressing the question of why presidential museums portray the former leaders in such a positive light, the National Archives’s own website, in its presidential libraries FAQ, says that “[t]he composition of the first exhibits in the museums reflect the funding sources of those exhibits.” 

In 2011, Larry Hackman, former director of the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, told the New York Times that “there are hidden and in some cases there are some odious strings that come with that money that keep the library directors, no matter how well intentioned they are, from developing certain exhibitions or programs.”

Hackman faced opposition from Truman’s family and close supporters when pushing for a more critical approach to the president’s use of nuclear weapons, but told the Times that “the process got easier with the passage of time, as family members and supporters began to die off.”

“The depiction of contemporary, or nearly contemporary, events in an exhibit comes with different challenges than the portrayal of events and personalities from a more distant time frame,” the National Archives FAQ says.

A crate that transported a giant panda from China during Nixon's presidency, on display at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. (Photo: Tim Evanson on Flickr)

If a president has just left office, and the events of the administration are fresh in the minds of the American taxpayer, said president will definitely want to have a hand in setting the tone of the museum exhibits. One well-publicized example of this is the Decision Points Theater at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. In the interactive exhibit, visitors are presented with scenarios from Bush’s presidency, such as the decision of whether to go to war with Iraq and the possibility of bailing out the banks during the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Multiple-choice buttons offer the opportunity to select a different option than Bush did, but if a visitor decides not to invade Iraq or to let the banks fail, Bush himself appears on screen to explain why that choice is wrong.

Once enough decades have passed, and public sentiment over a presidency has simmered down, museum exhibits may be revised to reflect a more critical approach. But there can still be opposition from die-hard devotees. This was the case at the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, California, which became part of the National Archives network in 2007 after operating independently for 17 years.

The library's original Watergate exhibit, financed and put together by close associates of Nixon, downplayed the scandal and placed the blame at the feet of the Democrats. In 2011, after years of squabbling between the Nixon Foundation and the National Archives, the revamped exhibit was unveiled. Nixon's pals were not impressed. Discussing museum director Timothy Naftali's opening remarks at the exhibit, Nixon devotee Anne Walker wrote:

"I don’t think he missed using one accusatory buzz word; abuse of power, dirty tricks, whitewash, cover up, etc. Several of these same buzz words now scream at the visitors to the Library the President’s friends built. The letters are huge, the colors are bright. No one can miss seeing them."

Naftali resigned a few months after the exhibit opened. The Nixon library then operated without a director for over three years until Michael Ellzey took up the position in January 2015. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Naftali said that the National Archives had found a suitable director in 2012, but the Nixon Foundation didn't like him and refused to meet with him. The candidate withdrew from consideration.

 
A letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to the Nixons, on display at the Nixon library. (Photo: Tim Evanson on Flickr)

Despite the internal squabbles, the Nixon library offers a good example of how the older presidential libraries are dealing with another problem: how to appeal to the folk who weren't yet born when the president was in office. The Nixon library is a surprisingly popular location for weddings, with ceremonies held in the rose garden and receptions taking place in the library's replica of the White House East Room. Events featuring popular political media figures are also held at the library—on June 27, Fox News host Gretchen Carlson will be there to "discuss the rise to hosting her own cable news show, the intense competitive experiences of winning Miss America, the challenges she’s faced as a woman in broadcast television, and how she manages to balance work, family and life," according to the official event description.

Whether old or new, presidential libraries take advantage of loosely related exhibits to draw crowds—"Football! The Exhibition" opens at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, California on June 6th, while the Lyndon B. Johnson library in Austin, Texas unveils its Beatles exhibition on June 13th.  Last year, the George W. Bush library hosted "Five Decades of Style", an exhibit of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta's gowns. It was the second time a presidential library hosted a retrospective of the designer's work: the Clinton library in Little Rock showcased his glamorous dresses in its 2013 exhibit, "Oscar de la Renta: American Icon". The ball gown angle may seem tenuous, but the de la Renta dresses were worn by several First Ladies—if you want to talk gratuitous fashion items at presidential libraries, you can't go past the $275 Swarovski-encrusted American flag bracelet at the Reagan library gift shop.

An animatronic LBJ at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. (Photo: Lauren Gerson/LBJ Foundation on Flickr)

So the libraries and museums feature both serious and silly exhibits, but does anyone go? Yes, although the numbers vary dramatically from place to place. Attendance records from 2014 show that the Nixon library ranked tenth out of the 13 presidential libraries, with 85,000 visitors during the fiscal year. The most popular library was George W. Bush's, with 491,000 annual visitors, followed by the Reagan library at 383,000 and the Clinton library at 334,000. The bottom three were the Truman library, with 59,000 annual visitors, the Jimmy Carter library, with 52,000 visitors, and the Herbert Hoover library, which saw 43,000 visitors during the fiscal year.

The trends are clear: to attract the numbers, a presidential library must be new and/or tied to a president with a solid approval rating. It can be tough for the older institutions to attract an audience, especially when their exhibits are a little dusty, their president is long dead, and the era in which they ruled holds little appeal for researchers and museum-goers. Once a president's associates have grown old and passed on, the foundation that established their library may struggle to raise funds to support museum exhibits and public programs. 

The Hoover museum, established in 1962, recently raised its admission prices for the first time since 2006 in order to make ends meet. It may lack the tech-enhanced pizzazz and LEED-certified architecture of the newer presidential libraries, but the Hoover museum believes in its core message. "His accomplishments as President (and he did have more than a few) were overshadowed by the Great Depression," says Thomas Schwartz, the director. "But no one can visit this museum and not be struck by the sheer overwhelming sense of awe at Hoover's tireless efforts at mending a broken world."

An interactive exhibit at Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. (Photo: Edward Stojakovic on Flickr)

But worthiness of purpose aside, uneven popularity is one of the reasons that some think that the presidential library system, a mix of public and private funding, is doomed. "Right now, one-quarter of the archive’s budget goes to the presidential libraries," said United States Archivist David Ferreiro in a 2010 interview with Information Today, "If you look at the projections out to 2030, it does not work. Something has to change." 

There have been a few steps toward reform, such as a 2011 House Oversight Committee hearing and a proposed Presidential Library Donation Reform Act that would require the disclosure of donor names. But an overall solution has yet to be found.

Meanwhile, archivists at the libraries continue processing records every day. Shannon Jarrett, Supervisory Archivist at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. says the library has thus far released "over 700,000 pages of textual records as well as 27,110 electronic records assets (mainly email and photos)." That sounds like a lot, but there's much work left to be done. "Our presidential records holdings include over 62 million pages of textual records and 80 TB of electronic records," says Jarrett, "so we have processed approximately 1.3 per cent.” 

(Photo: CTBTO on Flickr)

Summer: the time of year when megaplexes all across the country are filled with images of fiery catastrophe and the sound of deafening thunder, as the movie industry delivers destruction on an ever-grander scale. Grandiose explosions on the big screen during blockbuster season tend to be quickly forgotten, but in the real world, giant explosions leave a more indelible mark both on the Earth and in our memories. Whether it is the massive blast from a nuclear warhead test or the tragic explosions that claim lives, there are spots all over the world that remember devastating detonations. As we gear up for another summer of cinematic explosions, let's take a look at the sites of seven real-world explosions, some of which you can still visit.

1. TRINITY ATOMIC BOMB SITE
Socorro, New Mexico

(Photo: National Nuclear Security Administration on Wikipedia)

The superstar of terrifyingly powerful explosions, the Trinity Test Site in Socorro, New Mexico was the place where the first nuclear bomb was detonated. On July 6th, 1945, the "Gadget," as it was clandestinely named, was detonated and the world would never be the same. To use the much weather cliche, the genie was out of the bottle and further nuclear tests would only follow. Today there is a tall stone monument on the spot where the bomb went off, and the site is open to visitors a couple of times a year.   

(Photo: BriYYZ on Flickr)

(Photo: BriYYZ on Flickr)

2. THE BLACK TOM EXPLOSION MEMORIAL
Jersey City, New Jersey

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Ever wonder why you can't enter the torch in the Statue of Liberty? It's because of a World War I terrorist explosion so large it destroyed an entire island. On July 30th, 1916, German spies posing as guards for a munitions dump on tiny Black Tom Island off the coast of New Jersey, made good on a plan to destroy the armaments that the U.S. was supplying to the French and British. They planted a number of timed bombs across the island and left the scene. In the middle of the night Black Tom Island essentially evaporated beneath a blast so big it could be felt in Maryland. Shrapnel from the blast slammed into the Statue of Liberty damaging the torch and parts of her robe. The damaged sections were eventually repaired, but the torch was never reopened. Black Tom Island was rebuilt sing landfill waste and is now park of a New Jersey park with just a small plaque to remember the devastation.  

(Photo: Luke J Spencer on Atlas Obscura)

(Photo: Luke J Spencer on Atlas Obscura)

3. HALIFAX EXPLOSION MEMORIAL
Halifax, Canada

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Nuclear weapons are thought to create the most devastating explosions man has ever seen, but we were still able to do some pretty staggering damage even before then. In fact the largest man-made explosion prior to the advent of the atomic bomb nearly wiped the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia from the map. It was in December of 1917 that the French munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, collided with another boat in Halifax's bustling harbor. The French ship was stocked to the gunwalls with high explosives and combustible fuel, so when the ships crashed, the resulting explosion destroyed over half of the city. Thousands perished, and many thousands more were seriously injured. The city was able to rebuild but the explosive tragedy would not be forgotten. A modern concrete monument now stands in the city that was almost obliterated by a simple collision.  

(Photo: Luke J Spencer on Atlas Obscura)

(Photo: Luke J Spencer on Atlas Obscura)

4. NOVAYA ZEMLYA
Novaya Zemlya, Russia

(Photo: atomicforum on Wikipedia)

Trinity may be the most well known atomic bomb ever tested, but the most powerful was actually set off over a small Russian archipelago known as Novaya Zemlya. Over 200 nuclear weapons were tested over Novaya Zemlya, but the largest one, indeed the largest the world has ever seen, was set off on October 30, 1961. The massive boom yielded 50-60 megatons of force compared to the most powerful weapon of its kind the U.S. ever created which only put out around 25 megatons. This super weapon came to be known as "Tsar Bomba," and remains the single most devastating weapon humans have come up with. 

(Photo: NASA on Wikipedia)

5. THE WOLF'S LAIR
Ketrzyn, Poland

(Photo: Wikipedia)

The 1944 explosion that rocked the so-called "Wolf's Lair," a fortified Nazi stronghold deep in the woods of Poland, could very well have ended World War II early, or at least significantly altered the outcome., but unfortunately Hitler survived it. The plan was for a suitcase bomb to be placed in a meeting room in the stronghold, and detonated while Hitler was inside, blowing up history's greatest villain. Shockingly, the plan eventually worked with the bomb going off while Hitler was in the room, but bafflingly, the dictator survived. At the very least, the Wolf's Lair was now compromised and was abandoned, itself being rocked with explosions as the Nazis tried (unsuccessfully) to erase their base. This explosion inspired the Hollywood film, Valkyrie.     

(Photo: tomasz przechlewski on Flickr)

(Photo: Przemyslaw 'Blueshade' Idzkiewicz on Wikipedia)

6. SITE OF THE GREAT GREENPOINT SEWER EXPLOSION
Greenpoint, New York

(Photo: kschlot1 on Flickr) 

If you were standing on this spot on October 5th, 1950, you'd be dead. It was on that fateful day that the Brooklyn street at the corner of Manhattan Avenue and Huron Street simply exploded. Ten feet of asphalt on the corner was torn from the ground and manhole covers rocketed into the sky for blocks around. Given the atomic scare at the time, the huge boom had the locals running out into the streets thinking they were being bombed. In actuality the likely culprit of the destruction was simply backed up gas.  

7. THE WEATHERMEN TOWNHOUSE EXPLOSION
New York, New York

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Another New York explosion, this one was caused by a bit of homegrown terrorists. A group of militant radicals associated with the Weather Underground were working on some pipe bombs in the basement of their Greenwich Village home. Unfortunately the would-be bombers were not incredibly skilled with explosives and in creating their weapons of destruction, detonated them, demolishing the townhouse. Some of the group survived and managed to flee, but three others were killed in the ensuing destruction. Today the house has been rebuilt, but it still bears an oddly angled section that sticks out as a sort of silent monument to the blast.    

(Photo: Luke J Spencer on Atlas Obscura)

(Photo: Luke J Spencer on Atlas Obscura)

Close-up of a pineapple (Photo: BW Folsom/shutterstock.com)

Pizza has been a core food for North Americans for so long that we forget that it is, relatively speaking, a new dish on our shores. Most people over the age of about 75 can remember the first time they ever saw, heard of, or tasted pizza; the New York Times first introduced the dish to its readers back in 1944.

But Sam Panopoulos, 81, of London, Canada, a small city about halfway between Detroit and Toronto, can take it one step further. He can remember inventing what’s now one of the most popular pizzas in the world: the Hawaiian pizza.

The Hawaiian pizza doesn’t come from anywhere near Hawaii. It comes from Ontario, and was concocted in 1962 in a restaurant serving typical midcentury food without any particular focus. Since its creation, it has become a divisive and fiercely debated entry in the pizza lexicon; a reader-created post on BuzzFeed even called it “the most insulting and offensive pizza in the world.”

Melding canned pineapple and small squares of ham atop a regular cheese pizza, the Hawaiian is a niche pizza. In North America, you would never buy it for an office party or to feed hungry friends at a bar, at least not without a thorough interrogation to find out each eater’s stance on the pie. Pizza is a dish that is universally loved in the U.S. and Canada, but yet Hawaiian pizza is, very often, despised.

Sam Panopoulos left Greece on a boat bound for Canada in 1954. His first exposure to pizza was in Naples, where the boat briefly stopped. Naples reigns as the worldwide birthplace of pizza, but even there, it’s a fairly recent creation. As the story goes, the cheese and tomato-laden version of the dish that we recognize today was first baked in 1889 to honor the Italian monarchs King Umberto and Princess Margherita, who were visiting the city. Enter the now-classic margherita pizza.

Panopoulos didn’t know anything about pizza’s history; he just knew that the pie he had during his brief foray into Naples was pretty tasty. When he got to Canada in 1954, he settled in the town of Chatham, an hour from the border with Michigan. Panopoulos, who speaks with a thick Greek accent after 60 years in Ontario, achieved success early on, opening a restaurant called the Satellite in Chatham, which still stands (it’s now under different management).

“Pizza wasn't known at all, actually,” says Panopoulos in a phone interview. “Even Toronto didn't know anything about pizza in those days. The only place you could have pizza was in Detroit.”

Soon, pizza landed in Windsor, a Canadian city just across the river from Detroit. However, thanks to the execution it wasn’t especially popular there. “I visited Windsor, and the pizza in those days was three things: dough, sauce, cheese, and mushroom, bacon, or pepperoni. That was it,” says Panopoulos. “You had no choices; you could get one of the three [toppings] or more of them together.”

The mushrooms were canned, the dough was pre-made and bought in bulk. The ovens were small electric ovens, certainly not suitable by modern standards. A standard pizza oven today cooks at around 800 degrees Fahrenheit to achieve the charred crust we associate with good pizza. Panopoulos’ oven, and the ovens of the other pizza sellers in Detroit and Ontario, were nothing more than a standard apartment oven.

“The pizza in Canada in those days was primitive, you know? In the States and Detroit and all this, it wasn't bad, but it was nothing special,” says Panopoulos.

Hawaiian pizza. (Photo: 9george/shutterstock.com)

Panopoulos’s diner cooked the sort of food that people ate in the 1960s: pancakes in the morning, burgers and fries for lunch, and liver and onions for dinner. But he was eager to try out any new dishes that might entice customers. At one point, he hired, he says, an Asian cook and put him to work making American Chinese food. Later came pizza.

After watching how pizza cooks in Windsor were making their pies, he came home to Chatham and started experimenting. The concept of pizza was totally foreign to his customers, and even to the general public. A 1962 recipe from the Toronto Star includes a recipe for “Spanish pizza,” a strange concoction of yellow rice and Vienna sausages piled on a dough made from biscuit mix.

There weren’t even pizza boxes for quite a few years; Panopoulos said that he used to cut circles out of cardboard boxes he got from a furniture seller next door, place the pizza on top, and wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil.

Without really knowing or caring much about any traditions regarding pizza, Panopoulos began throwing together combinations to see what worked. Some of his discoveries were simultaneously discovered by other like-minded pizza pioneers, like the addition of salty toppings like olives and anchovies. But the pineapple was something else entirely.

Hawaii had only become a state in 1959, and soldiers coming home from World War II brought back tales of an island paradise in the South Pacific. Tiki culture, epitomized by fruity cocktails like the mai tai, became hugely popular from the 1940s through the 1960s. Canada wasn’t immune to the charms of Hawaii, either, and canned pineapple became a staple of every household, advertised by grocery stores relentlessly in newspapers throughout Ontario.

“In those days, the only sweet and sour thing you would get is Chinese pork, you know, with the sweet and sour sauce,” says Panopoulos. “Otherwise there was no mix.”

He was already serving Chinese food at the Satellite, and felt that people would connect to sweet and savory flavors together. So one day in 1962, he took down a can of pineapple, drained it, and threw the pieces of fruit on a pizza.

“People said ‘you are crazy to do this,’” Panopoulos remembers. But he liked it immediately, and starting advertising his crazy new pizza topping. Amazingly, it caught on. The classic union of ham and pineapple was an accident, a result of only having a few different toppings to work with.

Originally, Panopoulos did not market it as the now-set combination of tart pineapple and savory ham or salty bacon. But the inventor called his new creation the “Hawaiian pizza” from the start, and it quickly solidified into the version we know today. He told me more than once that he wishes he’d found a way to register or patent the pairing.

I ask Panopoulos if he still orders it today. “Yeah, I do,” he says. “I still like it.” 

 Brachycephalus auroguttatus (Photo: PeerJ, Ribeiro, et al., CC BY 4.0)

Tiny and bright Brachycephalus frogs live on the tops of Amazon mountains: they have very particular needs—so particular that they never make it down into the valleys.

Ecologically, these mountaintops are like "sky islands," where isolated populations evolve over time into new species. But as a team of Brazilian scientists writes "the difficulty of exploring these inaccessible habitats…severely limits the chance of discovery of new species" of frog. Which is why the team went looking for them.

 Brachycephalus leopardus, mating (Photo: PeerJ, Ribeiro, et al., CC BY 4.0)

In a new paper, published in PeerJ, the team reveals that through "extensive fieldwork" they were able to discover seven new species of Brachycephalus frogs—increasing by a third the known number of Brachycephalus species. These frogs are distinguished from each other by their bright colors and the roughness of their skin. And there are probably still more out there: "More than half of the currently recognized species have been described during the past 15 years, suggesting the possibility that the actual diversity in the genus is considerably underestimated," the team writes.

Brachycephalus leopardus, not mating  (Photo: PeerJ, Ribeiro, et al., CC BY 4.0)

Finding these was hard enough, though. Marcio Pie, one of the paper's authors, told the BBC that "he had climbed more mountains than he can remember." The difficulty of this fieldwork is twofold: first, on those mountains, "the trails are not particularly well marked" and second, the frogs are hard to find.

"You can hear them singing and there's probably hundred of them, but you simply can't catch them. Because once you get closer, just from the vibration in the ground, they keep silent for 20 minutes or half and hour," Pie told the BBC. The scientists actually found them by sifting through leaf litter on the forest floor—which is not only careful work but, given that snakes are also common in that area, a somewhat dangerous game.

Brachycephalus verrucosus (Photo: PeerJ, Ribeiro, et al., CC BY 4.0)

Bonus finds: Messages from Stalin-era prison system written in nail polish, ISIS love letter, ANOTHER black widow spider in British supermarket grapes

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

An aerial view of Hart Island (lower right), next to City Island (Photo: Doc Searls/Flickr) 

This is the fourth installment of five-part series on New York City's tendency to put its undesirables on islands around the boroughs, based on this past weekend’s Obscura Day event. Monday was Roosevelt Island, Tuesday was Randall's Island and Wards Island, Wednesday was North Brother Island and today we look at Hart Island. 

A map of the islands that are featured in Atlas Obscura's Islands of the Undesirables series (Photo: Map Data © 2015 Google) 

In a dense, expensive city, the poor aren’t the least desirable citizens—the poor and dead are. In New York City, these undesirables end up on Hart Island. 

In its earliest days, New York buried its poorest inhabitants in a potters field at the southern tip of Manhattan, near Chambers Street. As the city moved north, so did the potters’ field, to the current sites of Washington Square, Bellevue Hospital, Madison Square, Bryant Park, and the Waldorf-Astoria, among other locations.

In the 1840s, the field was moved off Manhattan entirely, to Randall’s and Wards Islands, and in 1869, the city’s tenth—and so far, its last—potters field opened on the northern end of Hart Island. 

Today, Hart Island is the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world, with close to a million graves arranged in a vast complex of trenches. If you die in New York City and no one claims your body within a week, this is where you end up. It’s not just for John and Jane Does, but anyone whose family is too poor—or is otherwise unable—to claim them. If you do have a loved one buried on its shores, Hart's Island is also notable for its bureaucratic cruelty. The island is run by the federal Department of Corrections like a prison for the dead and mourners are permitted only as far as a small gazebo.  No photographs allowed.

Abandoned buildings on Hart Island (Photo: Adam Moss/Flickr) 

Unlike many other local islands, Hart wasn’t named for a person. The name may come from a British cartographer who thought the island was shaped like a heart, or who named it after the Middle English word for deer. Besides a burial ground, the island has also been the site of early 19th century bare-knuckled boxing matches (often subject to raids when held in Manhattan), a Civil War training ground, World War II disciplinary barracks and (briefly) a Nike missile base. During the 19^th century, there was also an industrial school for vagrant boys, an almshouse, a lunatic asylum, a jail workhouse, and a youth reformatory, among other institutions.

Despite its dismal past and present, there have been some less-expected interludes in the island’s history: in the 1920s, a developer named Solomon Riley began building an amusement park for Harlem blacks excluded from the “whites-only” facilities elsewhere. Builders had already constructed 200 feet of boardwalk, a dance hall, and other structures when the city halted the project (planned for right near the jail), fearing prisoner escapes and an influx of contraband. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a drug rehab program called Phoenix House was also located on the island, and sponsored annual sober art-and-music festivals—the Velvet Underground headlined one of them.

Buildings on Hart Island (Photo: Adam Moss/Flickr) 

But today, the island is used only as a burial ground. It is owned by the Department of Corrections, and Rikers Island inmates perform the burials, earning fifty cents an hour. Bodies are placed in plain wooden coffins, within common graves that stretch for 70 feet. Most of the graves are unmarked, although there is one exception—the first baby to die of AIDS in New York has a tombstone. Access is tightly controlled by the Department of Corrections, which for years has allowed only sporadic “closure visits” where relatives can only get as far as a gazebo near the docks.

Over the past few decades, an artist named Melinda Hunt has been pushing to get more transparency around Hart Island from the city, whose record-keeping has often been abysmal. Hunt’s Hart Island Project has used Freedom of Information requests to obtain and digitize burial records, and her online Travelling Cloud Museum collects the stories of those who have ended up the island. “Clocks of anonymity,” one for each burial since 1980, tick away on the website, and are stopped only when someone adds a story in memory of the deceased.

Hunt notes that New York is the only city in America, perhaps the world, to bury its unclaimed dead with prison labor, and argues that the practice is a Dickensian holdover from the time when the island was home to both a potters field and a jail. But the island’s fortunes may change, and soon. The ACLU filed a class action suit in December to open up the grounds to mourners and a bill currently before New York City Council would transfer jurisdiction over the island from the Department of Correction to the Department of Parks and Recreation, while a separate bill would establish regular public ferry service to the island. If the bills pass—a big but not impossible “if”—Hart could join Roosevelt, Randall’s and other New York islands as a place that’s been transformed from one of the “islands of the undesirables” to being a thriving addition to the mainstream of New York City life.

(Photo: Adam Moss/Flickr)