Inside the lost island of New York – Big Picture
Stairwells strewn with debris and walls crumbling slowly to dust, it is the island that New York forgot for 50 years.
Now, in a series of extraordinarily eerie pictures, the lost world of North Brother – quarantine zone, leper colony and centre for drug addicts – has been brought back to life.
It is hard to believe that these echoing corridors and abandoned halls were home to hundreds of patients – or that a criss-cross of tree-lined avenues were once roads.
But the haunting quality of these pictures makes it easy to imagine that it was a place of indescribable misery, which one inmate compared to the notorious black hole of Calcutta.
