North Brother Island is a twenty-acre island in the East River between the Bronx and Rikers Island. Riverside Hospital opened there in the 1880s to isolate patients with contagious diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis and typhoid; its most famous resident was Mary Mallon, known as “Typhoid Mary,” who was confined there for 23 years. The island later housed veterans and a treatment center for teenage drug addicts before closing in 1963. Its abandoned buildings have been deteriorating ever since.

I grew up in the South Bronx and never heard of North Brother Island until I began exploring New York in my teens. In 1975 a friend and I rowed across to photograph it, and I returned more than forty years later. By then its history of addiction felt more personal: two of my cousins had struggled with drugs, including one who returned from Vietnam addicted to heroin and died before he was thirty.