10 Abandoned Places in New York I Bet You've Never Heard Of

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]New York is the most documented state in America. [music] Everyone thinks they know it. But there is a 22-acre island in the East River [music] that has been abandoned since 1963.

[00:00:12]You cannot visit it.

[00:00:13]>> [music] >> There is a subway station 80 ft below City Hall.

[00:00:17]Chandeliers, tile ceilings, skylights, sealed since 1945. [music] Every few minutes a train passes through without stopping.

[00:00:29]The lights are still on.

[00:00:30]Nobody gets [music] off.

[00:00:32]There is a ruined castle on the Hudson River.

[00:00:35]Most New Yorkers have seen it from a train window without knowing what it was.

[00:00:40]It was full of 200 tons of military weapons.

[00:00:43]>> [music] >> It blew up once, burned down twice. The walls are still there.

[00:00:49]On this list, [music] an institution where the world's first polio vaccine was tested on a child without consent.

[00:00:57]A military base disguised as a fishing village that may have inspired Stranger Things. A cemetery with over 1 million people buried in it where families needed permission from a jail just to visit a grave. And at number one, the most beautiful subway station ever built in New York.

[00:01:15]Closed New Year's Eve, 1945, untouched since that night.

[00:01:21]These are 10 abandoned places in New York you've probably never heard of.

[00:01:26]Number 10, Letchworth Village, Theills, Rockland County.

[00:01:31]In 1911, New York State opened what it called a model institution.

[00:01:37]The idea was humane. Instead of the [music] brutal, overcrowded almshouses that warehoused the mentally and physically disabled, this would be a real village with separate buildings, gardens, a working farm, dignity.

[00:01:50]The reality arrived quickly.

[00:01:52]Within a decade, Letchworth Village was overcrowded. By the 1950s, buildings [music] designed to hold 70 patients held 4,000. Mattresses lined hallways.

[00:02:03]Residents went unclothed. The youngest were malnourished. Brain specimens from deceased patients were removed, stored in formaldehyde jars, and placed on display in the laboratory.

[00:02:15]In 1950, virologist Hilary Koprowski needed human subjects for the world's first live virus polio vaccine trial.

[00:02:23]He tested it on himself first. Then he used a child resident of Letchworth Village.

[00:02:28]The child had no say.

[00:02:30]In 1972, a young ABC reporter named Geraldo Rivera entered with a hidden camera. The footage he broadcast, naked children in filth, [music] warehoused in rooms with no programs, no care, no names used, caused a national scandal that eventually forced the institution to close.

[00:02:49]It closed in 1996, 85 years after it opened.

[00:02:54]Dozens of buildings still stand on the campus today.

[00:02:57]The cemetery contains numbered markers, >> [music] >> no names.

[00:03:01]The world's first polio vaccine was tested here.

[00:03:04]That part is true. The child was a patient. [music] That part is also true.

[00:03:10]Number nine.

[00:03:11]The Rochester subway tunnels.

[00:03:14]Rochester.

[00:03:16]Rochester built a subway.

[00:03:19]In 1927, [music] the city converted an abandoned Erie Canal bed into an interurban rail line running through the heart of downtown.

[00:03:29]It worked.

[00:03:30]People rode it.

[00:03:32]It ran for nearly 30 years.

[00:03:35]Then, the car won.

[00:03:38]On June 30, [music] 1956, the Rochester subway closed.

[00:03:43]The city did not tear the tunnels out.

[00:03:46]It did not fill them in.

[00:03:48]It locked the doors and started debating what to do next.

[00:03:52]That debate has been going on for 70 years.

[00:03:55]Beneath downtown Rochester right now, there are miles of intact platforms, tiled stations, and rail tunnels. A complete transit world frozen in 1956.

[00:04:07]Urban explorers who access the system find token booths still in place, station signage still on the walls, the whole infrastructure of a functioning subway that simply stopped one day and was never cleared away.

[00:04:20]The graffiti murals that have accumulated over seven decades are now considered some of the finest in the state.

[00:04:26]Every few years the city announces a new plan.

[00:04:29]Light rail, a linear park, mixed-use development, then nothing happens.

[00:04:35]The trains have been gone longer than they ever ran.

[00:04:38]Number [music] eight, Camp Hero, Montauk, Long Island.

[00:04:43]In 1942, the US Army built a coastal defense installation at the eastern tip of Long Island. They disguised it as a fishing village, Cape Cod-style houses that were actually barracks, a church that was actually a gymnasium. The entire base constructed to look, from offshore, like a civilian settlement to confuse German U-boat crews approaching the coast. It worked as a deception.

[00:05:07]After the war, it became an Air Force radar station.

[00:05:11]In 1958, a 126-ft Sage radar dish was erected, designed to provide 30 minutes of warning in the event of a nuclear strike on the East Coast.

[00:05:21]The base officially closed in 1981.

[00:05:24]In 2014, the Duffer brothers named Camp Hero as the primary inspiration for Hawkins National Laboratory in Stranger Things.

[00:05:33]The sealed underground tunnels, the isolated location, the classified research.

[00:05:40]That last [music] part is where things get complicated.

[00:05:44]In 2014, >> [music] >> documentary filmmaker Christopher Garatano, hired a geophysicist to analyze the ground beneath [music] the old base.

[00:05:54]The results showed large underground structures >> [music] >> that do not appear on any official map.

[00:06:00]The hiking trails at what is now [music] Camp Hero State Park still carry warning signs about potentially live landmines.

[00:06:09]The government [music] disguised it as a village.

[00:06:11]Then they closed it.

[00:06:13]Then it inspired one of the biggest shows in television history.

[00:06:17]>> [music] >> The tunnels underneath are still sealed.

[00:06:21]Number seven, North Brother Island, East River, [music] the Bronx. You can see it from the shore.

[00:06:28]22 acres in the East River between the Bronx and Rikers Island, thick with trees and the dark shapes of collapsed buildings visible through the canopy.

[00:06:38]You can charter a boat and circle it.

[00:06:40]You cannot land.

[00:06:42]North Brother Island has been abandoned since 1963 and is closed to the public.

[00:06:48]The city bought it in 1885 to build a quarantine hospital for patients with contagious diseases, typhoid, tuberculosis, smallpox, yellow fever.

[00:07:00]Mostly poor immigrants.

[00:07:02]The idea was containment. Remove the sick from the city. Place them on a river island where they could see Manhattan through the windows of the hospital ward, but could not return to it.

[00:07:13]The most famous patient was Mary Mallon, Typhoid Mary, an Irish immigrant and cook who was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.

[00:07:24]She was arrested, brought to the island against her will in 1907, held for 3 years, released on the condition she never cook again, broke the condition, was re-arrested, and returned to the [music] island where she lived in a small cottage by the water for the last 23 years of her life.

[00:07:43]She died there in 1938.

[00:07:46]In 1904, the steamship General Slocum caught fire on the East River and burned to the waterline just offshore.

[00:07:54]More than 1,000 people died, the greatest loss of life in New York City until September 11th.

[00:08:02]Survivors washed up on the island's shore.

[00:08:05]After the war, it housed veterans.

[00:08:08]In the 1950s, [music] it became a drug rehabilitation center for teenagers. It closed in 1963.

[00:08:16]Nature [music] has fully reclaimed 25 buildings.

[00:08:19]Access is granted occasionally for academic or scientific purposes, escorted by city park staff.

[00:08:26]The island is not hidden. It sits in plain view. It is simply off-limits. If you want to see it, you look from the water.

[00:08:36]Number six, the Renwick Ruin, Roosevelt Island, Manhattan.

[00:08:42]The [music] man who designed St. Patrick's Cathedral also designed a smallpox hospital.

[00:08:48]James Renwick Jr. in 1854, Gothic Revival, on an island [music] in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, then called Blackwell's Island, now called Roosevelt Island.

[00:09:02]The building treated up to 7,000 patients a year at its peak.

[00:09:06]Smallpox was not a disease the city discussed openly. Patients were not transported politely.

[00:09:13]Police conducted raids, separated the infected [music] from their families, and ferried them to the island in the middle of the night.

[00:09:21]The building was constructed using prison labor.

[00:09:24]>> [music] >> The stone was quarried from the island itself.

[00:09:28]By the 1950s, it was obsolete and abandoned. [music] In 1972, the Landmarks Preservation Commission >> [music] >> made a decision that has no parallel anywhere else in New York City.

[00:09:41]They landmarked [music] it as a ruin.

[00:09:44]Not to preserve it in its original state, not to restore [music] it, to officially designated as something that should continue to decay [music] permanently, legally, forever.

[00:09:58]The walls will keep falling. The vines will keep advancing.

[00:10:02]The city has formally [music] committed to letting it collapse in slow motion for as long as it stands.

[00:10:09]At night, floodlights illuminate the Gothic shell against the Manhattan skyline.

[00:10:14]>> [music] >> You can see it from the Queensboro Bridge.

[00:10:17]The city didn't preserve it. They didn't demolish it. They landmarked the decay itself. [music] It is the only building in New York City officially designated to fall apart.

[00:10:29]If you're still [music] with this list, drop a comment.

[00:10:33]Which of these surprises you most?

[00:10:35]Because we are now getting to the places where the stories get harder to explain away.

[00:10:41]Number five, Overlook Mountain Hotel Ruins, Woodstock, Catskills.

[00:10:47]There is a trail above the town of Woodstock that passes through forest, gains elevation, passes no roads, no signs, no buildings, [music] and then delivers you to the concrete shell of a 300-room hotel >> [music] >> that has been unfinished for over 80 years.

[00:11:03]This was the third attempt to build a grand resort on this [music] ridge.

[00:11:07]The first hotel burned.

[00:11:09]The second hotel burned.

[00:11:12]The third, concrete construction designed to be fireproof, planned as the crown resort of the Catskills, never got finished. [music] Construction began in the 1920s.

[00:11:25]The Great Depression drained whatever money was left.

[00:11:29]The owner [music] spent years trying to keep it going.

[00:11:32]He died in 1940 with the interior still incomplete >> [music] >> and the building still open to the sky.

[00:11:40]New York State acquired the property shortly after and never did anything with it.

[00:11:45]That shell has sat on the ridge ever since.

[00:11:48]No roof, no floors, just the bones of something that was supposed to be grand slowly being absorbed by the mountain below it with views of the Hudson Valley through what would have been the windows.

[00:12:01]It burned twice.

[00:12:03]The third time they ran out of money.

[00:12:06]The concrete has been sitting unfinished on that mountain for more than 80 years.

[00:12:10]The hike is free.

[00:12:12]The view from the ruins is one of the best in the state. Nobody talks about why it's there.

[00:12:19]Number four, Willowbrook State School, Staten [music] Island.

[00:12:23]In 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy visited Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. He called it a snake pit.

[00:12:31]The institution had opened in 1947, built for 4,000 residents.

[00:12:37]By the 1960s, [music] it held over 6,000, nearly all children and adults with intellectual disabilities, warehoused in conditions that were deteriorating faster [music] than anyone with authority wanted to acknowledge.

[00:12:51]Between 1956 and 1970, NYU researcher Saul Krugman ran a series of experiments at Willowbrook.

[00:13:00]He deliberately infected residents, [music] most of them children, with hepatitis in order to study the disease's progression.

[00:13:08]Consent was obtained from parents.

[00:13:11]The consent was not freely given.

[00:13:14]Families seeking placement for a disabled child were told, in effect, >> [music] >> that participation in the study was required for admission.

[00:13:23]In 1972, the same year he entered Letchworth Village, Geraldo Rivera smuggled a camera into Willowbrook.

[00:13:31]The footage he broadcast was not describable in polite language.

[00:13:35]The resulting legal action produced the Willowbrook consent decree, [music] the landmark agreement that became the foundation of modern disability rights law in the United States.

[00:13:45]The principle that institutionalized people have enforceable legal rights to humane treatment >> [music] >> was not established before Willowbrook.

[00:13:53]It was established because of it.

[00:13:56]The institution closed in 1987.

[00:13:59]The campus is now part of the College of Staten Island. Several of the original buildings still stand on the grounds, empty.

[00:14:06]A reporter walked in with a hidden camera.

[00:14:09]What he filmed didn't just close this place, >> [music] >> it rewrote American law.

[00:14:15]Number three, Bannerman Castle, Pollepel Island, Hudson River. If you have ever taken the train north from New York City along the Hudson Line, you have seen [music] it.

[00:14:26]A ruined castle on a small island in the river. Stone towers rising above the waterline, walls partially collapsed, the whole structure overgrown and clearly abandoned.

[00:14:37]Most passengers glance at it and look away.

[00:14:40]Here is what it was.

[00:14:42]Francis Bannerman VI was the largest private dealer of military surplus in the United States.

[00:14:48]After the Spanish-American War of 1898, he purchased 90% of the US Army's captured weaponry, rifles, cannons, artillery shells, 200 tons of ammunition.

[00:15:02]He needed somewhere to store it.

[00:15:04]In 1900, he bought a rocky island in the Hudson River and began building a Scottish-style castle to serve as his personal armory and warehouse.

[00:15:13]New York State refused him a permit. He built it anyway.

[00:15:18]Bannerman died in 1918.

[00:15:21]In 1920, gunpowder stored in the powder house exploded.

[00:15:26]The blast was felt as far away as Poughkeepsie.

[00:15:29]A large section of the outer wall collapsed into the river.

[00:15:33]In 1950, the island's only ferry boat sank in a storm.

[00:15:38]The island was abandoned for good. In 1969, a fire gutted what remained, destroying every roof, every floor, every ceiling. Only the stone walls survived. What stands today is the remainder, dramatic enough that it reads from a passing train as a genuine medieval ruin, rather than a failed 20th century vanity project.

[00:16:01]Guided boat tours now run from Beacon.

[00:16:04]You can land on the island and walk among the walls.

[00:16:07]Most New Yorkers have seen [music] it.

[00:16:09]Almost none know what they were looking at.

[00:16:13]Number two, Hart Island, [music] Long Island Sound, the Bronx.

[00:16:18]There is an island a mile off the Bronx coast where over 1 million people are buried.

[00:16:24]You have almost certainly never heard of it.

[00:16:27]Hart Island has been New York City's Potters' Field. It's burial ground for the unclaimed dead since 1869.

[00:16:35]Paupers, stillborn infants, people who died in city hospitals with no family to collect them, the unnamed.

[00:16:45]For 156 [music] years, the city has been burying them here in mass graves, the digging done by inmates from Rikers Island.

[00:16:54]For most of that time, families of the buried were not permitted to visit.

[00:16:58]Not without written permission from the New York City Department of Correction.

[00:17:02]A cemetery, [music] the largest publicly funded cemetery in the world, administered as a correctional facility.

[00:17:09][music] Grieving families required to submit applications to a jail [music] system in order to stand at a grave.

[00:17:16]That policy held for over 150 years.

[00:17:20]The island also served at various points as a Union prisoner of war camp during the Civil War, a tuberculosis sanitarium, a women's asylum, a drug rehabilitation center, and a Nike missile launch site during the Cold War.

[00:17:38]Abandoned structures from every one of those uses still stand on the island.

[00:17:43]In 2021, jurisdiction from the Department of Correction to the Parks Department.

[00:17:49]Limited public access became available for the first time.

[00:17:53]Over 1 million people are buried there.

[00:17:56]For 150 years, their families needed a permission slip from a jail to visit them.

[00:18:02]Number one, City Hall Subway Station, Manhattan.

[00:18:06]In 1904, New York City opened its first subway line. The southern terminus was City Hall Station, and it [music] was built to make a statement.

[00:18:16]Guastavino tile vaulted ceilings arched overhead. Skylights set into the street above letting natural light filter down to the platform.

[00:18:25]Brass chandeliers, graceful curved platforms followed the elegant arc of the station's design.

[00:18:32]>> [music] >> The city wanted the world to see what New York could build underground.

[00:18:36]City Hall Station was the answer. It ran for 41 years.

[00:18:41]The problem was geometry. The station's platform followed a tight curve, elegant to look at, impossible to adapt. As subway cars grew longer through the 1940s, the gap between [music] the curved platform edge and the straight car doors became a safety liability.

[00:18:58]Longer trains simply could not load and unload passengers here [music] safely.

[00:19:04]On December 31st, 1945, City Hall Station closed. No ceremony, no announcement in the papers.

[00:19:13]The last train [music] came through and then the station was sealed. The MTA landmarked it in 1979.

[00:19:20]The tile is still there. The chandeliers are still there. The skylights still filter light down to a platform that no one is standing on.

[00:19:29]Every few minutes a train passes through it without stopping.

[00:19:32]The lights are still on. Nobody gets off.

[00:19:36]New York is not a state that hides its history. It just builds over it.

[00:19:40]The island is still in the river. The tunnels are still under the city. The castle is still on the water. And 80 ft below City Hall, the chandeliers are still hanging in a station that has been waiting, unvisited, for 80 years.

[00:19:56]Which of these surprised you most? Tell me in the comments. And if you want more of New York that nobody talks about, >> [music] >> subscribe. Because there is a lot more underneath this state.