99% Invisible - 132- Castle on the Park

Episode Date: September 16, 2014

On the southwest corner of Central Park West and 106th Street in New York City, there’s an enormous castle. It takes up the whole east end of the block, with its red brick cylindrical turrets topped with gleaming silver cones. … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I am walking down 106 Street towards Manhattan Avenue. I can see the building in distance. That's producer Jessica Miller, wandering around her old neighborhood. Oh yeah! So you can see on the back of this tower there's like a smoke stack, or at least the remnant of a smoke stack Jess used to live near Central Park and she's been walking by this building and wondering about it for a long time So she met up with Jim Rassenberger who's done some writing about the building for the New York Times. Hey, are you Jim? Yes, how are you nice to meet you?

The address of the building is 455 Central Park West, and it looks like a castle. It's huge. It takes up the whole east end of the block. It's made up of red brick with this intricate stone trim, and it's got five or so large cylindrical turrets with silver cones on top. It's gigantic. Gigantic.

I was gonna say ginormous. You could say ginormous. The building looks like something out of a fairy tale. Like Rapunzel could let down her hair through one of the turret windows for some night and shining armor who just wandered over from Central Park. But what I found out is that this building's past is not very fairy tale like at all. And you want to like just take a walk around the building and see what we see? I thought coming up around this side there are these things that look like smoke stacks kind of off of this back top. I mean the main the main smoke stack

has been torn down and it was part of the crematorium where they used to burn bodies. Well that's just a good dark turn. So, the building has been renovated, but when it was built in 1887, it was the country's first hospital devoted solely to the treatment of cancer. And they weren't very good at treating cancer yet, so that Crematorium Smokestack,

it was smoking pretty often. The old castle-like building at 455 Central Park West can actually tell us a lot about the history of cancer and the history of hospital architecture. But let's set the scene a little bit. It's the late 1800s, and people seem to know that cancer starts as a tumor, and that sometimes the tumor can be removed, but they don't know a whole lot beyond that. And a lot of hospitals in the US don't even want to treat cancer patients.

Some people feared the disease. They thought it was contagious. Some doctors thought it was contagious. And also, there was a lot of stigma about having the disease. That's Elaine Schatner. She's a clinical associate professor of medicine at Wal-Cornell Medical College.

And she's writing a book about cancer awareness. On top of misconceptions about cancer being contagious, there was another reason that hospitals might have hesitated to take cancer patients. At the time, they had to publish their death rates, so they'd turn away patients who were likely to skew the numbers. This is why you had tuberculosis hospitals and other specialty hospitals for diseases that were particularly deadly. In the late 1800s, Europe was a bit ahead of the U.S. in terms of cancer treatment. During and after the Civil War, patients in the United States who had money or could

afford to go to Europe would do so for care. And doctors from the United States who then, you know, for the most part, had minimal education would go to Europe to study science and pathology and surgical techniques. One such man was Jay Marion Sims. Sims went to Europe and learned a few surgical techniques for removing cancer. He wanted to bring this knowledge back to the US where he had worked previously at the New York Women's Hospital and then in 1874, the hospital decided.

They wouldn't let women with cancer in. For all the reasons we just talked about, it was too deadly, they thought it might be contagious. So in 1884, some philanthropists, including Elizabeth Column, who had lost her son to cancer and later died from the disease herself, broke ground on what would become the first hospital exclusively devoted to cancer care. It opened in 1887 and was designed by Architects of Charles Hate. Earlier I talked about the hospital looking like a castle from a fairy tale, and it turns

out that was a pretty common style for hospitals at that time. They looked like like castles, they look like aristocratic mansions and we see in the architecture that they have they they're walled, they have gate houses, they have elaborate entries, sometimes turrets, they have all the trappings of a very very wealthy neighborhood. They're very domestic in their architectural outlook. That's Ann Marie Adams. Hi, I'm Ann Marie Adams. I'm Director of the School of Architecture at McGill University.

She's also written about hospitals from this time period, and she says that in the late 1800s, hospitals were charitable institutions run by wealthy philanthropists where poor people went for care. Rich people still mostly received care at home, but hospital administrators wanted to change that. Architecture is a tool of persuasion to convince wealthier people to come to the hospital to be healed.

So in 1887, the first cancer hospital opened its doors to both pain and non-paying patients with cancer, and it tried hard to be an inviting place for paying customers. Even the food was good. So they had great chefs, you know, part of being competitive was having really good food. People went to hospital dining rooms

to celebrate special occasions like birthdays. Like we might today go to a hotel dining room, even though if we're not staying at the hotel. I'm so that obviously's changed a lot. The hotel comparison is pretty spot on. The Kinser Hospital was designed mostly for palliative care, in other words just making people comfortable and relieving pain. So they had champagne parties.

They took people on carriage rides in central park. Again, that's Jim Rassenberger, who I met up with at the beginning of the story. It was a beautiful building and meant to be beautiful, so that people didn't feel like they were going off to a terrible place to die, but rather going off to the French countryside. And the big round turrets with lots of windows that make the building look like a castle

were actually wards that house patients. Well, the patients were in beds around the perimeter, and there would be 10 or 11 beds. And so the doctor would come in and make his rounds from bed to bed to bed. Just to make sure you can really picture this, the rooms were perfectly circular in about 40 feet in diameter.

And an aerial view of one of the rooms looked a bit like the face of a clock with beds around the perimeter. But the round rooms weren't just about aesthetics. By having these rounded rooms fewer corners, I thought that you could keep the hospital cleaner. You know, dirt accumulates in corners, so just get rid of the corners. It's kind of brilliant. Another distinguishing feature of this hospital and of others at the time was tons of windows.

And the idea was that the open window would allow fresh air to flush the space between the patients. And this, of course, played into the idea that sicknesses traveled in bad air. This idea that sickness was spread by polluted smelly air was called the measma theory. But the weird thing is, by the time the cancer hospital was built, the measma theory had been debunked by the germ theory, which rightly held that diseases spread through germs or microbes.

The architecture just hadn't caught up yet. The architectural design of a hospital doesn't always correspond exactly to the medical theories of that time. Almost like society is hesitating to fully endorse the medical theory. Light, airy rooms, champagne parties, carriage rides through the park, it all sounds kind of charming. Until we get to the part about how nobody had any idea what they were doing, medically speaking. Beyond palliative care, the main treatment for cancer at the time was surgery,

but surgery for cancer was still incredibly primitive. You know, just sort of massive cutting of people with tumors, with the idea of removing every lymph node in their body and as much as possible, it could be done while keeping them alive. Surgery was also hugely risky. This was before the time of antibiotics, so a lot of people died from infections after surgery, but desperate patients take desperate measures. You know, if a doctor said I can take this out of you and it was causing pain and bleeding, you know, people would often agree. I can take this out of you and it was causing pain and bleeding.

You know, people would often agree. The surgeries at the Cancer Hospital in New York, as in other hospitals at that time, were happening in an amphitheater, so that students could watch and learn. There's a show on cinematics that I watch called the Nick, but graphically dramatizes these amphitheater surgeries from around the same time period. I want the students to take note that Dr. Christian Sun is entering on the media line just above the pubes. As you can see, there is significant blood in the cavity, thank you, remember. Surgeons from this time were doing pioneering work. In patients, we're pioneering guinea pigs.

And I had to start somewhere. But that show makes me so so happy that I live in the 20th century. Agreed, things were bad and they stayed bad for cancer patients for quite a while. As late as 1920, only 15% or so of patients survived cancer diagnosis for more than two years. Almost everyone died, so the numbers were bleak, and in 1900 the numbers were even worse. Which must be why they felt they needed a crematorium on site. Which must have been a really spooky site if you were there

and you could look at your window and see the smoke stack. And imagine looking out there and seeing smoke come out of that smoke stack. That would have been pretty awful. Under that billowing smoke, the New York Cancer Hospital soon earned a nickname, the Bastille. It was trying to look like a French at toe, but it ended up feeling like a French prison. Which is why, despite a huge demand for cancer treatment, the hospital couldn't get people in the door. The fact is that very few people wanted to go to the New York Cancer Hospital,

and what's amazing is that the place struggled financially, cancer care, before 1900, and for a long time after it was not lucrative. The hospital also tried to attract patients and funds by procuring a controversial new form of medicine. Radium. For a while, around 1920, the New York Cancer Hospital boasted the country's single largest repository of radium. Marie Curie visited to check out the radium repository in 1921, in a trip that made headlines. But radiation therapy, even more so than surgery, was not understood.

It was administered by people who didn't know how to administer it because they didn't really understand it. And a lot of the radiation workers, doctors and nurses themselves developed cancer. It wasn't until the 1930s or so that things started to improve. Surgery became better, the radiation treatments were working. I think in the 1960s and 1970s then you have chemotherapy and just much more, a much more organized approach to cancer care, and one that ultimately became very lucrative. In 1939, the Cancer Hospital left

for 55 Central Park West for the Upper East Side, where it became Memorial Sloan Catering, which is now known as one of the best hospitals for cancer treatment in the US. And of course, hospitals don't look like castles anymore. After World War One, hospitals start to look like small civic institutions more like city halls or or schools. They're very square that it's called the block plan. We also see the end of big open woods with lots of beds. Paying patients could expect single rooms or typical patients could be in a double room or a room of four patients.

And we said goodbye to good food, champagne, and carat rites. The money was channeled in things like surgical suites and in mechanical equipment rather than in decoration. And we see things like wooden beds and dressers disappear, everything becomes metal and has a kind of look of efficiency. After World War II, the office building slash skyscraper becomes the model for hospitals. It all changes again in the 1980s with the onset of what we call patient-centered care, where the atrium hospital just takes off.

These are hospitals that look like shopping malls, just one or two floors, big open spaces. I mean, that's a very kind of capsule history of the 20th century hospital. We've done away with completely round rooms now, but the general idea of round rooms being easier to keep clean has actually persisted. So where the wall meets the floor, if you go visit the hospital today you'll see it's probably curved so that nothing could get stuck in the right angle between the wall and the floor. As for the castle-like building wall and the floor. As for the castle-like building that housed the first cancer hospital, they went through

another really dark period. In the mid-1950s, it becomes tower nursing home. That becomes one of the most notorious nursing homes in New York. And is a place where terrible things happen, roaches crawling around walls, and patients being abused. The nursing home was shut down in the 1970s, and the building sat vacant and in a state of disrepair for a long time.

Jim Rassenberger used to walk by it in the 80s and said it was a spooky place. It was like a haunted house, you know, but it was even better than that. It was a haunted castle. It just seemed to be on an everable fall into a pile of bricks. It was really, there didn't seem to be any escape from that fate because it got so bad you thought, well, who's going to come in here now?

I mean, who would come in and try to make something of this building? That was New York in the 1980s. In 21st century Manhattan, even haunted castles can be turned into luxury condominiums. In the year 2000 the building was bought by a developer. Now it's 17 condo units, a parking garage, a spa, a pool, and a fitness center. The hospital castle on the park finally became on the inside, would it always pretended to be on the outside. A nice place for rich people. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Jessica Miller and Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan

Avery Troubleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxan, an open-hearted, collaboratively-minded architecture firm that generously gives us our home in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can keep up with all the coming and goings of 99PI on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify. If you say hi, I guarantee if you just write hi, I will write hi back to you on Twitter. I guarantee it.

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