The Real Hospital Islands Behind “Shutter Island”

Bostonian Dennis Lehane published Shutter Island in 2003, a thriller set on an invented hospital island where sinister things happen. The film version was shot using Peddocks Island as a backdrop, but Lehane's real inspiration likely came from other Boston Harbor islands with long histories of institutions and social services — especially Rainsford Island and Long Island.

Rainsford: "Hospital Island"

For more than 150 years, Rainsford Island was known as "Hospital Island," home to institutions for people who were sick or needed public help.

Official opinion swung wildly. After an 1858 visit, "Alien Commissioners" filed a report — likely exaggerated — that "a greater perversion of charitable appropriations was never witnessed. Thieves, strumpets and drunkards were living by the seaside almost in luxurious ease on the bounty of the State." In 1863, the Board of Charities found the hospital eager to "swell" its numbers by recruiting patients, and ordered that no more poor people be sent without the Executive Committee's consent. They kept arriving anyway. Another report in the 1860s found every state-run house poorly run and maintained.

The veterans' home was overcrowded, and its treatment inadequate and outdated. Around 79 veterans died there before a new home opened in Chelsea in 1882 and the survivors moved.

The men's almshouse had room for fewer than its up to 282 inmates. The city council set aside $16,000 for an extension, yet basics stayed hard to get: easy access to drinking water came only when the city laid pipes in 1877. From 1878, every man able to work spent his days breaking stone, and in 1879 the city made $10,755.20 from it. Death rates rose after stone cutting began. Filled to capacity with 537 men in 1889, the almshouse was emptied onto Long Island. An estimated 1,777 people were buried on Rainsford over the years.

The women's hospital took its place. The State Board of Lunacy and Charity reported that "the bath rooms and closets in almshouse are in much better condition than has been case previously" — but the women still faced poor treatment and unsanitary conditions until the island closed in 1895.

Long Island

Sometime in the 1880s, Boston bought a former hotel on Long Island and made it an almshouse. In 1887 the city moved poor women there from Austin Farm in South Boston. Under several names, the island served as almshouse, hospital, home for unwed mothers, homeless shelter and treatment center for alcohol addiction. Its hospital faced accusations of poisoning patients with strychnine, neglecting patients who needed care, and serving insufficient or unacceptable food.

In 1926 the facilities officially became Long Island Hospital, including a homeless shelter and a center for people recovering from alcohol addiction. Journalist Steve Brown has recalled riding out on weekends in the 1960s while his parents visited his grandparents — though he could not see his grandmother, the patient. Long Island's services ran until 2015, when the bridge to the mainland had to be taken down for safety.

The activist and the lawyer

Alice North Lincoln, from Louis Albert Banks's Heroic Personalities (1898). Credit: Library of Congress.

Alice North Towne Lincoln became involved with the islands in the 1880s through her work with immigrant tenants. In 1887 one of them, Margaret Mulhearn, could no longer pay her rent. Lincoln offered to take her to Austin Farm, only to find it closed; an attendant took Mulhearn to Long Island instead. Lincoln later remembered that Mulhearn "was poor, the life miserable, and worst of all, she was thrown with depraved and degraded companions, with whom, naturally, she had nothing in common. She said the life was killing her, and it soon did."

Lincoln resolved to act. Her lawyer, Louis D. Brandeis, walked through the island's facilities and called it "the most depressing & distressful experience." At Lincoln's urging, hearings began in 1894. A former superintendent of the Long Island facility testified to employee drunkenness, self-dealing and corruption. Lincoln argued not just against conditions but against the whole system, and pressed for reform. Boston closed Rainsford and moved all its women to Long Island.

The real stories may be less dramatic than Lehane's, but they belong with those of countless other urban islands where people labeled sick or "undesired" were sent away from the rest of society.

Sources

Based on "Island Histories that Inspired 'Shutter Island,'" Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on William McEvoy and Robin Hazard Ray, Rainsford Island: A Boston Case Study in Public Neglect and Private Activism (2019), and the National Park Service's Cultural Landscape Report: Boston Harbor Islands National & State Park (2017).