Isolation Hospital, Building 50 (site) (New Rochelle, New York)

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Building 50 was designed to isolate and treat patients with infectious diseases. Isolation limited the spread of the infection by separating contagious from healthy people. In addition, isolation permitted close observation, careful nursing, and efficient and thorough use of disinfection procedures.

By the late nineteenth century, military and civilian hospitals were being designed with separate rooms, wards, floors, wings, or buildings (pavilions) for the treatment of infectious diseases. Among the diseases that would typically have been encountered among the recruits and personnel at Fort Slocum in the early twentieth century and would have resulted in admission to the isolation pavilion of the post hospital were: tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, typhoid fever, severe diarrhea, epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, measles, and mumps. Many other contagious diseases were also treated in an isolation ward, such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, smallpox, cholera, plague, yellow fever, etc., but these would then have been uncommon at Fort Slocum. In addition, undiagnosed conditions that suggested a contagious infection would result in isolation as long as circumstances warranted.

The brick building erected in 1908 as Fort Slocum’s isolation hospital had one definite predecessor in a small wood-frame building located about 25 feet north of the wood-frame hospital erected on the post in 1878-1879. This small building was identified as the “Pest House” and appears to have stood until the the central pavilion and the front east wing of Building 46, the oldest section of the brick hospital, was built
in 1898-1899. After the pest house was removed, it is unclear how isolation cases were handled, but possibly they had a designated room or ward elsewhere in the hospital complex. After the old woodframe main hospital building was demolished in ca. 1904 and the brick hospital was expanded by construction of part of the present rear east wing, a new “Pavilion Hospital” was erected directly north of the new brick building in the area now occupied by Hutchinson Road. This building was apparently a wood-frame structure, for it was extant for only 6 or 7 years. Its precise role in the hospital complex is presently unknown.

Fort Slocum Architectural Documentation Volume 3, Part 1 of 2: davidsisland.westchesterarchives.com/index.php?option=c...