• Exiles in New York City
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Exiles in New York City

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Exiles in New York City shares untold stories from Ward’s Island, offering a new lens on the city’s past and present from the perspective of the marginalized.
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  • 15 April 2025
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Gold Winner, 2026 Nonfiction Book Awards

Ward’s Island in the East River sits just a short distance from Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx, yet it has been cordoned off from the rest of New York City. For nearly two centuries, it has been treated as a dumping ground for society’s most marginalized—the unhoused, recent immigrants, and people diagnosed with mental illnesses. Even today, its two psychiatric hospitals, homeless shelters, and residential substance-use treatment program house more than one thousand people, but these institutions are fenced off from the athletic fields and green space of the adjoining Randall’s Island Park.

Exiles in New York City shares untold stories from Ward’s Island, offering a new lens on the city’s past and present from the perspective of the marginalized. Philip T. Yanos—a clinical psychologist who grew up on Ward’s Island—explores the history of the island alongside the history of urban mental health systems in the United States. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with current residents and staff while weaving in recollections of his own childhood, he traces how the island became a place of exile and brings to life the failings of the approach to mental illness that it represents. This incisive and timely book reveals a part of New York City that has long been hidden in plain sight, and it also considers how to transform Ward’s Island for a new era.

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Price: $27.00
Pages: 192
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 15 April 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231212373
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA), SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban, PSYCHOLOGY / History, PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology
A riveting look at the untold history of the treatment and mistreatment of marginalized groups banished to Ward’s Island. Combining compassionate understanding with clear and informed insight, this account is impossible to put down. The final chapter, with an alternative vision for the island’s future, is positively thrilling.
— Stacy Horn, author of Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in Nineteenth-Century New York
Philip T. Yanos is professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Written Off: Mental Health Stigma and the Loss of Human Potential (2018). During his childhood in the 1970s, Yanos lived on the grounds of Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island, where his father was a psychiatrist.

Acknowledgments
1. A Strange Juxtaposition
2. Ward’s Island: A Place Where No One Would Complain
3. Parkland or Institutional Dumping Ground?
4. The French Connection Connection
5. “In Accordance with the Standards”
6. Where Will These Children Play?
7. “We Are New York’s Forgotten People”: The Island Now
8. The Future: What Can Ward’s Island Become?
Notes
Bibliography
Index