It’s one of the city’s best-kept secrets: a creepy quarantine island abandoned half a century ago.
The East River’s North Brother Island, once the site of an infectious-disease hospital and home to Typhoid Mary, is now a collection of crumbling buildings completely overrun by nature.
But curious New Yorkers might one day be able to explore the 20-acre landmass just 1,000 feet from the South Bronx shoreline, thanks to a new study underway by the University of Pennsylvania.
“I hope we can stabilize the ruins in a way that will allow people to see this island as it is today but without fear that a brick is going to fall on you,” said City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan), who helped secure a $50,000 private grant for the study.
The researchers took The Post on a tour of what looked and felt like a post-apocalyptic film set.
In the 1880s, the island’s remote location was deemed perfect for the building of a hospital to treat contagious smallpox and typhoid patients. Mary Mallon, who earned the name Typhoid Mary by passing the disease to 51 people while working as a cook in Brooklyn and Long Island, was its most infamous tenant. She displayed no symptoms herself, but was quarantined until her death in 1938.
A new tuberculosis wing was built in 1941, but became obsolete just two years later when a cure was discovered. After World War II, the grounds were used for housing for returned servicemen. Later, the island was reinvented as a heroin rehab center.
At its peak, 40 buildings graced the island, including dormitories, a church, a lighthouse and a morgue. But in 1963, the hospital was shuttered and the island abandoned by the city. It’s languished largely untouched since.
Today, North Brother can only be reached by boat.
Only 26 buildings remain. The half-collapsed structures are eerie, with tree branches growing through windows and rooms bare minus some rotting furniture.
The former nurses quarters is a majestic, four-story red brick and limestone building built in the same style as much of Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus. Vines cover the four towering columns at its entrance. All the windows are blown out. A cast-iron street lamp, its light missing, stands as sentinel to five decades of decay.
Levine — who calls the island “enchanting” — doesn’t want it to become the next Governors Island, with music festivals, food trucks and bicycle rentals.
“My hope is that we can open it up for controlled access,” he said.
UPenn researchers are examining the state of the buildings, surveying plant life and developing cost-analysis plans for conservation and public access.
They will report their findings to the City Council in February.