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One of New York City's creepiest abandoned places is going to be the setting for a new TV series from BBC America, according to Variety. The show will center around Typhoid Mary, an early 20th century woman who was one of the first people to be diagnosed as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever in New York City. Elisabeth Moss has signed on as the show's executive producer and will play the disease-spreading lead role.
Typhoid Mary, formally named Mary Mallon, was an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook for a variety of families in New York City and the surrounding area. A 1907 investigation found that members from seven of the eight families that Mallon worked for contracted typhoid fever, a nasty bacterial infection with symptoms including fever, headaches, diarrhea and swelling in the abdomen.
Though Mallon did not have symptoms of the disease, she was deemed a healthy carrier and was subsequently quarantined for three years in the now-abandoned Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island. She gained her now-famous nickname Typhoid Mary from an article published by researcher George Soper in a 1907 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Mallon was released from the hospital in 1910 on the condition that she would not return to cooking. She proceeded to work as a laundress for a few years but returned to cooking under the alias of Mary Brown. After working several cooking jobs, starting typhoid outbreaks along the way, she was taken into custody and again quarantined on North Brother Island from 1915 until her death in 1938.
North Brother Island remains abandoned and is currently off-limits to the public. The ruins of the hospital there are a creepy vestige of an era in which there was no cure for many deadly and contagious diseases, and people who contracted them were quarantined by the state.
Historians have questioned whether or not it's entirely fair to cast all of the blame for the outbreaks squarely on Mallon's shoulders. After all, she was an immigrant with few options and had spent her entire career as a cook. A 2004 PBS special from NOVA digs into the complicated network of causes that enabled Mallon to infect so many people over such a short period of time.
In the end, Mallon was quarantined for nearly three decades against her will, a set of circumstances that Moss is uniquely equipped to portray, what with her recent role in The Handmaid's Tale. There is no release date for the new series yet, but once it hits the screen it ought to provide a harrowing image of how disgusting New York City was just a century ago.