Sea View Hospital

Sea View: African American History, Public Health, and Social Equity in Civil Rights Era Staten Island

With the assistance of a Humanities Research for the Public Good grant from the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), Wagner College partnered with Sea View Hospital to document and share the extraordinary history of Sea View Tuberculosis Hospital and the Black Angels (the name African American nurses were known by) of Staten Island, New York. The hospital archives, which are largely complete, have not been reviewed by historians. Few Staten Islanders know about the TB hospital that operated for almost 50 years. Even fewer know about the use of a black nursing staff employed there. The Civil Rights Movement on Staten Island was largely initiated by this privileged community yet no meaningful historical study has been attempted.  

Sea View Tuberculosis Sanatorium (later hospital) in Staten Island, NY was opened in 1912 to treat the scourge of the 19th century—Tuberculosis.  Up until the discovery of antibiotics, TB was a disease that was poorly understood and had no cure. The 1882 discovery of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes TB, introduced a series of different approaches for treatment. The sanatorium movement, which ministered to TB patients who had pulmonary symptoms, relocated them to infirmaries that prescribed rest in open fresh air wards, or outdoor lounges, mild exercise, and a healthful diet to bring about a slowing of the progression of the disease.  Sea View Hospital was run by the New York City Department of Health and was one of the largest municipal facilities created for the treatment of tuberculosis in the United States. City administrators envisioned a treatment center within NYC and located the hospital in the sparsely populated borough of  Staten Island because of its proximity to Manhattan.  White hospital officials also determined that the contagious nature of TB would make it difficult for them to hire and keep a nursing staff to see to the needs of TB patients.  From the early years of the institution, it was decided that African American nurses would exclusively be hired to work at Sea View Hospital. These women  were instrumental in providing medical treatment to TB patients until the hospital was closed in the 1960s.  The nursing staff, who were recruited from segregated hospitals in the Northeast and the South, received higher salaries than the average wages black nurses were paid in Jim Crow hospitals. These women, who received their training in black colleges, relocated to Staten Island and helped to grow the small African American community on the island.  They would also be the backbone of the black middle-class. By the 1970s many of the children of Sea View nurses brought the fight for civil rights to Staten Island. The cataloguing and digitization of documents will greatly contribute to our understanding of Civil Rights era Staten Island and the history of the nursing profession.