As some of you may know, I moved to the Saranac Lake area about two years ago. It’s a remote area of the Adirondacks, close to the Canadian border.
For the last few months, I’ve been volunteering at the Saranac Lake Historical Society, which has, as its centerpiece, the Trudeau Sanitorium, which was the first tuberculosis facility in the United States. As I was cataloguing the most recent bequest, I came across a photo of the Seaview Sanitorium. I grew up on Staten Island, so this piqued my interest. So I snapped a pic, then did a little research.
This week’s Discovering History entry is this photo (circa 1953), along with a present-day photo of the Sanitorium, described by the New York Times as “the largest and finest hospital ever built for the care and treatment of those who suffer from tuberculosis in any form.” (NYTimes Archives, 11/13/1913, p. 6). It was built on a site that already had a poor farm, insane asylum and cholera hospital.
At its opening, the Sanitorium had 1,000 beds. Over the next fifty years, it added a children’s hospital and several additional wards. Since the development of effective drug treatments against TB, the Seaview Sanitorium, like the Trudeau Sanitorium in Saranac Lake, saw a huge decline in population.
