Eighteen red brick buildings sit abandoned on Boston Harbor's Long Island.They're the ghostly remnants of what looks like a small college campus.
It's where thousands of people experiencing addiction or homelessness were treated and sheltered for many decades. According to the Boston Public Health Commission, the island was first used to shelter people who were homeless in the 19th Century. At some point the shelter went dormant. The bridge to the island opened in 1951, and the city opened its most recent homeless shelter there in 1983. Many addiction treatment programs ran on the island over the years.
Ten years ago Tuesday, the city of Boston shut down the bridge to Long Island after was determined to be in poor condition and unsafe. That meant the programs on the island had to close. About 800 people who were being sheltered and treated there at the time, as well as staff members, had to evacuate immediately.
The city and its nonprofit partners scrambled to find places to shelter people or continue their addiction treatment. Months later, hundreds of people remained in makeshift shelters — including hundreds of men staying in a gymnasium run by the public health commission and dozens of women sleeping in the atrium of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program's medical respite.
"You're hustling. Know how people hustle for dope? You're hustling literally for someplace to sleep," said one woman, Emma, who was staying there.
Now, 10 years after the shutdown, the city is planning to rebuild the Long Island Bridge and open a new recovery campus on the island. The city of Quincy opposes the plan and is challenging a state license for the bridge in court. Boston is also awaiting a coastal management review by the state and a bridge permit from the U.S. Coast Guard.
But the ripple effects of the closing of the Long Island Bridge and campus continue.
WBUR'sAll Things Consideredhost Lisa Mullins spoke with Jess Nieuwenhuizen, director of programs and planning at the Boston Public Health Commission’s Recovery Services Bureau, and Sarah Porter, executive director of Victory Programs, which provided treatment services on Long Island.
Interview Highlights
On the shutdown and evacuation of Long Island:
Jess Nieuwenhuizen: "Leadership gathered many of us together and explained that we needed to assist with the evacuation of the island. ... I had to gather up the clients and inform them that they needed to pack their belongings, use the restroom, and that we'd be transporting them [to other programs' facilities]. And little did we know we wouldn't be returning. And I just remember sorting client records in [a] Walgreens parking lot and [sorting clients'] medication with the then director."
Sarah Porter: "It kind of unfolded throughout the day. There was notice that we'll be evacuating the island in eight hours, and then it was four hours, and then it was, 'OK, you need to go now.' ... We had 47 women who were in substance use treatment in our program on Long Island. And they were sitting having dinner. Some people had gathered belongings. ... And we put people in vans and drove them across the bridge that had just been condemned.
On what the loss of beds meant, just as the opioid crisis was taking off:
Nieuwenhuizen: "For us, it meant that folks that were in early recovery were now thrown into a crisis. And so we needed to locate treatment beds for them in other locations and other programs across the state to ensure that they could stay in treatment and continue on their journey of recovery."
On the impact in the area widely known as "Mass. and Cass," where the city opened a large men's homeless shelter to replace beds lost on the island:
Porter: "... there [was] a concentration of services in that area to begin with. You add a 400-bed shelter to anything, and that is going to tip the tide. You are going to have a significant number of individuals in extreme high need in that location. ... But it's only recently that the shelters within Massachusetts have adopted a more progressive policy procedures as it relates to substance use.
"For a very long time, if you were an active substance user, you were not able to stay in the shelters. If you had to leave the shelter in the middle of the night to use [drugs] — individuals who are using fentanyl actively are not going to make it through the night without using — if you left the shelter, then you lost your bed for three weeks. ... And so people were saying, 'Well, why am I even going to go into the shelter if I'm going to get kicked out?' ... That is what led to the encampment. And it built a community on Atkinson Street, [with people thinking], 'This is where I go if I am an active substance user.' ... [The] change, of allowing people to come inside [even after using drugs], is why the shelters are now full."
On the possibility of rebuilding the bridge and opening new programs on the island:
Porter: "It is too valuable of a resource to not use in that way, is my opinion. Boston, it's a crowded city. Nobody wants a detox program in their neighborhood. Nobody wants a large shelter in their neighborhood. If we want to decentralize services from that particular neighborhood, you have to have a place to put them, and it's incredibly difficult to put them anywhere. So let's put them out on the island. I am not convinced it is the end-all be-allsolution to everything, but there is not a detox program for women within the Boston city limits. Where in the world am I going to put that? I'm going to put it on Long Island. We need more shelter beds. The shelters are exploding at the seams and we haven't even hit winter yet."
Nieuwenhuizen: "I think, you know, the reality is we just don't have enough capacity and we know that folks are falling out of care, because there's no next step that's available to them. And so we know we need to continue to expand on services."
Porter: "When having experienced what it felt like to be kind of ripped out of that island, having to go back and gather people's pictures of their children that they left hanging on the wall — and I went back most recently, and those things are still there. There are still posters up. There are still newspapers. ... So it still feels somewhat intense of an experience. So could something better come from that? Well, gosh, you know, we'd be fools to not have something better come from it. We know more today than we knew then."