When New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia laid the cornerstone of the Triboro Hospital for Tuberculosis in Jamaica, Queens, in 1939, he expressed hope that the disease—then the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 15 and 35—would be snuffed out within his lifetime. Facing a shortage of some 4,000 beds, the city was in desperate need of the new facility. But LaGuardia did not live long enough to see the end of tuberculosis—he died eight years later, coincidentally the same year that clinical trials for streptomycin, the antibiotic used to treat TB, began. By the late 1950s the need for such a specialized facility had started to wane and, with it, so did the building’s condition. Dunn Development, with architecture firm SLCE, Old Structures Engineering, and architectural conservator Mary Kay Judy, recently rehabilitated the underutilized hospital to help address a different public-health challenge: the housing crisis.
Throughout much of the 19th century, “miasmas” or even lapses in moral judgment were often thought to cause tuberculosis (sometimes called consumption). The formulation of germ theory in the 1880s, however, helped medical professionals understand the disease’s communicable nature, spreading through the air much like influenza or Covid-19. Until pharmacological treatment was commonplace, doctors turned to architects for a solution: “taking the cure” meant isolation from others in tuberculosis sanatoriums with plenty of exposure to the sun and fresh air. This translated into dedicated facilities far from dense urban centers, with balconies or terraces wide enough to accommodate bedridden patients, proper orientation, and ample glazing, as well as all the auxiliary spaces necessary to maintain hygiene (and sanity) for patients who often needed months or years to fully recover. Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium (1933) is perhaps the most notable example, and certainly one Triboro’s architects would have known.
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