From 1913–1960, Seaview Hospital on Staten Island was one of the nation’s leading TB facilities—treating patients away from the general population and providing them with care. Because TB was highly infectious, many white nurses, who had their choice of other assignments refused to work at Seaview. City officials recruited African-American nurses from around the country; they became known as the “Black Angels.”

Founded in 1847, the New York Academy of Medicine was created in order to provide a voice for “the advancement of the art and science of medicine, the maintenance of a public medical Library, and the promotion of public health and medical education." As an advocate for modern ideas in medicine, the Academy was an important movement in improving the public health and sanitation as well as documenting the city's populace. It was made up of eminent doctors of all types and sectioned itself into their different areas of expertise.

Entrance to the Stuyvesant Polyclinic, ca. 1975. Designed in the neo-Italian Renaissance style by William Schickel and constructed between 1883 and 1884, the German Dispensary served the medical needs of the neighborhood's poorest citizens first as the Ottendorfer Clinic and then Deutsche Poliklinik. Temporarily renamed the Stuyvesant Polyclinic during the anti-German sentiment of the First World War, the named was permanently changed during the Second World War. A clinic remained in the building until 2006. Purchased for $13 million, it underwent a massive interior and exterior renovation, uncovering and restoring original stained glass long cemented over. Today the building is the home of the Gehl Institute, a global urban design and policy organization.

“North from a point just above Myrtle Avenue, running across Auburn Place and showing the New Cumberland Hospital on the left, 1940.” Founded as the Brooklyn Homeopathic Dispensary in 1852, the New Cumberland Hospital moved from Cumberland Street to its new nine-story building at the corner of North Portland Avenue and Auburn Place in 1918. Despite the change of address, the new hospital was officially named Cumberland Hospital in 1922. In the early 1940s, Cumberland Hospital was one of few structures spared from demolition as the surrounding blocks were razed for the construction of the Fort Greene Houses. The hospital was closed in 1983, as part of the City Health and Hospitals Corporation reorganization ahead of the opening of Woodhull Hospital. Today the 1918 building serves a homeless shelter while the 1950s hospital addition is the Cumberland Diagnostic & Treatment Center. One of few survivors of Fort Greene Houses construction, this 1918 hospital still stands at the corner of North Portland Avenue and Auburn Place.

75 Essex Street, 1928. Designed by the architects Rose & Stone, this Italianate-style building is the only one of its kind on the Lower East Side. When construction completed in 1890, the Eastern Dispensary relocated to the building from its previous headquarters on Grand Street. The dispensary was established in 1832 to provide the city's most vulnerable with medical care, during a massive cholera epidemic. Financed through private donations but with operations funded by the city, the facility offered more than just healthcare. It functioned as one of the city's "milk laboratories," providing sanitary milk for infants. Later renamed Good Samaritan Dispensary, the operation served the Lower East Side for over 60 years. When the dispensary closed in 1955, due to unpaid taxes, the Bell Yarn Shop moved in for a brief period in the 1960s. By 1985, the Eisner Brothers from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, purchased the building, opening a sportswear store on the ground floor. The future of this historic building has been the subject of debate since 2014, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected a request for Landmark designation. The property, celebrated as a "testimony to social reformers in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries," has been pulled on and off the market since the LPC ruling. If the building is sold, it is the Eisners' stated priority to make sure that it is "left as is on the outside."

The Northern Dispensary was founded in 1831, then in the northern part of the city. When New York deeded the land to the Northern Dispensary organization, the deed included a firm stipulation: that any building be used for the medical treatment of the city’s poor. Edgar Allan Poe, who lived nearby on Waverly Place, was among the facility’s patients in the winter of 1837. The clinic continued to operate until the 1980s, when the dispensary was fined for refusing to treat a prospective patient who had AIDS. In 1989, the building was purchased by the Roman Catholic Church, whose attempt to open a clinic for homeless AIDS patients was defeated by local opposition. The Northern Dispensary building sits on an extremely valuable lot in the middle of the West Village, but its 1831 deed restriction continues scare away developers. Today, the building is owned by the estate of William Gottlieb, an inscrutable real estate speculator who purchased the property in 1998.

By the 1870s, Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, off the eastern shore of Staten Island, became new quarantine stations for the port of New York. These small islands were enlarged with landfill and served as designated quarantine stations for arriving immigrants who were either suspected of being infected or found to have infectious disease when arriving at the port of New York. Even after Ellis Island opened in 1892, people quarantined on Hoffman or Swinburne were not permitted to leave for further inspection unless they showed signs that they were not in fact sick, or had recovered.      By the late 1930s, Hoffman and Swinburne Islands stopped being used as quarantine stations. They are now managed by the National Park Service and are a sanctuary for birds and harbor seals.

The Ellis Island Immigration Center was an important processing point for Public Health in New York as it controlled the flow of those with contagious diseases into the United States. The Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital was one of the largest public hospitals in the United States and had both a general hospital and a contagious disease hospital. Every immigrant was given a health inspection upon arrival, those deemed ill were taken for further inspection and sent to the Ellis Island Hospital. These patients would then stay there until they were better or deemed to ill to enter the United States. The steamship companies were responsible for covering these fees and nine out of every ten immigrants in the hospital were eventually deemed well enough to enter the United States. Opening in 1902 and operating until 1930, the hospital served an enormous amount of patients with a vast array of diseases.

It was in public spaces like Morris High School that New York began instituting public health measures. Efforts like immunization were able to be put in to place quickly through mass inoculation of student bodies. Morris High School was such a school. In fact, a book signed by several hundred Bronx schoolchildren was presented to bacteriologist William Hallock Park and Commissioner of Health Dr. Shirley Wilmott Wynne in appreciation of their commitment to making “the diphtheria immunization treatment widespread.”

see above ^

North Brother Island housed the Riverside Hospital, which while founded on Blackwell's Island, moved there in 1885. Riverside Hospital was founded in the 1850s as a smallpox hospital, but quickly became a hospital for diseases that required quarantine. Its most famous (or infamous) inhabitant was Mary Mallon! Mary Mallon, dubbed "Typhoid Mary", was the first asymptomatic carrier for a typhoid pathogen. Because she lacked symptoms, Mallon refused to stop working as a cook and continued to infect others, because of this she was forcibly detained on North Brother Island twice. On the second occasion, she was detained until her death in 1938 from pneumonia, the hospital closing shortly thereafter.

The hospital that would become Mount Sinai (now one of the largest and oldest teaching hospitals in the United States) opened on June 5, 1855, in a townhouse on West 28th Street. As its original name suggests, Jews’ Hospital served the needs of Jewish patients — and employed Jewish doctors — at a time when other hospitals in the city refused service. Non-Jewish patients were admitted in cases of emergency, as were Union soldiers wounded in the Civil War. In 1866, hospital directors adopted the new name Mount Sinai, signaling that patients of all backgrounds were welcome. In the early 1870s, the hospital moved to a new and larger facility at Lexington Avenue and 66th Street.

This is building is one of many that the Board of Health has occupied throughout its long history in New York. The Board of Health had its first meeting in 1805 in an attempt to stem an outbreak of yellow fever. Though it was incorporated into the New York State Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866 and later the Department of Health. It has been an important mechanism for New York to enforce and create public health measures.

The 1861 reconstruction of the hospital on Blackwell's Island came with a new mission: to help the underserved poorer occupants of the city. The City Hospital on Blackwell's Island became one of New York's first charity hospitals. Though the quality of care was at points notorious, it was the beginning of an attempt to control the public health of the city at large.

The Croton Aqueduct was vital for stopping the spread of diseases by providing a source of clean water to New York's citizens. Previously much of the water had been sourced from ground wells and contaminated water causing frequent outbreaks of cholera. This monumental public works project brought water from the Croton River down into the heart of New York through a system of aqueducts and reservoirs. This location is the Croton Distributing Reservoir, the final stop of the reservoir system before water was dispersed in pipes. The ability to easily access fresh water from upstate New York drastically reduced outbreaks of this nature and improved the health of the citizens at large.