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…