Farm Colony Seaview Hospital Historic District

An official Path Through History Site! Begun in 1902 on the site of the former Richmond County Poor Farm, the New York City Farm Colony centered on the idea of sheltering and feeding the able-bodied poor in exchange for labor. Its gambrel-roofed, fieldstone buildings evoke the Dutch Colonial Revival style. The Seaview Hospital complex, built between 1913 and 1938, was once the nation’s largest and most expensive municipal tuberculosis treatment facility. Its earliest buildings were designed by Raymond F. Admiral in the Spanish Mission style that maximized fresh air and sunlight, two of the only treatments then available for the disease.