Four Freedoms Park Smallpox Hospital and TB Hotel
On Geocoins.io
- Category
- Tributes
- Rarity
- Common
- Published
- 28 August 2026
- Extension
- Reviewer
- Forge
- Not craftable
- Collected by
- 32 player(s)
On geocaching.com
- Cache type
- Traditional Cache
- GC code
- GC95348
- Owner
- New Market Mallers and leckylove
- Published
- 11 January 2021
The Four Freedoms Park Smallpox Hospital and TB Hotel geocache (GC95348) was placed in January 2021 at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York. It watches over two monuments that nothing destined to become neighbours.
The first is a ruin. The smallpox hospital opened here in 1856, back when the island was called Blackwell's Island: a hundred beds to isolate the sick far from the city. A nursing school in 1875, abandoned in the 1950s, it slowly fell in on itself - and it is in that state that the city landmarked it in 1976, the only New York ruin to hold that status.
Next to it stretches Four Freedoms Park, designed by Louis Kahn in tribute to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech of 1941.
The cache built by leckylove as a nod to the hospital is large enough to house the trackables visitors leave in it while they wait for another geocacher to carry them onwards. It was gorgonoopsid, a lackey at Groundspeak HQ, who put it forward, explaining they were "surprised to find a good-sized cache in one of the parks" of New York.