Ellis Island’s Abandoned Hospital Laundry Room

The words “Whirlwind” and “Smith-Drum” stamped into rusted iron are the only labels left telling you what this equipment actually was. Everything else in the room has gone quiet and brown with corrosion, but those cast letters remain sharp enough to read. That contrast — legible branding on machinery otherwise dissolving into rust — is what pulled me in.

The hospital complex on the New Jersey side of Ellis Island wasn’t a quiet clinic. During the 1920s, at the peak of immigration processing, thousands of people moved through the infectious disease wards, and every one of them generated linen: sheets, gowns, towels, bedding. Reports on the site describe a laundry that ran continuously, processing somewhere in the region of 3,000 items a day. That’s not a household chore scaled up; it’s an industrial operation, and it needed industrial machinery to match.

The stakes were higher than ordinary hygiene, too. This wasn’t linen from a hotel — it was linen that had been in contact with tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other infectious diseases actively being treated in the wards next door. Cleaning it wasn’t optional or cosmetic. It had to be sterilised, reliably, every single day, or the laundry itself became a vector for spreading the disease it was meant to help contain. That single requirement — sterilisation, not just cleaning — shaped every machine in the room.

The building itself reflects this logic. It sits in an outbuilding on Island 2, connected to the ward buildings on Island 3 by covered walkways, so contaminated laundry could move between spaces without needless exposure. It’s a small detail, but it tells you the whole site was designed around containment.

Smith, Drum & Co. Industrial Clothes Dryer · Saturday 16 May 2026
FujiFilm X-T5 · ISO 320 · 1/35 sec
XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR · 23.4 mm · f/2.8

Some of the equipment carries the nameplate “Smith-Drum,” a Philadelphia-based manufacturer. The historic record fully backs this up: Smith, Drum & Co. was established in 1888 by Robert P. Smith and George E. Drum at Allegheny Avenue and 5th Street, deep within the city’s historic textile and industrial heart. While they built a massive reputation over the subsequent decades for high-volume commercial laundry, textile-dyeing, and garment-finishing machinery, their advanced iron-casting capabilities also made them an ideal asset during the industrial mobilisation of World War II. In the 1940s, the firm successfully pivoted to heavy machine tool manufacturing, subcontracting for Fay & Scott to build their massive HK extension-gap engine lathes for the war effort. The surviving equipment still resting on the south side of Ellis Island perfectly reflects the core business that originally defined the firm: heavy-duty, cast-iron industrial laundry infrastructure built to survive decades of continuous, punishing use.

Three types of equipment did the actual work, each solving a different part of the wash-dry-sterilise problem.

The washing cylinders were the first stage — large cast-iron drums that agitated fabric through water and, presumably, some combination of detergent and disinfectant. The Smith-Drum has a perforated cylindrical drum inside an outer casing, riveted rather than welded, which places it solidly in an era before welded steel construction became standard. These worked alongside autoclaves — steam sterilisers — that handled the disinfection side more directly, since a wash alone wouldn’t reliably kill everything that needed killing.

After washing came the spinners, or centrifugal extractors — the machine labelled “Whirlwind”. These are deceptively simple in principle: a perforated inner basket spins at high speed inside an outer tub, and centrifugal force throws water out through the perforations before the load ever reaches a dryer. The engineering demand here is different from the washer’s — it’s about withstanding enormous rotational force without the whole assembly walking across the floor or tearing itself apart. That’s presumably why the housing is bolted directly into the concrete floor rather than simply resting on it.

Smith, Drum & Co. Centrifugal Extractors · Saturday 16 May 2026
FujiFilm X-T5 · ISO 500 · 1/50 sec
XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR · 40.1 mm · f/2.8

The tumblers, or industrial dryers, closed the loop. These weren’t just about removing residual moisture; the heat itself was doing sterilising work, connected to the island’s central steam plant so that hot air moved through the drum continuously. Drying and disinfecting were the same action, done at once, which is a fairly elegant solution to a problem where you can’t afford a gap between “clean” and “safe.”

None of these machines look sophisticated by today’s standards. There’s no electronics, no sensors, nothing that resembles a control panel in the modern sense. But the engineering logic — wash, extract, sterilise-by-heat, in three purpose-built stages — is sound, and it had to be, given what was moving through that building.

The hospital complex was abandoned in 1954, and the laundry room has sat largely untouched since. What’s striking is how much of the machinery survived at all. Leather drive belts have rotted away completely — you can see their absence in the images, empty pulleys with nothing connecting them. Paint has flaked off the ceiling in patterns that look almost deliberate. But the iron, steel, and copper components underneath are largely intact, because they were built to a standard that assumed decades of continuous industrial use, not decades of standing empty.

The non-profit Save Ellis Island, which manages the hospital complex, has taken the position of preserving rather than restoring — a practice sometimes called “arrested decay.” The idea is to stabilise the building enough to stop active deterioration without erasing the visible evidence of abandonment. It’s a curatorial choice I find more honest than restoration would be. A freshly repainted laundry room would tell you what the space once looked like. This room tells you what happened to it, which is a different and, I think, more useful kind of history.

Standing in front of that Whirlwind extractor, what stays with me isn’t really the machine’s function — it’s the gap between how loudly this room must once have run, all day, every day, and how completely silent it is now. The iron remembers the shape of the work. It just isn’t doing it anymore.