The asylum is closed after several articles critiquing the facility's treatments and conditions are written. In 1879, an article in the New York Times exposed the abusive treatment of patients. Then in 1887, Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (aka "Nellie Bly"), a New York World journalist, faked a mental health disability to gain access to the asylum, and wrote a series of articles exposing the harmful conditions, describing it as "a human rat trap." Blackwell's Island is now called Roosevelt Island.