first night at the institution in her exposé for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
Bly’s covert operation exposing abuses at the asylum at Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, pioneered
a path for women in newspapers and launched what morphed into serious investigative journalism. The
account by the 23-year-old “girl detective” shocked the public with its depiction of brutality and violence.
Now the journalism pioneer is getting her own monument – at the very site she wrote about.
With the city looking to create more public art celebrating women, Roosevelt Island leaders plan to pay
tribute to the groundbreaking reporter, according to art news site Hyperallergic.
Bly was part of the ‘stunt girl’ movement that was very important in the 1880s and 1890s as these big mass-
circulation papers came into the fore
“She was an extraordinary woman,” Susan Rosenthal, president of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corp,
says of Nellie Bly.
Rosenthal says her organisation is sponsoring a competition for an artist to create the memorial, which can
be a standard sculpture or a digital or interactive creation. The group plans to unveil the piece, which has a
budget of $500,000 (£410,000), in the spring of 2020.
For 10 days, Bly, who was born Elizabeth Cochrane outside of Pittsburgh, lived side by side with women
who were suicidal, violent and psychotic, as well as perfectly sane women who were mistakenly confined to
the institution.
Writing as Nellie Bly, a pen name taken from a Stephen Foster song, she was a courageous crusader to let
herself be committed into an insane asylum with no guarantee that she’d be able to leave, says Brooke
Kroeger, author of Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist.
“She was part of the ‘stunt girl’ movement that was very important in the 1880s and 1890s as these big,
mass-circulation yellow journalism papers came into the fore,” Kroeger says.