132- Castle on the Park

On the southwest corner of Central Park West and 106th Street in New York City, there’s an enormous castle. It takes up the whole east end of the block, with its red brick cylindrical turrets topped with gleaming silver cones. All the stained glass windows and intricate stonework make the building looks like something out of a fairytale.
This building’s past, however, is not very fairytale-like at all.
When it was built in 1887, this castle was the country’s first hospital devoted solely to the treatment of cancer. In the late 1800s, cancer was known to start as a tumor, but they didn’t know a whole lot beyond that.
In the back of the castle, was a smoke stack that used to lead out from the crematorium. That smokestack was smoking pretty often.