North Brother Island is New York’s miniature Detroit, without the industry — a 20-acre, un-High Line-ed wilderness of trees and vines and abandoned, crumbling buildings in the treacherous tidal strait where the waters of New York Harbor trade places with those of Long Island Sound. It has been uninhabited for 50 years and off limits to all but biologists for more than a decade; the city manages it as a nature preserve. While it has always felt secret-filled, it now has a new one, which can be glimpsed in the photographer Christopher Payne’s new book, “North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City”: When a vast swath of trees was recently cut down in the Bronx for development, the island’s forest, created by neglect, became the largest in the South Bronx. ﻿Robert Sullivan

Years North Brother Island served as an isolation hospital for people with infectious diseases: 1885-1941

Years Typhoid Mary lived on the island: 1907-10 and 1915-38

Years island housed veterans studying in New York on the G.I. Bill: 1945-51

Years island housed drug addicts: 1952-63