Hoffman Island is an 11-acre articicial island in the Lower New York Bay off Staten Island, New York City. The island was created in 1873 by the addition of landfill and was named for Mayor and Governor John T. Hoffman. The island served as a quarantine station for Ellis Island immigrants who presented symptoms of contagious diseases. During World War II, the US Merchant Marine used Hoffman and Swinburne Islands as training stations. After the war, Robert Moses and Bernard Baruch advocated transforming the islands into a city park, and the New York City Board of Estimate proposed the joining of the two islands, but all existing buildings on the island were razed in 1961 and plans to make the island a homeless shelter in the 1980s never came through.