The Girl Puzzle Monument honoring activist and journalist Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, pen name Nellie Bly (1864-1922), is a public sculptural installation by American artist Amanda Matthews, CEO/Partner of Prometheus Art Bronze Foundry and Metal Fabrication.

The location is significant because of its proximity to the remains of the old Blackwell Island Asylum - The Octagon is the last remnant of the original building where Nellie Bly went undercover as a patient while working as a reporter at the New York World.

The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC) awarded to Amanda Matthews the project as the result of a widely published open call for artists.

[4] Amanda Matthews named the art installation after Nellie Bly's first published article, "The Girl Puzzle", which ran on January 25, 1885, in the Pittsburgh Dispatch newspaper.

Only twenty years old, coming from a large working-class family, Bly had bravely responded to a previously published misogynist complaint about women wage-earners, and the editor hired her to write again for the newspaper, eventually as a full-time reporter.

Her series of articles exposing the harrowing experiences of women factory workers in Pittsburgh led to the anger of local industrialists, and she eventually left to serve as a foreign correspondent in Mexico.

She experienced not only the worst of the misogynist and xenophobic assumptions by the city's bureaucracy but also the abusive treatment of those deemed mentally ill. After only a few days, she tried to convince the asylum staff that she was not ill, but it was only after the New York World sent an attorney that she was finally released.

Her first article (of six), "Behind Asylum Bars," ran on Sunday, October 9, 1887, and the City aldermen allotted an extra one million dollars a year to correct the abuses that Bly eventually exposed in her full report Ten Days in a Mad-House.