kings park psychiatric center

On Long Island, a lost city and forbidden explorers

By Paul Vitello

July 16, 2007 - New York Times

 

KINGS PARK, N.Y., July 12 — With Hansel-and-Gretel-like caution, someone had tied the end of a spool of purple yarn to the banister. The banister was just inside a broken window of an abandoned state mental hospital building here. The thin purple line unspooled into darkness: up two flights of stairs, across a hall and into a vast open room where the natural light was ample enough for an artist’s studio. Even with the locked metal bars on the windows.

Before it was closed in the 1990s, the Kings Park Psychiatric Center was home to as many as 10,000 patients.

“Whoever used this was probably coming in here for the first time,” said the guide of this strange tour, who did not want to be identified. He pointed at the string. “They didn’t want to get lost. You don’t want to get lost in here.”

The dozens of abandoned buildings that made up the human warehouse known as the Kings Park Psychiatric Center — which at its peak in the 1960s held more than 10,000 patients, most of them from New York City — have been closed for about 10 years now. Closed to patients, anyway.

But despite fences and boarded windows, a nimble community of adventurers has continued to check in, if only for a few hours at a time.

Some are vandals, but most are more interesting intruders. There are a handful of amateur filmmakers who post their work on YouTube and use the hulking structural shells for spooky, chiaroscuro effects in works with titles like “The Nightmare at Kings Park” and “Angel.” Some are thrill seekers like the young men who filmed themselves a few months ago rappelling down Building 93, the 13-story anchor on the sprawling grounds. They, too, posted their work on YouTube, causing a stir in the community here. Residents and Kings Park school officials called on the state to tighten security, and since then even more fences have been put up.

 

But most of the visitors here seem to be people like those who gathered on Thursday, tiny digital cameras and collapsible flashlights strung from their necks. They call themselves the regulars — Jake Bloom, 17; Raymond Staten, 22; Max Neukirch, 20; Kevin Vagle, 20; John Leita, 35 — and they come because they are fascinated by something they can barely express. They variously describe the appeal as “the history of this place,” the “mysterious beauty” or the magnetism of great old buildings in decay — descriptions that cumulatively suggest the appeal of any lost civilization. Like Roman ruins, the crumbling buildings of Kings Park represent a vast state enterprise overtaken by history and fallen to rot.

“When I come here, I feel like I’m privileged to see something that no one else can see,” said Mr. Bloom, a high school senior from Glen Cove, N.Y. “It’s a place, I don’t know, where there used to be a whole world.”

The hundred or so buildings on the 300 acres of waterfront property on Long Island’s North Shore, like similar psychiatric centers operated by the State of New York in Brentwood and Central Islip and upstate, were once state-of-the-art psychiatric campuses designed to offer bucolic respite for the mentally ill, along with more aggressive interventions like electroshock therapy and lobotomies. They were cities unto themselves. Kings Park had its own power plant, police station, firehouse, railroad station, bakery, hospital and cemetery.

The fiscal crisis of the 1970s, coupled with the development of better psychiatric drugs, changes in the culture of mental health care and scandals about neglectful warehousing of patients at some institutions, led many centers to close by the 1990s. In some places, developers have proceeded with plans to build residential housing, stores and movie theaters. In others, including Kings Park, where local residents have fought development, state workers have boarded up the buildings and just kept the lawns cut.

A spokesman for the State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, which owns the property, has said that officials have promised to beef up security and have assured nearby residents that unauthorized visits would be stopped.

“It’s technically illegal to go inside any of the buildings,” said Mr. Leita, the elder statesman of the regulars, who operates a Web site called lioddities.com (as in Long Island oddities), where photos and maps of all the former state hospitals are posted. “I have done it, of course, but we try to be respectful.”

(A reporter who accompanied the regulars on Thursday tried to be equally respectful in pursuit of a newspaper article about a unique slice of local history that seems to have found a unique set of buffs.)

 

In the big room at the end of the purple string, the guide (not Mr. Leita) walked gingerly across a stone floor thickly carpeted with flaking paint. The paint piled up in heaps and also seemed to blossom from the walls like petals. “I grew up in Kings Park,” said the guide, ducking a loose bundle of wires hanging from the ceiling. “My father and mother worked here for 30 years. I used to sit on the benches and talk to the patients sometimes. They had fascinating stories. Outlandish but fascinating.”

It was common knowledge in town that among the patients housed at Kings Park were occasional stars. Jazz musicians were especially frequent visitors. King Pedlar, a retired Kings Park psychiatric aide who sometimes joins the regulars in their visits to his old workplace, recalled watching with reverence as Bud Powell, the great jazz pianist, “played for us on an old upright in one of the rec rooms of Building 93.”

“It was inspiring,” he said.

Beyond the room of the flaking paint was another just like it, and beyond that a corridor of windowless cubicles, and beyond that a room where the canopies of a kitchen exhaust fan system stretched across the ceiling like the wings of a great aluminum bird. “Over there would have been the dining room,” said the guide, pointing through a window in a wall.

Stephen Weber, a Kings Park community activist and trustee of the Kings Park Heritage Museum, said most of the unauthorized visits to the old hospital grounds are harmless “haunted house stuff,” though he does not condone trespassing and warned that some of the buildings are awash in various kinds of toxic dust, including asbestos.

“My sense is that a lot of these kids are people of the Internet,” he said of the regulars. “They explore these structures, they post pictures of what they do on the Web, and there is a certain competitive thing going on — who can find the weirdest stuff.”

Well, yes and no, replied the explorers interviewed for this article. Yes, they are people of the Internet and view themselves in some ways as kin to hackers, who defy the boundaries of Web space. And yes, there is a certain appeal in the weirdness. Mr. Leita claimed to have seen electroshock equipment in one building, though some of the others who saw the same thing said it was more likely electrodes attached to a cauterizing machine. But weirdness is not the main thing.

“I came for six years before I even entered a building,” said Mr. Staten, a quiet man with hair neatly combed who described himself as adrift until he found his purpose here. “The mysterious beauty of everything, it’s always interesting to me.

“This is where I fell in love with photography,” added Mr. Staten, who shares a Web site with Mr. Bloom called lostintimeproductions.com. “In a way, I discovered myself here.”

Like many who visit, Mr. Bloom and Mr. Staten also explore other abandoned state hospitals as well as empty factory buildings and power plants. There is something about the stillness and quiet of places where once there was great physical or emotional sturm and drang, they said. Something about that atmosphere they find attractive.

“This was a metropolis, filled with life-and-death stories for years and years,” Mr. Leita said.

Inside, someone had scrawled a warning on a door. It was written in black spray paint. “Don’t go in,” it said. “Door locks.”

 

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