Hospitals

This category contains 7 posts

Wreaking Havoc in the Staten Island Farm Colony

Posted by abandonednyc ⋅ 2-26-13. ⋅ 10 Comments

These dormitories are the Farm Colony’s oldest structures.

At the center of Staten Island lies a bucolic expanse of ancient forest, a city-owned amalgam of parks, scout camps, and overgrown lots collectively termed the Greenbelt. It’s an area known for its natural beauty, its murders, and its ruins—on the southern rim, off Brielle Avenue, there’s not one but two historic hospitals that are crumbling to oblivion. The grounds of Sea View Hospital and the New York City Farm Colony may be the most forgotten quarter of the forgotten borough, representing New Yorks’ highest concentration of derelict buildings, with over two dozen scattered through 300 acres of mostly wooded land.

What’s left of the Farm Colony only comes out in the winter—from May to November, thick greenery conceals the battered rubblestone facades of its twelve remaining structures—over forty years of neglect, trees have reclaimed the grounds. The forest bends when the wind gusts, groaning like a legion of creaky doors. In areas that had once been cleared for farmland, thorns amass in undulating hillocks, hooking and scoring the flesh of any who dare to trudge through the overgrowth. Some of the vines have adhered to the ruins of the oldest buildings, whose interiors have almost completely collapsed, leaving only a tangle of splintered beams and nail-studded boards. If you peek through the window of one of these wrecks, there’s a German Expressionist nightmare of canted doorways and lurching walls.

These dormitories replaced the charmless farmhouses of the Richmond County Poor Farm, which had operated on the spot since 1829 to house and rehabilitate New York City’s aging poor. By the time Staten Island was incorporated as a borough of New York City, the Poor Farm was renamed the Farm Colony. With distinctive gambrel roofs modeled in the Dutch Colonial Style, the buildings constructed in this period were designed to evoke the ease of rural living, avoiding an institutional design to reflect changing attitudes in the treatment of the poor.

In colonial times, poverty was equated with deviancy, and the care of dependents was traditionally left to the Church, but by the 19th Century, governments across the United States began constructing state-run institutions to house the poor, infirm, mentally ill, and developmentally disabled. This was the era of the farm colonies, when able-bodied inmates were expected to work in exchange for their room and board.

200 residents could grow enough vegetables to feed 3,000, which was more than enough to share with other institutions across the city, including City Hospital on Blackwell’s Island. With the construction of several new dormitories in the 30s, the population quickly expanded to over 1,000, and started to exhibit a perplexing problem. As early as 1910, 75% of the residents were over 50, a quarter over 70, and the majority were unfit for manual labor.

Light sneaks through a boarded window into the close quarters of a former inmate dormitory.

By 1925, farm work was no longer mandatory, but many residents enjoyed the perks of voluntary farming and maintenance jobs. Tokens could be exchanged for tobacco, pipes, and candy, and those who worked got first priority in the dining hall. Anecdotes from the simple lives of this isolated community scatter the archives of the New York Times. Heated horseshoe rivalries, band performances, and handicraft sales were among the most prominent events of a life lived at the Farm Colony.

The Farm Colony was in many ways idyllic, but not without its controversies. Like all institutions in this period, the facility was guilty of overcrowding at times. In 1934, a hospitals commissioner was shocked to discover that many of the Colony’s 200 employees were habitually intoxicated, resulting in the resignation of the superintendent and his second in command. By the 1950s, the facility had become a geriatric hospital. The second half of the 20th Century marked a steady decline in residency. Increased prosperity nationwide and the introduction of social security further depleted the population, and the property was abandoned in 1975.

Though the area was designated a historic district in 1985, next to nothing has been done to protect the buildings. Thought to be hazardous to children playing at a nearby ballfield, a morgue was demolished in 1999, ruffling the feathers of the borough’s preservationists. The city has been trying to drum up interest in the site over the last decade, briefly considering it as the site of a new police academy, and shortlisting the Farm Colony as a possible location for a school of engineering, but they’ve repeatedly been unable to attract an interested party. City council member James Oddo, who called the Farm Colony the “bane of his existence”, made another appeal in 2012 for expressions of interest. Lack of access to mass transit may be partially to blame for the lack of response. As another piece of Staten Island’s architectural legacy falls to its knees, it serves as a reminder that a bureaucratic designation is less than half the battle.

The gambrel roofs of the older buildings hearken back to a period long before their hundred year history.

Generations of vandalism have eviscerated the interiors of the Farm Colony’s remaining buildings. Inside, little has been left to catch the eye. Floors are strewn with rubble. Plaster dust accrues in drifts, exposing a patchwork of masonry. Wintry details complement the desolation—a broken windowpane bearded with icicles, hallways inundated with frozen pools. Juvenile graffiti covers every surface, except on the ground floors, where the building has been sealed off with cinderblocks in an unsuccessful attempt to keep out intruders. These corridors are intensely, eerily dark, and all but untraveled. Featherweight vines dangle from the ceilings of the blackest chambers like some alien weed. A single breath seems to cloud these rooms with fog, otherwise they’re empty. To find any artifacts one must head underground. Barely visible in the basement gloom, piles of old laundry bloom with mold, chairs are devoured by rust.

A dank basement room carpeted with coils of wire.

The Farm Colony may be decrepit, but don’t call it desolate. Even with temperatures below freezing, the grounds experience a weekend rush. If you plan to visit, be prepared to dodge a few paintballs, it’s one of the most popular pastimes here at the Colony. (Visitors have equipped the grounds with an elaborate field of obstacles pilfered from the buildings.) Elsewhere, the grounds are littered with all the tokens of a high school hangout. Beer cans, cigarette stubs, and junk food wrappers pave the walkways. At night, these lanes are crowded with teenagers, who’ve come to escape their parents and affirm their friendships by way of getting scared. Fearing boredom above all, they enter the Greenbelt ruins in spite of the warning of a cautionary tale.

Legends of a serial killer called Cropsey have spread through this part of Staten Island for as long as anyone can remember; it’s a fiction intwined with truth. The land surrounding the Farm Colony is haunted by a history of real-life horrors, starting in the 1920s with the abduction and murder of a seven-year-old boy, who some had seen walking into the woods with an elderly man on the day of his disappearance. (The crime prompted an investigation of Farm Colony residents and staff, but nothing turned up that could implicate anyone in the crime.)

Later, sinister abuses at the nearby Willowbrook State School for the developmentally disabled cast a pall over the area. Andre Rand, a former orderly at the facility, is thought to be responsible for a series of child murders that shocked the borough in the 70s and 80s. Rumor has it he lived in the tunnels under the abandoned hospital, and it’s confirmed that he set up camp on the grounds. In 1987, the body of Jennifer Shweiger was found buried in a shallow grave not far from his campsite. Most of Willowbrook was renovated and incorporated into the College of Staten Island in the 1990s. In the intervening years, the Farm Colony has taken its place in the collective imagination as the site most associated with the Cropsey legend.

The Farm Colony has never been open to the public, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a shared space. Though some would call it useless, ugly, or appalling, the youth of Staten Island has somehow endowed this place with meaning and mystique. Its value is written in the dust, just count the footprints. Through fogbanked mornings, orange autumns, and torrid summer nights, the Colony beckons—a wilderness in which to be wild, a victim to bear our destructive instincts, a place to harbor our fears, and face them.

The sun sets on the Farm Colony.

Graffiti in the dining hall…

…and a devastated hallway on the top floor.

The gate left open to the laundry and industrial building.

Inside the cavernous industrial building, another popular spot for graffiti.

The unadorned Nurses Residence, once the insane pavilion, sits across from the paintball area.

Inside one of the four H-shaped dormitories, a staircase landing strewn with rubble.

Light leaks in a dark chamber.

Can you identify these vines (or roots) growing in a pitch black basement room?

What appears to be a former laundry room, the floor is covered with moldy slippers, blankets, and clothes.

The last room standing in the three oldest dormitories is on the verge of collapse.

For a closer look at the legends surrounding the Farm Colony and the case of Andre Rand, watch the documentary Cropsey, available on Netflix.

For more on New York City’s abandoned institutions, check out Letchworth Village:

Legend Tripping in Letchworth Village

Posted by abandonednyc ⋅ 8-5-12. ⋅ 11 Comments

Ruins of Letchworth Village.

Letchworth Village rests on a placid corner of rural Thiells, a hamlet west of Haverstraw set amid the gentle hills and vales of the surrounding Ramapos. A short stretch of modest farmhouses separates this former home for the mentally disabled from the serene Harriman State Park, New York’s second largest. Nature has been quick to reclaim its dominion over these unhallowed grounds, shrouding an unpleasant memory in a thick green veil. Abandonment becomes this “village of secrets,” intended from its inception to be unseen, forgotten, and silent as the tomb.

Owing to its reputed paranormal eccentricities, Letchworth Village has become a well-known subject of local legend. These strange tales had me spooked as I turned the corner onto Letchworth Village Road after a suspenseful two-hour drive from Brooklyn. Rounding a declining bend, I caught my first glimpse of Letchworth’s sprawling decay—some vine-encumbered ruin made momentarily visible through a stand of oak. Down the hazy horseshoe lanes of the boy’s ward, one by one, the ghosts came out.

This map gives a sense of scale. Most of these buildings still stand, altered or abandoned.

By the end of 1911, the first phase of construction had completed on this 2,362 acre ”state institution for the segregation of the epileptic and feeble-minded.” With architecture modeled after Monticello, the picturesque community was lauded as a model institution for the treatment of the developmentally disabled, a humane alternative to high-rise asylums, having been founded on several guiding principles that were revolutionary at the time.

The Minnisceongo Creek cuts the grounds in two, delineating areas for the two sexes which were meant never to mingle. Separate living and training facilities for children, able-bodied adults, and the infirm were not to exceed two stories or house over 70 inmates. Until the 1960s, the able-bodied labored on communal farms, raising enough food and livestock to feed the entire population.

1933 photo of Letchworth Village’s Girl’s Group

Sinister by today’s standards, the “laboratory purpose” was another essential tenet of the Letchworth plan. Unable to give or deny consent, many children became unwitting test subjects—in 1950, the institution gained notoriety as the site of one of the first human trials of a still-experimental polio vaccine. Brain specimens were harvested from deceased residents and stored in jars of formaldehyde, put on display in the hospital lab. This horrific practice has become a favorite anecdote of ghost-hunters and adolescent explorers.

The well-intentioned plans for Letchworth Village didn’t hold up in practice, and by 1942, the population had swelled to twice its intended occupancy. From here, the severely underfunded facility fell into a lengthy decline. Many of the residents, whose condition necessitated ample time and attention for feeding, became seriously ill or malnourished as a result of overcrowding. At one point, over 500 patients slept on mattresses in hallways and dayrooms of the facility, meagerly attended by a completely overwhelmed staff tasked with the impossible.

Having discontinued the use of the majority of its structures, and relocated most of its charges into group homes, the institution closed down in 1996 as old methods of segregating the developmentally disabled were replaced with a trend toward normalization and inclusion into society. The state has made efforts to sell the property, with mixed results. Most of the dilapidated structures were slated for demolition in 2004 to make way for a 450-unit condo development, but the plan has evidently been put on hold. Ringed with ballfields and parking lots, shiny Fieldstone Middle School makes use of nine buildings of the former girl’s group, an island of promise in a landscape of failure.

The hospital laboratory, a rumored supernatural hotspot.

Today, the rest of the neglected campus retains a kind of elegiac beauty. With its meandering walkways, pleasant natural setting, and evocative decay, it’s a peaceful spot for small town dog owners and amateur photographers alike, but by night a new breed of visitors descends upon these grounds.

Embarked on by the young and curious, a moonlit pilgrimage to a haunted location promises a brush with the unknown and an affirmation of courage—it’s a ritual that’s become commonplace at Letchworth Village. Pervasive graffiti and piles of beer cans and snack packaging mark the most popular hangouts. Much of the writing alludes to the institution’s allegedly horrific past, or warns of its vengeful spirits. Is it all just for teenage kicks, or are these acts of remembrance?

Within a crumbling fieldstone facade, one of Letchworth’s most impressive structures has been reduced to an ugly black skeleton. It’s the most evident of an outbreak of arson attempts that plagues the property, but not the most successful—some blazes don’t leave a trace. Perhaps without knowing it, these amateur arsonists, vandals, and spiritualists are quickly scouring away a shameful memory, absolving a collective guilt with paintballs, matchbooks, and pentagrams.

An unmarked grave in The Old Letchworth Village Cemetery

In a little-known and easy-to-miss cemetery about a mile from the facility, amends are being made more constructively.

Off Call Hollow Road, a new sign has been erected pointing out the “Old Letchworth Village Cemetery.” Down a seldom-traveled path, an unusual crop of T-shaped markers congregate on a dappled clearing. They’re graves, but they bear no names.

Few wished to remember their “defective” relatives, or have their family names inscribed in such a dishonorable cemetery—many family secrets are buried among these 900 deceased. Here, in the presence of so many human lives devalued, displaced, and forgotten, the sorrow of Letchworth Village is keenly felt.

As part of a movement taking place across the country, state agencies and advocates funded the installation of a permanent plaque inscribed with the names of these silent dead, and a fitting epitaph: “To Those Who Shall Not Be Forgotten.”

More than ghost stories, bursts of cool air, shadows and slamming doors, we fear our capacity for cruelty and our willingness to overlook those who most needed our care and understanding. Letchworth Village isn’t a house of horrors, but it has become a thing of the past, and a symbol of these failings. Now, its ruins are vanishing—any moment, they’ll powder to dust, dirt, and ash. Who will mourn when the village crumbles, and what will remain? Soot-black foundations, half-remembered histories, and nine hundred numbered graves, poignant reminders of an all-too-recent injustice.

-Will Ellis

Each of the six groups of buildings included eight small dormitories.

The hospital, north of the boy’s group, is known as Letchworth Village’s most haunted building.

Evidence of last night’s joyride on the hospital lawn.

Inside, vines invade a crumbling hallway.

A dayroom library fueled the flames of an arson attempt.

A small basement nook of unknown purpose, this was the only door of its kind.

A storage area in the basement of Letchworth Village.

An adjacent room was filled with hospital plasticware, some overflowed into this darkened hallway.

A renegade paintball game left a gruesome mark on this room.

Cold storage. The first room I came across in Letchworth Village, a morbid introduction.

Moments after taking this photo, a group of young explorers entered through a side door. I gave them quite a scare.

A dining hall is brought to light as its ceiling crumbles.

Inside a typical dormitory, some cubbies had four beds cramped within.

The top floor of Stewart Hall has been thoroughly razed, but the bottom remains mostly intact.

Fire damage visible on the lower floor.

A strange camera malfunction lasted the entire time I was in this building and stopped the moment I stepped out. It’s the closest I came to a paranormal experience.

Many of the cheaply made service buildings were in a similar state.

Plastic foliage survived a blaze that threatened to take down a two-story building, most recently used for storage.

Even in broad daylight, the place is eerie. Here, an ominous administration building.

Better late than never, a monument to Letchworth’s dead.

Inside Fort Totten Part 2: The Army Hospital

Posted by abandonednyc ⋅ 6-30-12. ⋅ 1 Comment

A tin ceiling crumbles in an Army Hospital dayroom.

Constructed in 1906, the Fort Totten Army Hospital has been vacant since the area was decommissioned as a military base in the mid 70s. Today, this once thriving infirmary with a 68-bed capacity exhibits a harrowing level of decay. Beneath an attractive Colonial Revival facade, hospital rooms self-destruct in slow motion.

Originally known as the Post Hospital, and later named after Dr. Walter Reed, the medical center is situated on a scenic bank of the Long Island Sound on the southeast portion of Willet’s Point, in an area currently under the jurisdiction of the NYC Fire Department. A newly renovated training facility, which once served the military as a barracks and mess hall, sits directly behind the hospital, a prime example of the potential for adaptive reuse of the installation’s vast collection of dilapidated buildings.

Most are in a state of limbo, awaiting a white knight to cough up the millions necessary to preserve and repurpose the structures, but unfortunately, Walter Reed Hospital is long past the point of no return.

Inside, a nearly complete lack of artifacts disappoints, but allows the structural degeneration to take center stage. Watch your step—some doorways give way to a two-story chasm, filled with jagged debris and splintered beams. Buckling walls, bulging floors, and collapsed light fixtures mingle in the wretched sea-foam green interior. Its a preservationist’s worst nightmare, but it only scratches the surface of Fort Totten’s decay.

With a third of the property somewhat maintained by the Parks Department, the grounds are currently open to the public. It’s worth the trip to see this moribund military base while most of its history remains (precariously) intact. With some of the last remaining open spaces in Queens, this little known park makes a perfect picnic spot, but I wouldn’t sit too close to its ill-fated infirmary—Fort Totten Army Hospital is falling down.

(For more on the past, present, and future of Fort Totten, see Part 1.)

-Will Ellis

For more Queens abandonments, check out:

Houdini’s Grave, in NYC’s Spookiest Cemetery
Inside Creedmoor State Hospital’s Building 25
The Rockaway Beach Branch, Queens’ Forgotten Railroad

Click through for Part 1 of this post.

Inside Creedmoor State Hospital’s Building 25

Posted by abandonednyc ⋅ 5-31-12. ⋅ 19 Comments

That’s not gravel.

Creedmoor Psychiatric Center’s Building 25 was once a haven for NYC’s cast-out mentally ill, but today it houses a much more reviled and equally misunderstood breed of New Yorker. They’re pigeons, and you won’t believe what they’ve done with the fourth floor…

The sprawling Creedmoor campus was constructed in 1912 in Queens Village as the Farm Colony of Brooklyn State Hospital, one of hundreds of similar psychiatric wards erected at the turn of the century to house and rehabilitate those who were ill-equipped to function on their own.

Rejected by mainstream society, hundreds of thousands of mentally disturbed individuals, many afflicted with psychosis and schizophrenia, were transferred from urban centers across the country to outlying pastoral areas where fresh air, closeness to nature, and the healing power of work was thought to be beneficial to curables and incurables alike. These self-sufficient communities provided men and women with serious mental disorders a safe, structured environment to live, work, and receive medical and psychiatric care.

Inside Creedmoor State Hospital's Building 25

Urban exploration doesn’t get much sexier than this.

As the 20th century progressed, asylums across the country became overrun with patients, and many institutions became desperately understaffed and dangerously underfunded. Living conditions at some psychiatric wards grew dire—patient abuse and neglect was not uncommon in this period.

By 1960, Creedmoor’s population swelled from 150 in 1918 to over 7,000. As late as 1984, the violent ward of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center was rocked with scandal following the death of a patient, who was struck in the throat with a blackjack by a staff member; the man was restrained in a straitjacket at the time.

With the development of antipsychotic medications came a trend of deinstitutionalization. A series of dramatic budget cuts and dwindling patient populations led to the closing of farm colonies across the United States, and a marked decline at Creedmoor. The campus continues to operate today, housing only a few hundred patients and providing outpatient services. Many of the buildings have been sold off, others, like Building 25, lie fallow.

The campus was dead quiet on the day I stopped by, with the exception of an occasional patient wandering the grounds, rocking back and forth, or speaking to someone who wasn’t there. The building sat on a mostly fenced-off area in the middle of the active complex, practically concealed in the overgrowth.

Inside, the boarded-up first floor was pitch black, but it held the most artifacts, with some rooms filled to the brim with mattresses, wheelchairs, and medical equipment. A preliminary tour of the second and third floor architecture offered nothing out of the ordinary for this traveler, for whom the sight of peeling paint and dark corridors has grown fondly familiar but less than exhilarating.

Some of the hospital’s smaller artifacts still held the power to captivate—a tiny collection of plastic trinkets, a grungy brassiere hung from a pink hanger, a newspaper clipping pronouncing the medical benefits of whiskey. The most intriguing feature was a series of patient murals; many were once painted over but are coming to light again as time peels back the layers. Having seen most of the rooms on the lower floors, I headed once again for the central stairwell and ascended.

The ultimate slop sink.

Upon opening the door to the fourth floor, a noxious wave of the most nauseating fetor hit me like a brick wall. Amassed in hulking heaps, coating and carpeting the floors beyond recognition, the fruit of a thousand cloacae festered in the 90 degree heat.

For 40 years, generations of pigeons have haunted (and pooped on) this floor, far removed from their dim-witted dealings with the human world, assembling a monument all their own. The effect is visually fascinating, lending some rooms the look of an indoor desert. In others, guano accumulates in stalagmites under popular roosts, the tallest heaps reaching several feet in height. Carcasses litter the surface, hinting at an even larger number entombed within.

I’m clearly an outsider here; my every sinking step is followed by watchers nesting on shit-covered fluorescent fixtures. Their knowing black eyes gleam differently at Creedmoor than they ever did on the sidewalk. Worse—their low, rumbling coos take on a decidedly sinister quality here, with violent fits of flight punctuating an otherworldly soundscape. After spending over an hour in this miasmal hell, the decades-old mustiness of Building 25′s lower floors filled my lungs like the freshest mountain air.

On the second floor I came across an elaborate squatter’s residence in the central dining hall. Mounds of a different type accrued here, but reached greater heights than any on the fourth floor. The kitchen was filled with years’ worth of garbage intersected by narrow, meandering pathways. A living room, kept relatively tidy, featured a sitting area with an array of chairs (including one homemade toilet.) A system of organization began to emerge from the seemingly random assortment of belongings that covered each surface—toiletries, clothing, condoms, hundreds of dead D batteries—I slowly realized that the squat could still be inhabited, a notion that was confirmed by the discovery of an uncomfortably recent newspaper.

I reluctantly continued to the last room I planned to photograph, distinguished by a photogenic series of peeling murals. As I stepped inside, my eyes settled on what looked to be a curious assemblage of blankets fixed atop a medical bed, an image that took moments to register as a human being, whose home I was invading, snoozing peacefully in the light-filled dayroom. After hours of exploring this desolate and increasingly bizarre environment, the sudden jolt of humanity presented a shock. Unwelcome, I made a break for it, passing once more through the dark decaying halls of Building 25, leaving its charms, horrors, and mysteries for the birds.

An appealing display, this room has been arranged and rearranged by photographers over the years.

One went as far as covering the upholstery with fake blood. Spooky stuff!

Overgrowth covered most of the windows, casting green light on much of the interior.

Furniture stacked in a cafeteria on Building 25′s third floor.

Metallic sheets are bolted to the bathroom wall in lieu of mirrors, which patients could use as a weapon.

A tiny toy collection arranged on a windowsill.

Even in the 70s, this equipment was outdated, and left behind.

A peeling mural prophesied the current condition of the top floor.

Guano Stalagmites in Creedmoor State Hospital

These dropping formations formed under the pipes of a sprinkler system the birds frequented.

Satan’s sandbox.

This bathroom boasts an impressive amount of fecal matter.

And I thought my toilet was filthy.

This room looked more like a Southwest cantina than a Queens hospital.

Anyone for musical chairs?

An uninviting ward hallway on Creedmoor’s fourth floor.

An incongruous Virgin emerges from the infested top floor.

I hesitate to post photos of the squatter’s residence, but here’s a glimpse.

Bayley Seton Hospital: Part II

Posted by abandonednyc ⋅ 5-17-12. ⋅ 9 Comments

Flooded Hall.

I wasn’t able to track down any information on the function of this obscure outbuilding of the Bayley Seton Hospital complex in Stapleton, SI. The austere, three-story edifice is the only abandoned structure within the active section of Bayley Seton, situated on the northeast corner of the grounds behind the main building. The rest are fenced off and awaiting demolition after being sold to make way for a new development—it’s likely that this building may hang on for a bit longer.

For a detailed history of Bayley Seton Hospital, refer to my last post on the Nurses’ Residence.

If you have any information on this building, please enlighten me in the comments below.

My favorite room in Bayley Seton Hospital.

Another view of the Utility Room. This door fell out of the wall when I tried to open it.

Evening light penetrates a dark hallway.

A crumbling passageway.

The floor of this room was covered with a rank, pulpy, mush—apparently the remains of ceiling panels that had gone to rot.

Glass block windows installed on the first floor.

One of several pieces of furniture remaining in the building.

A toilet with a strange weighted contraption.

An examination chair tucked away in the stairwell.

Graffiti in the building was minimal, but this bit stood out.

The building at sunset, just before a security guard asked me to leave…

The Bayley Seton Hospital Nurses’ Residence

Posted by abandonednyc ⋅ 5-16-12. ⋅ 2 Comments

Inside the Bayley Seton Hospital Nurses’ Residence

A floundering medical complex sits on a 20-acre campus in Stapleton on the North Shore of Staten Island. Today, eight of Bayley Seton Hospital’s twelve buildings lie abandoned, the largest being the old Nurses’ Residence at its southeast corner.

The grounds of BSH house Staten Island’s first hospital, an historic colonnaded structure built in the 1830s to serve ailing retired naval and merchant sailors, appropriately named “the Seamen’s Retreat.” Change came to the site in 1858 when a mob of 30-40 prominent locals attacked and burned down the Port of New York Quarantine Hospital, located a mile north of the Retreat. Though this horrific incident was incensed by an outbreak of yellow fever the locals blamed on the nearby hospital, flagrant racism was most likely a factor—recent immigrants made up the majority of the hospital’s population.

Some of the quarantine station’s services were transferred to areas of what is now Bayley Seton Hospital, and placed under the jurisdiction of the Marine Hospital Service, which by 1885 controlled the entire complex, and by 1902 had been renamed the US Public Health Service. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt started a campaign to revitalize The Public Health Service Hospitals, resulting in the construction of the main seven-story art-deco building and its offshoot Nurses’ Residence, a winged four-story structure on the southeast corner of the property.

The Nurses’ Residence (right,) pictured with the larger main building (left.)

The hospital was sold to the Sisters of Charity of New York, a Catholic healthcare organization, in 1980. At this point the U.S. Health Service Hospital was renamed after Sisters’ founder Elizabeth Seton and her father Richard Bayley (who coincidentally once headed the ill-fated Thompkinsville Quarantine Hospital.) Under the Sisters of Charity, the hospital was predominantly used to treat mental disorders and substance abuse, and continues to fulfill this role today, albeit at a greatly diminished capacity.

In 2000, The Sisters of Charity turned over Bayley Seton to the related Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center, which faced financial troubles at the Stapleton campus from the beginning. Over half of its services were suspended and the hospital fell into an inexorable decline. Plans to close Bayley Seton emerged in 2004 as Saint Vincent’s, once the largest Catholic Health organization in New York, filed for bankruptcy with a debt of over a billion dollars. At some point during this tumultuous period (artifacts point to the building last being inhabited in 2002,) the former Nurses’ Residence, which had most recently been used as a New York addiction treatment facility, was abandoned as part of an ongoing series of downsizings and closures.

One of many gutted rooms, beginning to show signs of age.

In 2009, The Salvation Army settled on a 7.6 million dollar deal to purchase 7 acres of BSH. Originally, plans called for the construction of a 120,000 square-foot community center in the footstep of the Nurses’ Residence, set to begin in 2011, followed by a two-year period to terminate Bayley Seton’s remaining services, after which the main building would also be converted into senior housing. If it’s ever built, the center will be one of 30 similar complexes across the country funded by a 1.5 billion dollar endowment by the late Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. The Salvation Army failed to raise the 25 million needed to cover the difference between its cut of the Kroc endowment and the projected cost of construction, and ground has yet to be broken.

The Kroc Center in a 2007 rendering.

Twelve foot chain link fences have been placed along the perimeter of the Salvation Army property, but the site is otherwise untouched. Fenced-off and boarded-up, the Nurses’ Home ages in secret. Walls molt through layers of colored paint under tumbledown ceilings. The unrecognizable contents of a half-dozen milk cartons fester in a neglected refrigerator. An upright piano keeps mum in an empty common room while activity slows to a trickle on the rest of the Bayley Seton Hospital campus. Here and there, artifacts remain—painted crafts, motivational posters, hand-drawn cartoons—evoking the human element of the hospital’s better days. With its subtle architectural charms, the Nurses’ Residence has little hope of being saved from the wrecking ball, (though a few conservationists are out to change that.) Those in power seem to agree—despite centuries of convoluted history, it’s time to pull the plug on Bayley Seton Hospital.

For more photos of Bayley Seton Hospital’s abandonments, go on to PART II.

The main entrance.

Bayley Seton Hospital Professional Services

Lettering here once pointed out the “Professional Services” office.

A kitchen on the top floor in the early stages of decay.

The contents of a staff-only refrigerator left long after their expiration dates.

This piano wasn’t worth the difficulty in transporting it.

Cheap ceilings crumble in the reception area.

Fluorescent fixtures dangle by the reception window.

Mold spreads on the walls of a first floor residence.

Another creepy hallway of the former Nurses’ Home.

“Invest in yourself, Share your pain”

Arts and Crafts

An exterior view of the abandoned Nurses’ Home as it stands today.

A Last Look Inside a Demolished Staten Island Castle

Posted by abandonednyc ⋅ 5-8-12. ⋅ 3 Comments

The recently demolished “S.I. Castle”

For 120 years, a castle with many names loomed over the quiet nabe of New Brighton, Staten Island. Perched on a 6 acre hilltop covered with dead creeping vines, the “S. I. Castle,” officially the Frost Memorial Tower of the old Samuel R. Smith Infirmary, which was later renamed Staten Island Hospital, appears to be the quintessential haunted house. You mightn’t expect its history as a flourishing charity-driven hospital for the underprivledged and a point of pride for the Staten Island community.

The stately Infirmary in its youth.

Today, the empty rubble-strewn lot lingers as a symbol of lost history, and lost hope, for members of the Preservation League of Staten Island and their supporters, whose generations of passionate and repeated efforts to save the building, and promote its designation as a New York City Landmark, have fallen on the deaf ears of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Unannounced, the city demolished the striking Romanesque Revival structure in early March, asserting that the building was in a state of “progressive collapse.”

Touring the Smith Infirmary only 4 weeks before its fateful demolition, I can say that the decision was warranted. Through 33 years of abandonment, the degraded walls, slumping ceilings, and precarious floors of the infirmary became an appealing canvas for graffiti artists, a haven for squatters, drug addicts, and arsonists, and ultimately, a neighborhood hazard.

Crossing paths with an unassuming homeless man hauling a large piece of lumber, I made my way through the weedy, brick-covered lot to a shuttering board on the west side of the building. The smell of mold and rot permeated the ravaged interior. Wind blustered through its second floor landing, causing boards and debris to smack and rattle at odd intervals. As one of the last people to set foot inside the Frost Memorial Tower, I witnessed a shameful record of neglect that calls into question the value and mission of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. These pictures document the dying breaths of a squandered architectural and historical treasure. Rest in pieces, S.I. Castle.