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Talking Trash in Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary

Take the A train past JFK. You’ll be one of a handful of travelers left on a car that seemed well over capacity a moment ago; the babble of the crowd fades to the soft hum of an unimpeded machine.  Nobody asks you for money, or directions.  If you’ve made it this far, you know where you’re going.

Suddenly, the ground drops out and you’re gliding over the silver Jamaica Bay.  The train runs just above sea level, skimming over a surface that teems visibly with diving cormorants.  Clustered with skeletal boat frames, aged marinas jut from a neglected shoreline across the water, to the west, a row of painted houses stand on stilts. There’s no place like the Rockaways to experience New York as a city by the sea.

Head east at Hammels Wye, and a brief walk through the quiet neighborhood of Averne will lead you to a little known peninsula called Dubos Point, one of the last fragments of salt marsh left in a city that was once ringed with tidal wetlands.  The marsh was filled with dredged materials in 1912 in preparation for an ill-fated real estate development, but over the last century, the area has reverted to its natural state.  In 1988, the land was acquired by the Parks Department, deemed a wildlife sanctuary, and given an official name for the first time (Rene Dubos was a microbiologist and environmental activist who coined the phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally”).

Parks officials envisioned marked nature trails and boardwalks for community use, and planned to build nesting structures and employ part-time patrol staff to encourage wildlife and keep the place clean, but none of this came to be.  The Audubon Society of New York maintained the grounds sporadically until 1999, but abandoned its post citing a lack of resources.  Since then, the area has been largely neglected, leaving its care up to volunteers.  Green Apple Corps and the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance have orchestrated several clean-up events over the years, but they’re facing an uphill battle.

Every day, the shores of Dubos Point are bombarded with an onslaught of garbage, and it’s not coming from park visitors (the preserve is technically not open to the public).  Most of the refuse is washed up from the bay, after a long journey through storm drains that began in the littered streets of New York City. Familiar objects are made strange, touched by a long encounter with an invisible world, caked with green algae, eroded with salt, barnacle-burdened and bleached by the sun. The entire peninsula resounds with the constant susurration of wind through grass. For all these reeds are hiding, perhaps they whisper secrets; mud-moored vessels, decaying toys, and saltbored furniture lay half-concealed in the tidal growth.

Standing water in old tires and plastic debris makes for a perfect breeding ground for the area’s most populous species.  My first steps onto the grounds of Dubos Point seemed to disturb some ancient curse, as great swarms of mosquitoes rose from their stagnant hollows to draw my blood sacrifice. The Parks department has been criticized in the past for neglecting its duties at Dubos Point while mosquito infestation reached “plague proportions” in the late 90s, rendering backyards unusable from April to October.  After years of complaints and little improvement, some residents resorted to building outdoor shelters for brown bats, a natural insect predator.  Today, the only visible improvement made on the grounds of Dubos Point is a line of Mosquito Magnet kiosks, placed every 100 feet along the boundary of the preserve.

Despite decades of pollution, the Jamaica Bay harbors hundreds of species of wildlife, and the water is cleaner today than it was 100 years ago.  As one of the last remaining pockets of undeveloped land in New York, the estuary supplies an essential resting place for migratory birds along the Atlantic Flyway; egrets, herons, and peregrine falcons are spotted here. Looking past the garbage, you can still make out the natural beauty of Dubos Point, and imagine what this whole region was like 400 years ago. Neck-high cordgrass is abundant, trapping bits of decayed organisms to fuel a thriving, though limited, ecosystem.  Throngs of fiddler crabs crowd the soggy ground, scuttling sideways with one collective mind, crunching underfoot like eggshells. The breezy silence is only interrupted by an occasional splash from a jumping fish, or the roar of a plane, taking off from the crowded runways of JFK just across the water. Off the curling tip of Dubos Point, fishermen still cast their lines in the Sommerville Basin, affirming a bond we’ve all but lost.

12,000 of the original 16,000 acres of wetlands around the Jamaica Bay have already been filled in for development, and sources predict that the last of the saltwater marshes could disappear in the next 20 years. It’s a shame to see one of the few protected areas in this condition, when its potential for education and recreation is so apparent. New York needs to protect its wild spaces, and sometimes that means getting our hands dirty. To learn about volunteer opportunities with the Parks Department, visit their website.  And check back for information on the next Dubos Point clean-up.

Related Links:

• Parks Department – Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary
• NY Times 1996 – Drafting Bats in War on Mosquitoes
• NY Times 1988 – Renewal of Wetlands Begins in Queens Bay
• NY Times 2000 – Wildlife Refuge Becomes a Battleground for Humans

Checking in to Grossinger’s Resort

Past a deserted security desk, waist-high grasses choke back the yawning entrance to the Jennie G. Hotel, whose toppled fence serves more as an invitation than a barrier.  Here in the sleepy town of Liberty, NY, this derelict hilltop lodge is not only a destination for the curious, it’s a daily reminder of the town’s old eminence, an emblem of a dead industry, visible from miles around.

In its time, Grossinger’s Catskills Resort was a fantasy realized, where wealthy businessmen, celebrity entertainers, and star athletes gathered to mingle with those that they liked and were like, to see and be seen, and to enjoy, rightly so, the things they enjoyed.  As the slogan goes—Grossinger’s has Everything for the Kind of Person who Likes to Come to Grossinger’s.

If you’re the kind of person that’s inclined to spend their vacation somewhere dark, dusty, and dangerous, the motto still rings true today, and you’re not coming for the five-star kosher kitchen.  For just as quickly as the resort prospered into a world-class institution, it’s descended into a swift decay—another fallen empire.  Explorers frequent the grounds, armed with cameras in an attempt to capture the beauty in its devastation, sifting through the artifacts—a broken lounge chair, old reservation records—piecing together a lost age of tourism.

A generation ago, this region of the Catskills was known as the Borscht Belt, a tongue-in-cheek designation for a string of hotels and resorts that catered to a predominantly Jewish customer base.  In popular culture, the most notable representation of this time and place is Dirty Dancing, which was supposedly inspired by a summer at Grossinger’s.  The unexpected success of its film adaptation had little effect on the long-struggling resort—in 1986, a year before the film was released, Grossinger’s ended its 70 year legacy.

The story of Grossinger’s is, at its root, an American story. The Grossingers were Austrian immigrants, who after some early years of struggle in New York City, and a failed farming venture, opened a small farmhouse to boarders in 1914, without plumbing or electricity.  They quickly gained a reputation for their exceptional hospitality and incredible kosher cooking and outgrew the ramshackle farmhouse, purchasing the property that the resort still occupies today.

Grossinger’s rise to prominence is largely attributed to the couple’s daughter Jennie, who worked there as a hostess in its early years.  Later, Jennie’s legendary leadership would transform the resort from its humble beginnings to a massive 35-building complex (with its own zip code and airstrip), attracting over 150,000 guests a year, and establishing a new type of travel destination that renounced the quiet charms of country living for a fast-paced, action-packed, social experience that met the expectations of its sophisticated New York clientele.

Every sport of leisure had its own arena, with state of the art facilities for handball, tennis, skiing, ice skating, barrel jumping, and tobogganing, along with a championship golf course.  In 1952, the resort earned a place in history by being the first to use artificial snow.  Its famous training establishment for boxers hosted seven world champions.  Its stages launched the careers of countless well-known singers and comedians.  In its day spas and beauty salons, ballrooms and auditoriums, guests were offered a level of luxury that even the wealthiest individuals couldn’t enjoy at home, earning Grossinger’s the nickname, “Waldorf in the Catskills.”

A daily missive called The Tattler identified notable guests and the business that made their respective fortunes.  Weekly tabloids published on the grounds boasted the presence of celebrity athletes and entertainers.  But for all the emphasis on earthly pleasures and material wealth, Jennie G. ensured that the Grossinger’s experience was warm and personal, always treating guests like one of the family, even when visitors reached well over 1,000 per week.

By the late sixties, the Grossinger’s model had started to fall out of favor as cheap air travel to tourist destinations around the world became readily available to a new generation.  After the property was abandoned, several renovation attempts were aborted by a string of investors.  Widespread demolition has greatly diminished the sprawl of the original resort, but several of the largest buildings remain.  Most have been stripped of any vestige of opulence, and some structures are barely standing, no more so than the former Joy Cottage, whose floors might not withstand the footfalls of a field mouse.

Artifacts from the hotel’s glory days are few and far between, but Grossinger’s most recent batch of visitors has been quick to leave its mark.  In a haunting hotel filled with empty rooms, some scenes are startlingly arranged, with collected mementos photogenically poised in the pursuit of a compelling shot.  Despite these attempts to prettify Grossinger’s decline, the grounds retain an air of savage dilapidation, and an utter submission to the verdant Catskill’s encroachment.

An indoor swimming pool is Grossinger’s most enduring spectacle, and has become a favorite location of urban explorers near and far.  Radiance remains in its terra-cotta tiles and its well-preserved space age light fixtures.  Its dimensions continue to impress, as do the postcard views through its towering glass walls, all miraculously intact.  It’s growth, not decay, that makes this pool so picturesque—the years have transformed this neglected natatorium into a flourishing greenhouse.  Ferns prosper from a moss-caked poolside, unhindered by the tread of carefree vacationers, urged by a ceiling that constantly drips.  Year-round scents of summer have bowed to a kind of perpetual spring, with the reek of chlorine and suntan lotion replaced by the heady odor of moss and mildew—it’s dank, green, and vibrantly alive.

Meanwhile, areas across the region that once relied on a thriving tourism industry have fallen into depression or emptied out.  The Catskills is attempting to rebrand, updating its image and holding online contests to determine a new slogan.  The winner?  The Catskills, Always in Season.

Though it remains to be seen whether the coming seasons will bring new visitors, there’s no doubt they’re serving to erase the region’s outmoded reputation.  With each passing year, in ruined hotels across the Catskills, the physical remnants of lost vacations dwindle.  Indoors, snowdrifts weigh on aching floors; leaf litter collects to harbor the damp or fuel the fire.  Vines claim what the rain leaves behind, compelling the constant progress of decay.  Scattered in photo albums, hidden in bottom drawers, excerpted from yellowing newsprint, the memories will follow, clearing the way for new journeys.  Before it’s forgotten, here’s one more look inside the celebrated resort.

-Will Ellis

Related Links:

• 1954 Article on Grossinger’s
• Sullivan County Historical Society—Jennie Grossinger
• Wikipedia—Grossinger’s Catskill’s Resort Hotel
• NY Times—Beyond Borscht – Rebranding the Catskills
• Interesting Piece by Richard Grossinger

Consider the Catskills for your next getaway: Official Catskills Tourism Site

Legend Tripping in 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Related Links:

• Disability History Museum—Survey of Letchworth Village, 1912
• Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 exposé
• NY Times 2004—”At Former Hospital; 450 Condos Set for Haverstraw”
• NY Times 2007—”Giving Names to Souls Forgotten No Longer”
• NY Times 1970−”New Approaches to the Retarded Bring Increased Hope”

Houdini’s Grave, in NYC’s Spookiest Cemetery

If you pass by a graveyard on the Jackie Robinson Parkway, don’t hold your breath.  You’ve got two and half miles of Queens’ Cemetery Belt ahead of you, a burial ground so vast it’s supposedly visible from space.   Surrounded on all sides by an ocean of headstones, the modest Machpelah Cemetery makes up only a small fraction of the sprawling necropolis, but its arguably the creepiest graveyard in the city…

Cramped centenarian tombstones muster in rows on the hilly plot—the place is rundown and deserted, but one grave is consistently well-maintained.  It’s the monument of Machpelah’s most famous resident, master escape artist Harry Houdini.  Only steps from the headstone lurks an eerie cemetery office, abandoned since the late 80s.  The cemetery is a dream destination for graveyard ghouls on a chilly October night, especially since Halloween marks the anniversary of Houdini’s untimely death.

The history of the Cemetery Belt can be traced back to the Rural Cemeteries Act of 1847, under which cemeteries became a legitimate commercial enterprise for the first time in New York.  Non-profit organizations were authorized to buy up land and sell plots to individuals, replacing the traditional practice of burying the deceased in churchyards and private property.

Areas of then-rural Queens quickly became concentrated with new cemetery holdings.  A stipulation of the act limited the acreage of land an organization could purchase in a given county, but church groups and land speculators got around this by buying up neighboring plots on the Brooklyn-Queens border, forming the region now known as the Cemetery Belt.

Between 1832 and 1849, a series of cholera outbreaks thoroughly exhausted Manhattan’s remaining burial sites.  The common belief at the time was that ground water could become contaminated with the disease when infected corpses were exposed to the soil.  As a result, all burials were prohibited on the island of Manhattan in 1852.

As the population swelled, new developments, including the Brooklyn Bridge, often required the displacement of grave sites.   Manhattan started evicting its dead people, and sending them to western Queens—tens of thousands of deceased were disinterred and transported to mass graves in the Cemetery Belt.  These ghoulish dealings were kept away from the public eye, often carried out in the dead of night.

Today, Queens’ five million “permanent residents” almost triple its living population, but their numbers are at a standstill.  Most of these cemeteries reached capacity long ago, leaving many without a source of income.  As a result, some have fallen into disrepair, with officials failing to provide the “perpetual care” their patrons are rightfully owed.

At the nearby Bayside Cemetery, conditions were downright shameful, and hair-raising—exposed human remains were identified at several of the overgrown grave sites.  Community pressure, litigation, and the effort of volunteers have gotten the place cleaned up, albeit in a cursory fashion.  Gaping mausoleums have been closed off with cinderblocks and boards.

At Machpelah, the plots are untidy, but not nearly as egregious as the Bayside grounds.  The cemetery’s decline is most apparent in its ramshackle office building.  The boarded-up structure is dilapidated now, but its architecture, dating to 1928, continues to impress on the surface.

Any semblance of grandeur breaks down on the inside.  The striking arched windows visible in the facade are installed in rectangular frames, and their diamond panes are all artifice.  The skeleton of a drop ceiling hangs askew, with most panels collapsed and reduced to a yellow paste that covers the ground.  The office has apparently fallen victim to vandals over the years, furniture and safe deposit boxes have been ransacked, old burial records lie scattered in the grime.  Anything of value has been removed, but a coin bank souvenir from the 1939 New York World’s Fair remains, its most recent deposits dating back to 1988.

The building is utterly unventilated, “stuffy” doesn’t begin to describe its suffocating ether.  Reception rooms are boxed in with cheap wood paneling, which combines with the dizzying funk of mildew to evoke the interior of a coffin.   Secluded in a cockeyed armoire, Nosferatu could feel right at home here.

Every Halloween, hundreds of devotees make the yearly pilgrimage to Houdini’s final resting place to pay their respects, party, and make an offering—around the anniversary of his death, pumpkins, broomsticks, and playing cards mount like a cairn on his headstone.

The Society of American Magicians, for which Houdini served as president until his death, was the official caretaker of the site until recently.  Between 1975 and 1993, the bust that adorns the Houdini monument was stolen or destroyed four times—it’s thought to be the only graven image in any Jewish Cemetery.

For many years, the likeness was only brought out for yearly ceremonies, but in 2011, a group of magicians from the Scranton Houdini Museum engaged in some guerrilla restoration, installing a new bust with the blessing of Houdini’s family, but without the permission of Machpelah or the Magician’s Society.  The group has since taken over responsibilities for the site’s care, and so far the bust remains unscathed.

With no funds to reoccupy, renovate, or demolish the old office building, its likely to stand until it falls down on its own; the same can’t be said of Houdini’s shiny new effigy.  Odds are he’ll lose his head again—even though it’s screwed on.  So next time you’re traveling down that graveyard highway, be sure to stop by for a look while you can.  There’s no need to wait for the witching hour.  At Machpelah Cemetery, the gate is always open, and every day is Halloween.

-Will Ellis

Related Links:

• Scouting NY—Houdini’s Final Vanishing Act in Queens
• NYTimes—Houdini Returns, of Course
• NYTimes—Houdini’s Final Trick, A Tidy Grave
• Nathan Kensinger Photography—Machpelah Cemetery: Houdini’s Grave
• Newsday—The Cemetery Belt: Why Does Queens Have so Many Cemeteries?

For more Queens abandonments, check out:

The Rockaway Beach Branch: Queen’s Forgotten Railroad and Inside Creedmoor Hospital’s Building 25

Inside Creedmoor State Hospital’s Building 25

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.

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.

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.

• NY Times—”Fear and Brutality in a Creedmoor Ward”
• NY Times—”The Lost World of Creedmoor Hospital”
• Office of Mental Health—Creedmoor Hospital History
• The Kingston Lounge—Photoessay on Building 25

A Watery Grave for Historic Ships on Staten Island

Do you know how to get to Staten Island’s most remarkable graveyard?  First pass through a centuries-old roadside cemetery, (consisting of a handful of horribly eroded grave markers).  Follow a barely there garbage-strewn path down to the marshy Arthur Kill (kill is the Dutch word for creek, which explains why creepy names like “Fresh Kills” abound in the Dutch-settled Hudson River Valley.)  Once your feet are sinking a few inches into the mud with every step, you’ll start seeing the boats.  Some over a century old, steam vessels, warships, ferries, fireboats, the final vestiges of New York’s shipping era, doomed to die here in a catastrophically polluted Staten Island waterway.  Welcome to the Arthur Kill Boat Graveyard.

Operational since the 1930s, Witte’s Marine Equipment company in Rossville served to dredge, salvage, and resell materials from the wrecked and disused vessels of the New York and New Jersey waterways.  Eccentric owner John J. Witte refused to dismantle the majority of the ships that came to rest in the yard, amassing a prodigious collection of over 400 historic watercraft.  As the ships slowly decomposed and the area gained a reputation as a mecca for artists and photographers, Witte gained his own reputation as a ferocious defender of his property, known for scaring off unsolicited visitors personally until he passed away in 1980.  The yard is now controlled by the Donjon Marine Company, which seems to be taking a more proactive approach to actually salvaging materials from the wrecks and keeping the curious out, erecting 12-foot metal walls around the perimeter of the yard with signs prohibiting any and all photography.

The walls presented an obstacle, but after several muddy minutes I made it to the Arthur Kill Shore.  Though the shipyard had lost most of its former glory, the remaining 20-40 wrecks were still an eldritch sight to behold—half submerged in years of muck, leaning at odd angles, corroded in streaks of rust, putrefying elbow to elbow with massive skeleton hulls.  These wade out their final days in the boneyard before being stripped and recycled into automobiles and refrigerators.  So see them while you can, if you dare, what was once the city’s premiere collection of nautical artifacts is sinking fast.

• 1990 NY Times article—”A Lesson in the History of Ships”
• Radio segment and article from WNYC