New York City is a timetable of indefinite events and historical landmarks, but in all its gloom and grayness, there lies a peculiar past where some of the city’s most eerie psychiatric wards once stood. Here’s a look into some of the most eerie centers.
Bellevue Hospital
Located on First Avenue, Bellevue Hospital is one of the North America’s largest hospitals and also the oldest public hospital buildings. Founded in 1736, it started as a “six-bed infirmary,” and is now the flagship hospital of New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which is the nation’s “largest municipal health-care system,” according to New York University’s School of Medicine in Psychiatry. The hospital is the home of the first Ebola patient in New York City, and is recognized internationally as a major academic and medical institution.
Seaview Hospital
Also known as the tuberculosis hospital, it was the largest and most expensive municipal facility for the treatment of tuberculosis during its time in the United States. The facility occupied 37 buildings that were constructed in the early 1900’s, and declared by The New York Times as “the largest and finest hospital ever built for the care and treatment of those who suffer from tuberculosis in any form.” The landmark is named on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and is also a U.S. Historic District and New York City landmark, according to untappedcities.com.
Blackwell’s Island
Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt’s Island, was once home to multiple facilities. Since the 1830s, Blackwell Island’s Asylum was known as the place for New York’s public institutions of disagreeable conditions – “hospitals for grave diseases, a penitentiary, an almshouse, even a quarantine for smallpox.” The mental institution associated with the hospital, for the insane or lunatic asylum, was “rumored to treat its patients most cruelly,” according to Bowery Boy’s History. A century after the hospital opened its doors, the facility went into desperation and eventually was shut down. Part of the facility is still standing as an apartment building. The older Smallpox Hospital located on the island, was “listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and designated a New York City Landmark four years later, the only ruin in the city with that designation.”
Letchworth Village
In 1911, Letchworth Village stood in quiet fields of Rockland county, just miles from the Hudson River. The psychiatric facility was home to the “the segregation of the epileptic and feeble-minded.” The center gave patients the freedom to work, play and worship – however, the village faced reports of maltreatment and neglect towards patients, as well as extreme unsatisfactory physical conditions. In 1996, the facility shut down after a successful human rights campaign effort. Comparable to several other mental institutions, the Letchworth Village is nothing more than an abandoned, desolate piece of ground – that some might associate as the appropriate relation to the hospital’s eerie and disturbing history.
Bloomingdale Insane Asylum
In 1769, a 28-year-old King’s College medical graduate, Samuel Bard, inspired city officials with an influential commencement speech in efforts to encourage them to aggregate funds to construct a new hospital. In 1776, the facility as a whole was named the New York Hospital, and then the “3rd oldest hospital” when it opened. The hospital admitted those of a multitude of conditions, but the number of mentally ill patients being admitted was on the rise almost immediately. Later on, a council was formed to expand the hospital’s psychiatric unit, when the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was established in 1821. Today, the Buell Hall of Columbia University is the only asylum building still standing in place of the grounds.
Buffalo State Hospital
Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, also known as the Richardson Olmsted Complex, is a psychiatric facility built by Henry Hobson Richardson in 1871 in mid upstate New York. The hospital faced overcrowding issues, and patients “slept in the halls or even outside, as the occupancy exceeded the building’s design by the thousands.” The hospital was later named the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, where eventually all patients were moved out due to unkempt and outdated conditions. The former psychiatric facility is now an open ground the public may walk around at legally.
Rockland Psychiatric Center
Located in Orangeburg, New York, the 410 bed mental health facility provides contemporary treatment for individuals whose mental illness requires hospitalization with a mission of recovery, according to New York University School of Medicine in Psychiatry. According to the website, the hospital specializes in intermediate and extended inpatient treatment for patients suffering from severe and persistent psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia, and dual diagnosis. Aside from the psychiatric unit, the hospital also aids deaf patients and serves as a residential home that meets respective needs of clients.
New York State Inebriate Asylum
Founded in 1858, the New York State Inebriate Asylum, also known as the Binghamton State Hospital, is located in Binghamton, New York. It was the first institution designed and constructed to treat alcoholism as a mental disorder. The building was founded on the “theory that inebriety, like insanity, is a disease, requiring like that, for its cure, medical and moral treatment,” according to nysasylum.com. The abandoned hospital is now a national historic landmark.
