King's Park Psychiatric Center

​

Kings Park Psychiatric Center is a former mental hospital that now sits abandoned on Long Island. The institution, built in 1885, housed over nine thousand patients at its peak. A sprawling campus of 150 buildings, the hospital was a self-sustaining community with farming, construction, and food preparation on site, as well as its own power plants and railroad spur. Many of these 150 buildings have been demolished or have burnt to the ground since Kings Park began to decline in 1970.

​

The hospital started out as a farm colony, where patients tended the fields and grew their own food. This was the primary mode of therapy at the time, before any medications were available. Kings Park was established to reduce the burden on hospitals in Brooklyn that were overcrowded. The farm colony was considered the antidote to the dense and dirty city, where patients would get fresh air and open space.

​

In the few years after the farm colony was established, patient populations soared. Before the turn of the century, more wards were built, as well as a reservoir, steam plant and sewage system. During this time the conditions for patients at Kings Park were abhorrent, according to an 1893 state report. The report read, “the buildings were unsuitable and unhygienic, facilities inadequate, clothing insufficient and of poor quality, food often unfit for human consumption.”

​

By the 1930s, more buildings were constructed at the hospital as the patient population rose. The hospital had its own farmland, cow barn, piggery, butcher shop, tailor, morgue, and power plant.Kings Park was becoming an independent city, with its own high rise tower — the 13-story Building 93, funded by the Works Progress Administration. A former ward attendant who worked at the hospital for several decades remarked, “If there was one place in the country that was not affected by the Great Depression, Kings Park was it.”

​

After World War II, medical treatment for the mentally ill included pre-frontal lobotomies and shock therapy. Doctors believed that epileptic patients had improved moods after having seizures, and they wanted to replicate this effect through electroshock treatment. Lobotomies, an even more brutal method of treatment, were surgical procedures where doctors inserted a metal tool into a patient’s brain through their eyelid. The doctor would violently sever the neural connections between the pre-frontal cortex and the rest of the brain. After the operation, lobotomized patients resembled zombies, becoming passive and docile.

​

The patient population reached its peak in 1954 at 9,300 patients. In the years following, the population began to steadily decline due to the introduction of new drugs for treating mental illness. It eventually closed it's doors in the early 1990's.