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4.0
6 votes

Kings Park Psychiatric Center

W 4th St, Kings Park, NY 11754, Kings Park, New York 11754 USA

  • Independent
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“Once the largest asylum in the world with it's own electricity generator!”

This place is on private property. Listing for informational purposes only. Please do not visit without express permission from the land owner. "Engineers and earth movers have now joined nature and vandals in the slow dismantling of the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, an all-but-abandoned city of the sick on the North Shore of Long Island, on thickly wooded bluffs above Long Island Sound. Kings Park was one of the island’s four giant state mental institutions — part farm, part warehouse — that treated hundreds of thousands of patients from New York City. It began in the 1880s and kept growing into the 1960s and ’70s until, like its counterparts on the island and across the country, it was made obsolete by new drug therapies and a new understanding of the rights of the mentally ill. Kings Park shut down in 1996 and the grounds became a state park, partly because nobody knew what else to do with it. Too far from major roads and full of buildings contaminated with asbestos and lead, it has proved inhospitable to redevelopment. (The sites of the other hospitals have long been home to ball fields, shopping centers, apartments, even a federal courthouse, and one is now a nature preserve.) At Kings Park, the state mows the lawns and tries to keep the ruins sealed, but only recently found the money to tear down the dozen or so unsalvageable buildings. After that, state parks officials say, it will be time to figure out what to do next. For now the site remains one very strange state park — a place where you can launch a canoe into the Nissequogue River among reeds and herons and striped bass, or wander the grounds of a rotting asylum, among a century’s worth of ghosts. In its prime, Kings Park had not just hospital wards and offices but also a power plant, firehouse, workers’ cottages, dairy and horse barns, a piggery, libraries and garages. It had its own farm fields, reservoir and railroad spur. Nearly all of what remains at the site is abandoned, including Building 93, a tower that looms over the grounds like a horror-movie hospital. Doors and windows are covered with plywood; weeds sag on brickwork. Graffiti defaces the ruins inside and out; thieves have stripped them for scrap metal, sawing off pipes and gutters and smashing electrical switches with rocks to pick out the copper like crab meat. There is a subculture of Kings Park infiltrators, carrying heavy tools and posting videos to YouTube. They seem to work as doggedly as the birds, squirrels and thick weeds that wrap themselves around metal stairwells and window grates. Kings Park used to be far-off countryside, but over the decades, as development sprawled eastward from the city, it became an island of green in the heart of suburbia. This was true of all the Long Island state hospitals, but Kings Park, with its 600 rolling acres and water views, is the most beautiful. Its future is unclear: there will be parkland, certainly; housing in significant amounts, probably not. As for some sort of refuge for the poor and mentally ill, forget about it. The surrounding township, Smithtown, will have a say on land use, and the not-in-my-backyard forces are legendary there. Nobody, aside from the looters and a few dedicated amateur researchers and bloggers, seems all that interested in the Kings Park Psychiatric Center as it is, or used to be. Long Island’s hospitals may not have had as bad a reputation as their New York City counterparts, but the whole era was toxic with abuse and neglect. And the memory of the patients who lived and died there is all but lost. Hundreds of them lie today in a potter’s field at the far edge of the property. Parks workers had trouble remembering where it was. But they found it, up a dirt road behind a locked gate: a grassy meadow scattered with a few stone slabs bearing numbers, not names.   New York State has largely abandoned its comprehensive commitment to caring for the mentally ill and disabled. When the hospitals emptied out, patients were sent to group homes to be better cared for; many were forsaken there, too. A recent series of articles in The Times found that abuse and neglect plague the mental-health system to this day. It would be wonderful if someday profitable redevelopment of Kings Park led to a surge in financing for care of the mentally ill. I’m not counting on it." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/erasing-the-past-at-the-ghost-hospital.html?_r=1

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Reviewed by
bostonbaker

  • 5 Reviews
  • 11 Helpful
October 23, 2014
Rated 4.0

You do NOT need permission to visit! It's on State Park property! All you have to do is pay the park fee (when I went this summer it was only $6) and you can take photos of the exterior. You cannot go inside, but you'll see plenty of kids doing it anyway. A lot of the buildings are not boarded up so it is VERY easy for the park rangers to see you if you sneak in! They will catch you, kick you out of the park, and call the cops!

1 person found this review helpful

Reviewed by
PaulieB331

  • 4 Reviews
  • 3 Helpful
August 04, 2014
Rated 4.0

It was fun as a kid to visit but they are starting to knock down buildings so if you want to see it now is the time to go. They are turning it into a park

1 person found this review helpful

Reviewed by
kathy.kuenzl

  • 1 Review
  • 0 Helpful
October 19, 2013
Rated

Sad. My sister-in-laws father was committed there back around 1960. He suffered with schizophrenia. When my brother found him with a knife and his wife tied up on a table just in time to stop him. Scary thoughts that some of the new meds given to people today also can cause them to be violent. He lived to be released when they closed and was fine as long as he took his meds. He died in Colorado where he spent his last years with my brother and his wife. I'm sure there are many horror stories from this 'hospital' inflicted by staff and the so called doctors of the day. Those poor, poor people who suffered untold agonies at their hands. Sad.

1 person found this review helpful

Reviewed by
sopablack

  • 1 Review
  • 0 Helpful
October 19, 2013
Rated

Paynus?

1 person found this review helpful

Reviewed by
meresposito

  • 5 Reviews
  • 0 Helpful
August 15, 2020
Rated 5.0

Creepy? Yep. But more because I worried what squatters were hiding around every turn. The fence to the big building has many holes so you can get close- illegally. There are slate tiles falling from the roof so it’s not safe. Interesting but plan to walk a bit from the parking and around the fenced perimeter.

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Kings Park Psychiatric Center

W 4th St, Kings Park, NY 11754
Kings Park, New York
11754 USA
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