Pilgrim State

Pilgrim State Hospital was once the largest psychiatric facility in the world. Built in 1930 on nearly 2,000 acres of Long Island for 12,500 patients, at its peak the hospital treated 16,000. No hospital of its kind ever had a larger population. Today, I got to perform an Environmental Site Assessment at a power plant on a portion of the Pilgrim State grounds.

I'm not a complete stranger to the facility. I was born in Mineola and lived on Long Island for the first 16 years of my life, but until today, except for a few, frankly rather confused years in the mid-1970s, I have not been back to the island since I left.

As a pre-teen, I used to ride past Pilgrim State on weekend family trips to the beach. The place always creeped me out. Maybe it was the imposing architecture or just the sheer size of the facility, but in my boyhood mind Pilgrim State became a sort of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and I could imagine (or perceive?) psychic waves of panic and anguish streaming from the grounds. The car couldn't pass the nightmarish place soon enough.

My perceptions were not entirely unfounded. According to the appropriately spooky urban decay web site, Opacity, many types of shock therapy were performed at Pilgrim, such as insulin shock therapy, in which the patient is injected with large doses of insulin to induce convulsion and coma. In 1940, Pilgrim State started using electric shock therapy, passing electric currents through the brain to induce grand mal seizures as a treatment for schizophrenia and mood disorders, and the hospital has recently been under investigation for forcing this treatment onto patients. Pre-frontal lobotomies were performed at Pilgrim starting in 1946, and through 1959 as many as 1,000 to 2,000 lobotomies were performed in Building #23 (the facility is also Site No. 23 on Opacity; 23 enigma, anyone?).

I was afraid of the place as a child, but as a teenager, some friends and I found a spot where we could sneak onto the sprawling hospital grounds and ride mini-bikes around and between the unfortunate patients: slow-motion droolers and walking zombies zoned out on Thorazine, electro-shock therapy and bizarre surgical procedures. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Night of the Living Dead. It might have been part of an adolescent rite of facing what frightens us and proving our courage to our peers, but I know now that we only succeeded at increasing the suffering of the most distressed, and I'm lucky that my karma hasn't yet caught up with me for that.

But instead of being in a straight jacket myself, today I took an early morning flight to LaGuardia and drove my rental car on the Long Island Expressway past Mineola (I'll have to enter the city of my birth some other time) and on out to Pilgrim State. Today, the hospital is largely abandoned, although some smaller areas are apparently still active. As I drove on the access road to the power plant, areas looked like Mother Nature was trying to reclaim the hospital as if to heal the damage Man once inflicted upon himself there.

The power plant employees told me that there are occasional rumors and reports of massive redevelopment projects for the site, but nothing ever seems to come to fruition. Several buildings have been partially or totally demolished; however, they said that the demolition occurred before asbestos assessments or abatements were performed, and now huge piles of asbestos-containing demolition debris stand as monuments to the odds against the site ever being beneficially reused.

So the hospital today has the post-apocalyptic look of an abandoned military base. Driving around, the grounds looked more like what I imagine post-Soviet Siberia looked like, rather than the Long Island of my fond childhood memories.

But I've changed as well, and now I feel not fear or loathing, but nothing but empathy for the patients who used to spend their days wandering aimlessly around these lawns.

Tomorrow, I get to perform another Site Assessment here on Long Island, this time at a facility adjacent to a nuclear power plant. Now that I think of it, maybe my karma didn't turn out so well after all.