Though new life is planned for the site, the ghosts of Pilgrim State linger
Ambrose Clancy
Long Island Business News
Flying past on the expressway the landscape to the south changes for an instant from glass and steel buildings to a medieval walled city brooding in the distance under the sky.
Hey, what was that?
If you take the exit and then make a quick right turn, that old world vision from a moment ago cuts to something out of the first few minutes of a horror movie.
A massive Victorian brick building looms in a park of leafless trees with vast courtyards filled with triumphant weeds, trash and silence. Stone entrance steps lie crumbing to dust above a decaying stone balustrade. Dead vines are crucified to red bricks. On the first floor the glass in the windows are long gone, covered with gray plywood, and the windows on higher floors have been smashed jagged by vandals.
Curtains stripped of color by time and the elements move in the breeze through barred windows.
Is there any place more haunted on Long Island than Pilgrim State? Once the most populous mental institution in the world swarming with close to 18,000 people on 800 acres, today in bright sunshine the silence speaks to you. But go on a day of rain and fog, and even if you don’t believe in ghosts, you might reconsider your position.
The sinister complex of enormous empty buildings, which have been abandoned for more than a decade now, waits for the wrecker’s ball. Some 50 buildings have already been razed to stone blocks and dust by a developer.
Jerry Wolkoff bought 460 acres of Pilgrim from the state seven years ago for $19.5 million and has put another $10 million into a project he’s dubbed “Heartland Town Square.”
Promising to break ground next year, Wolkoff said he envisions a “little Manhattan,” a place where young people will live and work, a solution to the Island’s brain drain.
On the drawing board are more than 9,000 apartments and three million square feet of commercial space, which will employ 15,000 people.
The development has the potential to be the best “smart growth” location on Long Island, said Islip Town Planning Commissioner Gene Murphy. The town board accepted a preliminary environmental report with 21 fundamental disagreements at an April 14 meeting.
Accepting an environmental review with even one disagreement is “unique,” according to Murphy. Traffic, waste water, density and other issues still remain obstacles, Murphy added.
“But we believe it’s in the public interest to move the project along and SEQRA [State Environmental Quality Review Act] allows us to agree to disagree,” the commissioner said.
As for Wolkoff’s belief that ground breaking will begin next year for a buildout lasting 15 years, Murphy said it was too early to tell. A public hearing on the project is scheduled for May 28.
Opened in 1931, the institution is named for Dr. Charles Pilgrim, the state’s commissioner of mental health in the century’s early years. By 1954 there were 14,000 patients with a staff of more than 4,000.
A self-supporting city with its own power generating station, Pilgrim had its own post office with its own postmark, an LIRR station, police and fire departments, greenhouses, a farm and a cemetery. There was a nursing school with student dormitories. The executive staff lived like dukes in mansions modeled on English country estates.
The remains of the old Pilgrim – the state still runs a psychiatric hospital on the grounds – are a powerful sight which tells your intuition something terrible happened here. And it did.
The declining population and eventual shuttering of Pilgrim was due to one of the great liberation movements in history, when pharmacologists developed antipsychotic medications.
“Prior to the development of these medications like Thorazine in the mid-1950s, a large number of patients spent their entire lives in asylums,” said Robert Bornstein, professor of psychology at Adelphi. If you could call them lives.
The new drugs freed the mentally ill to control their conditions at home through pills, rather than being warehoused in huge state institutions where in many cases quacks dispensed “therapies” which turned human beings into vegetables or caged them like animals.
The primitive methods of treatment included restraint devices unchanged since the dark ages, as well electric shock and prefrontal lobotomies. This procedure required drilling holes in a patient’s skull and then severing fibers that connect the thalamus to the frontal lobes of the brain.
Physicians could take a knife to anyone’s brain if the patient was institutionalized and demonstrated aggressive behavior. Patients were either reduced to drooling idiots or children with almost no memory.
More than 2,000 Pilgrim patients were lobotomized in the 1940s and ‘50s. One out of every 25 lobotomies performed in the country was done there.
(Poet Allen Ginsberg’s mother was lobotomized in 1947 at Pilgrim with the consent of her 21-year-old son. She died in the institution nine years later. Ginsberg acknowledged his guilt and love with “Kaddish,” one of his finest poems. The poet gives Pilgrim a mention in his most celebrated work, “Howl:” “Pilgrim State’s … fetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul…”)
By the 1960s most state medical boards had outlawed lobotomies and soon after the practice was completely discredited and banned in the United States.
There is still a mental hospital on the grounds, set in a modern building with 510 beds providing inpatient and outpatient services.
On a floor of one of the still-active buildings is a “museum,” which is really just a collection of artifacts. Al Cibelli, who created the exhibit, works in vocational rehabilitation with the patients, whom he refers to as “clients.” Cibelli knows every inch of Pilgrim, including an extensive network of tunnels.
Five years ago he came across a picture of a large table model of Pilgrim and decided to try and find it. He found the model in one of the decaying buildings and now it’s the centerpiece of the exhibit. Cibelli has also uncovered some gruesome reminders of Pilgrim’s past.
A white canvas straitjacket with metal buckles hangs from a coatrack next to a “restraint chair.” This is a solid oak chair with leather straps, a hole in the seat for a bucket and a square oak hood for the patient’s head.
There are also old photographs of patients at play and work and some accomplished artwork, especially a striking mural. There are photos of the mural and a piece of the original, done by a patient from the 1940s.
The mural depicts a recreation room and shows patients playing chess and cards. Some faces, clearly in distress, leap out at you. There was an artist at work here, and not merely a decorator.
Cibelli showed a display of homemade keys crafted by patients desperate to escape.
“Some of these are pretty good, “Cibelli said. “You have to give them credit.”
With the exception of medical journal reports, not much has been published about Pilgrim State.
An exception is a book debuting last year titled “Pilgrim State,” by Jacqueline Walker, a Briton whose mother, Dorothy, was in the asylum in 1949.
She had been committed by her philandering husband, who the
author writes drugged her mother and committed her to rid himself of his obligations.
“I regard it as torture,” Walker told a reporter. “There was nothing wrong with her.”
In front of her small children, Dorothy Walker was strapped in a straitjacket, taken to Pilgrim and given electroconvulsive treatment. “If she wasn’t mad before she went in, who could go though all that and not be damaged by the time they came out?” Walker has said.
While inside, Dorothy Walker pleaded with officials to see her children but was denied. “Although she obviously suffered from depression – who wouldn’t, given what she had to deal with?” Walker told an interviewer. “But she was so full of joy, too.”
Another person who spent time in Pilgrim and reported on it is Michelle Trauring, features editor for the college paper, “The Stony Brook Independent.”
Trauring with two friends, one sporting a miner’s hat complete with light, found a recessed area in a building with a window and slithered in one late October night.
They saw a rusted gurney abandoned in a hall. “Its four wheels are stuck, locked in place and time,” Trauring wrote. Other eerie visions emerged from the darkness. “A gynecological chair sits awkwardly at the foot of one of the staircases, its stirrups ripped off.” Graffiti written on a wall: “I cannot corrupt that which has been corrupted.”
On a return recently on a misty afternoon, Trauring pointed out her means of entrance, now flooded with rainwater. Passing trash in a courtyard, she noted evidence of partying teenagers: torn notebooks and beer cans. “High school,” she said. “Homework and beer.”
Asked if she believes in ghosts, Trauring said, simply, “Yes.”
The spookiest moment in her visit to the ghost asylum? “The phone,” she said, peering in through a smashed plate glass window.
The trio had wandered into a reception area. The miner’s light fell on something: “… a beige phone sits on the counter. The receiver is off the hook, lying face up …”
Hey, what was that?
If you take the exit and then make a quick right turn, that old world vision from a moment ago cuts to something out of the first few minutes of a horror movie.
A massive Victorian brick building looms in a park of leafless trees with vast courtyards filled with triumphant weeds, trash and silence. Stone entrance steps lie crumbing to dust above a decaying stone balustrade. Dead vines are crucified to red bricks. On the first floor the glass in the windows are long gone, covered with gray plywood, and the windows on higher floors have been smashed jagged by vandals.
Curtains stripped of color by time and the elements move in the breeze through barred windows.
Is there any place more haunted on Long Island than Pilgrim State? Once the most populous mental institution in the world swarming with close to 18,000 people on 800 acres, today in bright sunshine the silence speaks to you. But go on a day of rain and fog, and even if you don’t believe in ghosts, you might reconsider your position.
The sinister complex of enormous empty buildings, which have been abandoned for more than a decade now, waits for the wrecker’s ball. Some 50 buildings have already been razed to stone blocks and dust by a developer.
Jerry Wolkoff bought 460 acres of Pilgrim from the state seven years ago for $19.5 million and has put another $10 million into a project he’s dubbed “Heartland Town Square.”
Promising to break ground next year, Wolkoff said he envisions a “little Manhattan,” a place where young people will live and work, a solution to the Island’s brain drain.
On the drawing board are more than 9,000 apartments and three million square feet of commercial space, which will employ 15,000 people.
The development has the potential to be the best “smart growth” location on Long Island, said Islip Town Planning Commissioner Gene Murphy. The town board accepted a preliminary environmental report with 21 fundamental disagreements at an April 14 meeting.
Accepting an environmental review with even one disagreement is “unique,” according to Murphy. Traffic, waste water, density and other issues still remain obstacles, Murphy added.
“But we believe it’s in the public interest to move the project along and SEQRA [State Environmental Quality Review Act] allows us to agree to disagree,” the commissioner said.
As for Wolkoff’s belief that ground breaking will begin next year for a buildout lasting 15 years, Murphy said it was too early to tell. A public hearing on the project is scheduled for May 28.
Opened in 1931, the institution is named for Dr. Charles Pilgrim, the state’s commissioner of mental health in the century’s early years. By 1954 there were 14,000 patients with a staff of more than 4,000.
A self-supporting city with its own power generating station, Pilgrim had its own post office with its own postmark, an LIRR station, police and fire departments, greenhouses, a farm and a cemetery. There was a nursing school with student dormitories. The executive staff lived like dukes in mansions modeled on English country estates.
The remains of the old Pilgrim – the state still runs a psychiatric hospital on the grounds – are a powerful sight which tells your intuition something terrible happened here. And it did.
The declining population and eventual shuttering of Pilgrim was due to one of the great liberation movements in history, when pharmacologists developed antipsychotic medications.
“Prior to the development of these medications like Thorazine in the mid-1950s, a large number of patients spent their entire lives in asylums,” said Robert Bornstein, professor of psychology at Adelphi. If you could call them lives.
The new drugs freed the mentally ill to control their conditions at home through pills, rather than being warehoused in huge state institutions where in many cases quacks dispensed “therapies” which turned human beings into vegetables or caged them like animals.
The primitive methods of treatment included restraint devices unchanged since the dark ages, as well electric shock and prefrontal lobotomies. This procedure required drilling holes in a patient’s skull and then severing fibers that connect the thalamus to the frontal lobes of the brain.
Physicians could take a knife to anyone’s brain if the patient was institutionalized and demonstrated aggressive behavior. Patients were either reduced to drooling idiots or children with almost no memory.
More than 2,000 Pilgrim patients were lobotomized in the 1940s and ‘50s. One out of every 25 lobotomies performed in the country was done there.
(Poet Allen Ginsberg’s mother was lobotomized in 1947 at Pilgrim with the consent of her 21-year-old son. She died in the institution nine years later. Ginsberg acknowledged his guilt and love with “Kaddish,” one of his finest poems. The poet gives Pilgrim a mention in his most celebrated work, “Howl:” “Pilgrim State’s … fetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul…”)
By the 1960s most state medical boards had outlawed lobotomies and soon after the practice was completely discredited and banned in the United States.
There is still a mental hospital on the grounds, set in a modern building with 510 beds providing inpatient and outpatient services.
On a floor of one of the still-active buildings is a “museum,” which is really just a collection of artifacts. Al Cibelli, who created the exhibit, works in vocational rehabilitation with the patients, whom he refers to as “clients.” Cibelli knows every inch of Pilgrim, including an extensive network of tunnels.
Five years ago he came across a picture of a large table model of Pilgrim and decided to try and find it. He found the model in one of the decaying buildings and now it’s the centerpiece of the exhibit. Cibelli has also uncovered some gruesome reminders of Pilgrim’s past.
A white canvas straitjacket with metal buckles hangs from a coatrack next to a “restraint chair.” This is a solid oak chair with leather straps, a hole in the seat for a bucket and a square oak hood for the patient’s head.
There are also old photographs of patients at play and work and some accomplished artwork, especially a striking mural. There are photos of the mural and a piece of the original, done by a patient from the 1940s.
The mural depicts a recreation room and shows patients playing chess and cards. Some faces, clearly in distress, leap out at you. There was an artist at work here, and not merely a decorator.
Cibelli showed a display of homemade keys crafted by patients desperate to escape.
“Some of these are pretty good, “Cibelli said. “You have to give them credit.”
With the exception of medical journal reports, not much has been published about Pilgrim State.
An exception is a book debuting last year titled “Pilgrim State,” by Jacqueline Walker, a Briton whose mother, Dorothy, was in the asylum in 1949.
She had been committed by her philandering husband, who the
author writes drugged her mother and committed her to rid himself of his obligations.
“I regard it as torture,” Walker told a reporter. “There was nothing wrong with her.”
In front of her small children, Dorothy Walker was strapped in a straitjacket, taken to Pilgrim and given electroconvulsive treatment. “If she wasn’t mad before she went in, who could go though all that and not be damaged by the time they came out?” Walker has said.
While inside, Dorothy Walker pleaded with officials to see her children but was denied. “Although she obviously suffered from depression – who wouldn’t, given what she had to deal with?” Walker told an interviewer. “But she was so full of joy, too.”
Another person who spent time in Pilgrim and reported on it is Michelle Trauring, features editor for the college paper, “The Stony Brook Independent.”
Trauring with two friends, one sporting a miner’s hat complete with light, found a recessed area in a building with a window and slithered in one late October night.
They saw a rusted gurney abandoned in a hall. “Its four wheels are stuck, locked in place and time,” Trauring wrote. Other eerie visions emerged from the darkness. “A gynecological chair sits awkwardly at the foot of one of the staircases, its stirrups ripped off.” Graffiti written on a wall: “I cannot corrupt that which has been corrupted.”
On a return recently on a misty afternoon, Trauring pointed out her means of entrance, now flooded with rainwater. Passing trash in a courtyard, she noted evidence of partying teenagers: torn notebooks and beer cans. “High school,” she said. “Homework and beer.”
Asked if she believes in ghosts, Trauring said, simply, “Yes.”
The spookiest moment in her visit to the ghost asylum? “The phone,” she said, peering in through a smashed plate glass window.
The trio had wandered into a reception area. The miner’s light fell on something: “… a beige phone sits on the counter. The receiver is off the hook, lying face up …”
This article was
written by Ambrose Clancy
and published by Long Island Business News
on Friday, April 24