Brownsville General Hospital
Updated May 3, 2020 | By Matthew Christopher
Brownsville General Hospital was originally a general hospital that served a mining town and primarily treated cases of black lung, but when a new state-of-the-art hospital was opened, it was converted to the Golden Age Retirement Home, a center for care for the elderly. During the 1980's Golden Age Retirement Home became the focus of an epic legal battle when the facility was cited for multiple serious code violations including unsanitary conditions, deficiencies in infection control, neglect, and more by the department of health and its medicare/medicaid licenses were revoked. Featured on prominent national and local television news shows prior to its closure, Golden Age became a symbol of abuse of the elderly. It has sat unoccupied since, in an ever-worsening state of disrepair.
This visit to Brownsville General Hospital may be the most frightening trip I have ever taken (along with Hudson River State Hospital, for similar reasons). While I am not typically that afraid of being in abandoned buildings on my own, as I was on this trip, I was unprepared for how catastrophic the structural damage to the building was. There was literally no place in the building that didn't feel like it could collapse at any second with no more cause than a strong breeze. Huge sections of the second floor had fallen onto the first, which had in turn fallen into the basement in a jagged heap of boards, beds, and drawers. A second floor bathroom had been spared this fate because the pipes had held it aloft, but it had listed and pushed the wall out into the hallway like a rotting wooden fan. The floors that were still there were spongy and often sagged a foot or two beneath where they had originally joined the walls, and upon examination of the first floor I was somewhat horrified to discover that the structural support for the floor above, which I had just traveled, was almost entirely nonexistent. At any given moment I fully expected to fall through the floor or to see the hallway ahead of me twist with the nightmarish sound of splintering wood and disappear entirely before my eyes. It may sound melodramatic to read, but I assure you that it is hard to think of much else when you are in such a place.
The only way to continue on was to acknowledge my own mortality and to accept it, which is somewhat fitting given the site's original history as a miner's hospital and later a retirement home. Fate can snatch us up at any moment for any reason, and confronting that fact while praying that this was not in fact the time and the way was my only real solace. While the site was originally only known of by one or two other photographers, in the years since my visit it has become more of a destination for urban explorers - and I have no doubt that if that trend continues Brownsville General Hospital will claim someone's life, or at least injure them very badly. It's a terrifying place.
One final note of interest was that after spending the entire day in this deathtrap, my closest brush with death actually occurred later while driving through the back roads home. I stopped to photograph an abandoned house (from the road, I might add) and an angry redneck chased me in his pickup truck and nearly ran me off the road because he thought I was working for someone he was having a property dispute with. It was such a bizarre and unanticipated end to the day, and would have been a very strange twist indeed if I had gone through this site unscathed only to be murdered afterward by a random encounter with a psychotic hick.
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