Rockland State Hospital
The overgrown campus of Rockland State Hospital, demolished in 2018.
Updated July 23, 2019 | By Matthew Christopher
Rockland State Hospital was born in tragedy: after a 1924 fire at Ward's Island where patients burned alive, Orangeburg, NY was selected as the site of a new facility to relieve overcrowding in other psychiatric hospitals. Considered the best planned hospital in the world, Rockland State Hospital opened in 1931 andgrew quickly; its 600-acre campus would go from treating 5,768 to over 9,000 patients.
As with many state hospitals, many qualified personnel were drafted in World War II, leaving only untrained and sometimes dangerous staff available. Disease, abuse, and neglect flourished, and desperate measures to control the populace like hydrotherapy, lobotomies, and insulin shock treatment came and went. Eventually, the rise of psychotropic medications allowed the push for deinstitutionalization to gain steam. By the 1970s most of the patients had been discharged and while there were still outpatient treatment facilities, most of the campus was abandoned. Renamed Rockland Psychiatric Center, a few of the unused buildings were reused (including, rather bizarrely, Kid's Corner Day Care Center, which was later abandoned itself), but most were left in ruins.
Once said to be one of the largest intact psychiatric facilities in the United States, Rockland State Hospital is no more: in 2018 the campus was unceremoniously razed after a sale to JPMorgan Chase for $7.5 million, and will become the site of a data center.
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