Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital

The Kings Park Psychiatric Center was established in 1885 by Kings County in nearby Suffolk County on Long Island. The official name of the hospital in its first 10 years was the Kings County Asylum, taken from the name of the county that Brooklyn occupied. The hospital was revolutionary at the time in the sense that it was a departure from the asylums of folklore, which were overcrowded places where gross human rights abuse often occurred. The asylum, built by Brooklyn to alleviate overcrowding in its own asylums, was a “farm colony” asylum, where patients worked in a variety of farm-related activities, such as feeding livestock and growing food, as this was considered to be a form of therapy.

Eventually, the Kings County Asylum began to suffer from the very thing that it attempted to relieve overcrowding. New York State eventually responded to the problem in 1895, when control of the asylum passed into state hands, and it was renamed the Kings Park State Hospital. The surrounding community, which used to be known as Indian Head, adopted the name “Kings Park,” by which it is still known today. The state eventually built the hospital into a self-sufficient community that not only grew its own food, but also generated its own heat and electricity, had its own Long Island Rail Road spur, and housed its staff on-site.

As patient populations grew throughout the early part of the 20th century, the hospital continued to expand. By the late 1930s, the state began to build upward instead of outward. During this period, the famous 13-story Building 93 was constructed. Designed by state architect William E. Haugaard and funded with Works Progress Administration money, the building, often dubbed “the most famous asylum building on Long Island,” was completed in 1939. It was used as an infirmary for the facility’s geriatric patients, as well as for patients with chronic physical ailments.

After World War II, patient populations at Kings Park and the other Long Island asylums grew dramatically. In 1954, the patient census at Kings Park reached 9,303 but would begin a steady decline afterward. It was at this time that Kings Park Hospital had a larger population than its neighboring city. By the time Kings Park reached its peak patient population, the old “rest and relaxation” philosophy surrounding farming had been succeeded by more invasive techniques of pre-frontal lobotomies and electroshock therapy. However, those methods were soon abandoned after 1955, following the introduction of Thorazine, the first widely used drug in the treatment of mental illness. In addition, activists worked in legal suits through the 1970s to reduce the patient population in major institutions, arguing that people could better be supported in smaller community centers.

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