Greenpoint Nurses' Residence: Inside Brooklyn's Abandoned Quarters

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1940s Greenpoint Hospital Campus Tax Photo There is a certain kind of quiet that only abandoned buildings have. Not peaceful, quiet. More like held-breath quiet. The kind that makes you hyper-aware of every footstep, every creak, every shadow shifting at the edge of your vision. I found that quiet on a cloudy afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, standing outside a chain-link fence and looking up at the old Nurse Quarters of Greenpoint Hospital. I had stumbled onto the building almost by accident. I was deep into researching other vacant structures across the borough when the Nurses' Residence turned up on the blogs. The fact that it sat close to home made the decision easy. One overcast day, I drove slowly down the block on a hunch, scanning the fence line. That is when I spotted it: a gap, barely noticeable unless you were looking for it. No rope. No gear. Just an opening and a window of time between passing cars and foot traffic. I slipped inside. The entrance foyer stopped me cold...
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Oil Facility Lane #1






Open gate, open invitation in my book.
















Open invitations just scream come right in and explore the place. If open gates give you pause then your thinking wrong because I strolled right in like I owned the place. Entering the doorway I hear the raging waters of a burst pipe filling the basement with drinkable water unknown to the owners and city.












Climbing the stairs to my left were oil meters and switch boxes used to dispense and assess how much petroleum oil was leaving the site and on site. To my right was the thrashed records room by the looks of it due to the huge amount of papers scattered all over the ground. Heading upstairs more office space opened up. Better in appearance then downstairs, the office cubicles contained various old computer equipment and bookkeeping records. Nothing of unique note inside an administrative floor of a fuel facility.




A three-bay garage attachment.














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