Kings Park Psychiatric Center: The Abandoned Long Island Asylum

Kings Park and the Education of an Explorer

Every pursuit has a place where beginners go first. Skateboarders have their parking lots and curbs. Climbers have their local crags. And if you are just finding your way into the world of urban exploration on Long Island, sooner or later someone points you toward Kings Park.

The former Kings Park Psychiatric Center has become, over the years, something like a finishing school for people who don't yet know they're enrolled. Getting onto the grounds is straightforward. Finding a way inside the remaining buildings, if you know where to look, is not much harder. Which is exactly why the Parks Police have written thousands of trespassing tickets here in a single calendar year, why security visibly tightens every Halloween, and why local photography groups have been known to show up with large, enthusiastic crowds of people who want to take what they call "creepy" photos of old hospital asylums. The place attracts everyone, which is both its charm and its limitation.

On any given afternoon during the summer, you might find people smoking on the roof, barbecuing on top of outlying structures, or drinking cheap beer while the late light falls across broken windows and over-saturated graffiti walls. It is, in a genuinely strange way, a community hub. A place to learn. A place to make your early mistakes in front of no one who will remember them.

It was all of those things for me, in the summer of 2016.

I came alone, which felt important at the time. A solo visit to prove something to myself, though I couldn't have told you exactly what. It was June, and the heat was the kind that makes everything feel slightly more desperate than it actually is. I moved around the perimeter, peering through shattered windows, testing doors that turned out to be sealed and shuttered. Most of the obvious entry points had been addressed. It took patience and some wandering before I found a smaller outbuilding I can no longer name, the memory having blurred over nine years, that let me through. I made my way inside and traced the interior back to the main wing, looking out through openings that had once been windows and were now just holes in the wall with views onto where I'd just been walking.

Then I went to Building 93.

Everyone eventually goes to Building 93. The 13-story former infirmary is the monument at the center of the Kings Park experience, the building that appears in every photo set, that everyone who has ever come here has climbed through. The hallways are thick with the particular dust of a long-abandoned institutional building: asbestos particulate, crushed lead paint, decades of settled grime. I was aware of this in a general way and pushed through it with the confidence of someone who has fully reckoned with what they're breathing.

I was also still learning my camera.

I had a Canon T3i and a brand-new Benro tripod, and I understood perhaps a third of what either piece of equipment was capable of doing. Aperture controls were still more theory than practice. My hands, fueled by heat and the particular anxiety of a new place, produced photographs that were technically uncertain in almost every direction. I had recently started building Lightroom presets modeled on the work of trashhand, a photographer whose style I admired without yet having the skills to approximate it. I was going out late into Manhattan for Sam's NYC Prime Shot midnight photography events, standing in the street at two in the morning with smoke grenades and models and other young photographers who were all figuring out their cameras together. Those were good nights. But this was a hot June afternoon in a broken building on Long Island, and I was still very much in the learning part of learning.

I climbed anyway. Up through a pit of broken furniture, desks, doors, and chairs piled into a general rubble, sweat moving from my chest to my shirt as I hauled myself up each staircase. Higher, and then higher again, until the stairs ran out and the roof opened up around me. From the top, I could see over the treetops in one direction and, in the other, look down through gaps in the roofline boards at people crossing the road below, entirely unaware they were being watched from thirteen stories up. There was also the pool: a standing rectangle of dark green water, algae-thick and shimmering in the direct sun, the unofficial swimming pool that shows up in every account of this building. In the heat, it looked almost inviting. It was not inviting.

I climbed back down, completed what I'd come to do, and walked out having seen New York's most famous and most visited psychiatric hospital. It was everything it was supposed to be, and I was nowhere near good enough, yet, to document it properly. That felt right.

I came back in December, this time with friends, and made a decision I have been thinking about in quiet moments ever since.

We returned to Building 93 first and set off Enola Gaye smoke grenades inside the HVAC room, which was exactly as dramatic as it sounds and very much its moment. Smoke bomb portraiture in abandoned buildings was having its cultural peak in 2016, as ubiquitous in certain photography circles as hanging your legs off a newly built Manhattan skyscraper once was. Everyone was doing it. We were doing it. The photographs looked incredible, and the air quality was not a consideration anyone raised.

Most explorers, including me, do not recognize that the painted murals inside this basement were painted by acclaimed comic strip creator and cartoonist Percy Crosby, a patient at the hospital.

At least one mural may have been preserved before being vandalized after 2008.

If I remember correctly, this was inside the Cube in Building 17.

We moved on to Building 7, known to regulars as the Cube, a roof structure that was demolished in 2017, though the 10-story building still stands. Finding no access that day, we returned to Building 93, and that's when someone suggested the tunnels.

The underground tunnel system connects the buildings across the campus, a network of service passages insulated with deteriorating pipe lagging and coated, over decades of disturbance, in ground-down asbestos dust. I knew, in a general way, what asbestos was. I knew, in a general way, what happened to people who breathed enough of it. I went in anyway. Nobody pressured me. Nobody convinced me. I just followed, because that is sometimes how the worst decisions happen, not from pressure but from momentum.

We moved through enclosed passages with no respiratory protection. At one point, someone pulled out an emergency flare, and we stopped for portraits in the orange light, testing locked tunnel exits that didn't open, breathing whatever was in the stagnant air around us. The photographs from that session were pretty striking. The air quality was genuinely not.

I bought a 3M P100 respirator shortly after. I've carried it everywhere I explore since then. Lesson learned, but the learning came after the exposure, which is the least useful possible order of operations. I know what I breathed in those tunnels. I know the latency period for what that kind of exposure can become. It's the kind of knowledge that sits quietly in the back of your mind on a long drive or a sleepless night and doesn't require much encouragement to surface.

After popping out of a tunnel exit into Building 7, its rooms vandalized in the same register as Building 93, and climbing to the Cube's roof for a different angle on the campus before calling it a day. It was, by any honest measure, a good day. The memory is real, and the company was good, and I would not give it back. But I would go back and put the respirator on before the tunnels. That part I would change.

The unofficial KPPC rooftop swimming pool.

Tunnel rats.

Kings Park Psychiatric Center opened in 1885 as the Kings County Farm, a rural retreat intended to house and treat patients from the overcrowded asylums of Brooklyn through a model of agricultural therapy. Patients worked the land. The institution grew steadily and was transferred to state control in 1895, renamed the Kings Park State Hospital. Over the following decades, it expanded into one of the largest psychiatric facilities in the country, eventually housing well over 9,000 patients at its peak in the 1950s. The campus at its height was a self-contained city, with its own power plant, farm, bakery, fire department, and railway spur.

The deinstitutionalization movement that swept American psychiatry from the 1960s onward reduced the patient population steadily. The hospital closed in 1996. Buildings were shuttered, equipment left behind, records sealed. The grounds passed to the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, which manages the site as part of Nissequogue River State Park. Several buildings have been demolished since then. Others have been set on fire, some accidentally, some not. What remains still stands largely as it was left, which is to say: open to interpretation and open, in various ways, to the public.

Plans announced in 2023 envision converting the old York Hall into an event venue and performance space, surrounded by a cluster of community amenities: dog parks, a farmer's market, playgrounds, a botanical garden, and a museum. The roof of York Hall was repaired for $400,000 in anticipation of the larger project. That larger project, estimated to require somewhere between $8 and $10 million, has not moved forward. Funding remains the obstacle. For now, the campus continues to function as it has for nearly three decades: part state park, part cautionary tale, part informal university for anyone curious enough to walk in.

I never made it to the other Long Island psychiatric centers, Pilgrim State or Central Islip. They are on the list, which is always getting longer.

But Kings Park was where it started for many explorers, and something is fitting about that. It's a place designed, almost accidentally, to absorb beginners: people who don't know the protocol yet, who are still learning their cameras, who need somewhere large enough and forgiving enough to make their early mistakes without consequences. The Parks Police will write you a ticket if they catch you. The buildings will give you a rash if you brush against the wrong wall. The roof will remind you how far down the ground is.

What it won't do is turn you away. And for someone just starting, that's more valuable than it sounds. What Kings Park gave me was a beginning- two of them, actually- and a lesson about preparation that came at a cost I won't fully know for years. Some educations are like that. You don't get the grade until much later, and by then there's nothing left to study for.

🧠 Did You Work or Live at Kings Park Psychiatric Center?

Whether you were staff on one of the wards, a former patient, or a family member who visited someone here over the decades — the stories from inside these buildings matter far more than anything a camera can capture. Kings Park housed thousands of New Yorkers across nearly a century of operation. If you have photographs, patient records, staff badges, or memories from the years when Building 93 still had a purpose beyond rooftop views, reach out. The Parks Police can ticket trespassers, but they can't ticket history.

📩 Share Your Story or drop a comment below — every contributor gets full credit

Search This Blog

Digital Ink'd

Kings Park Psychiatric Center: The Abandoned Long Island Asylum

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Samigon 35mm f/2.8 - Sample Review Two

Inside the Abandoned National Silk Dyeing Co.: Paterson's Forgotten Textile Mill

Inside Yonkers' Abandoned Glenwood Power Plant (Photos & History)

Nearpara Rubber Company: From Tire Reclaiming to Toxic Brownfield

Inside the Abandoned St. Michael and St. Edward Church in Brooklyn