Kings Park Psychiatric Center
From Wikipedia: “The Kings Park Psychiatric Center is a former state-run psychiatric hospital located in Kings Park, New York. It operated from 1885 until 1996, when the State of New York closed the facility down, either releasing its few remaining patients or transferring them to the still-operational Pilgrim Psychiatric Center.”
Saturday after work the parents and I went to a friends house for a BBQ. My pseudo-cousin* Josh and his girlfriend left shortly after to perform at a childrens party, they returned home later that night, and after the girlfriend left to party all night, Josh said he and some friends were going up to see an old abandoned mental institution. He asked if I wanted to come. The catch, I had to stay over and get up early the next morning to leave early and get there in time.
The next morning, after a nice 5 hours of sleep we awoke and left from Pendell PA for Smithtown/Kings Park on Long Island. After a fun long drive up the NJ Turnpike we arrived in the small town train station and set out to make our way in.
Kings Park Psychiatric Center was closed in 1996, and since then it has fallen into horrible disrepair. It’s been 11 years and it shows. Not because of nature taking over, but because of vandals and so-called “pipe thieves” (People who steal copper pipes from abandoned buildings for resale.) have decided to make it their own. And treat it much like I imagine they treat their own rooms at home.
Our tour for today was Building 93, the Geriatric/Ambulatory Infirmary. It is 13 stories tall, the tallest of the lot. And until the new hospital, the tallest building in town.
In order to get to Building 93, we started our tour at the what is known as the Quad. (Buildings 41, 42 and 43) 93 is surrounded by a tall fence. So underground infiltration was required. We didn’t get to explore much of the Quad as we made our way in through a forced open window in a well on the side of Building 42, which serves as the connection between the other two symmetric buildings.) Quickly after entering the building and wandering in a basement we found our way into the tunnels. Long tunnels that go under much of the complex.
Our first stop on the tour was the Power Plant. A coal based plant that used to serve electricity and steam to all the buildings. Of course, it’s not functional now as is nothing at all hardly (Aside from a few alarms in some other buildings.) We looked around for a little while, but I am dismayed to say we didn’t discover the best room until it was too late. Will explain later…
When we entered, I found something called a “Flow Meter” on a shelf. It was big and blocky with a meter in it. It looked brand new, but I picked it up anyway. I carried it for a while but eventually let it behind as we had to actually do a lot of climbing through asbestos filled tunnels with no working elevators and lots of missing ladders and stairs. But fortunately before we left, Josh gave me a phone…
We were on our way, back down the next tunnel. After a lot of slippery turns and climbs and dangerously dark tunnels we made our way into a dark room with bed frames. We had finally made it into Building 93! Our first task was to make it easier for ourselves. We climbed all 13 floors! Skipping passed identical floor after nearly identical floor we made it to the one floor that didn’t look the same. The attic. Where the piping and elevator controls were kept. After exploring the heck out of this floor, including the elevator control motor room we went down. To the first floor.. well, 12th floor. Or 11th. Not sure. The building from the outside has 11 floors with windows, a smaller 12th floor without windows (Possibly attic?) which would make the 13th either that attic with a basement underground that is considered the first floor, or it’s the two towers which house the elevator controls. Either way, we made our way down. Floor 11 I’ll call it.
Every floor was nearly identical layout wise, but each had different feels. Not only design and color, but debris and vandalism. When we got to floor 9, we were amused to find something I really wish I had taken a photo of. Some handy impressive chair arranging. Chairs, all of the chairs, apparently most of the chairs in the entire building, were arranged all over the place. One hall had chairs sitting up on the railings, some rooms had them hanging on the pipes above or on tables. It was an impressive feat of “art vandalism”. Since they didn’t steal the chairs that no one would want anyway, they just “arranged” them in an artistic fashion. I really wish I could go back and take a photo.
Aside from that, every room had peeling and cracking lead paint and some form of graffito-tagging. From tags, logos of so-called gang members to people who just wanted to make their mark, everyone seemed to have written something somewhere. Hell, myself, Josh and the girlfriend included all left our own marks. My logo is a JMA connected together, I put them on some of the higher mid levels if you want to find them. I also placed a link to the site in one room, and some quotes in others. “This is a tasty burger” is mine if you find it.
Others had more clever slogans. Like “Others will leave. Others never go. Some stay for the pie.” was pretty good. I especially liked this one…
The way the building is laid out, the further down you go, the bigger the “day rooms” get. You notice this when looking at its stepped features. A side note, and this gets a bit nasty, but there is a lot of feces in the buildings. A lot. Piles of it in weird places. As if it were purposely placed there. Not animal either. Human. Maybe from the pipes. Maybe some sick vandals love fecal art. I dunno. Coupled with the asbestos dust all over the place, this was a trip not everyone would want to take.
When we finally got to the first floor, we found out that there were two halves to the building and the skipping of the locked door to the stairwell we had to bypass was unneeded since the opposite end had a perfectly opened door. Oh well, live and learn. This was the only way to the first floor, which is the one we came in on. So we explored the first floor for a while. By explored, I mean “wandered aimlessly trying t remember how we got in”. Since there was not one exit, and even if there was one opened, the fence would keep us in and the wandering patrols would catch us. So it was tunnels for us again. Eventually we remembered, the dark room with the bed frames and the word “Bitch” on the wall. It was time to leave. As we got ready to leave, some people poked up through our exit! Fortunately it wasn’t the police. Because, hell, would the police REALLY want to get their uniforms dirty and climb the hell out of the tunnels? No! In fact, as long as they don’t have reason to, they won’t enter any of the main buildings with the exception of Building 7, the hospital. The one we really should have gone to. Hopefully next time. It was just some other people. Mostly girls, making their way to floor 7. Or so they said. Hey, I don’t ask questions, let’s just hope they don’t need a chair as those are all on 9.
Back into the tunnels we went and back to the power plant we went. One of our group decided to wander off. And I wish I had gone with him. Remember that room I mentioned above? He found the one room I would have been ecstatic to see. The computer room! As we were trying to find him on the second and third floors, I saw him come out of the computer room on the first floor. Sadly we were in a crunch as the girlfriend had to babysit at 5 and the police apparently patrol constantly at 3, plus it was 2PM and we had a more than 3 hour drive ahead of us. So we had to skip it. And I am disappointed. But I will not let them skip it next time. Whenever that is.
So we rushed back down the tunnels to the Quad basement and found our way back out through the broken window well and back through the woods to the path and made our way to the car and back home. Long drive up, long drive back. We stopped at the Vince Lombardi rest stop for fast food, which I didn’t eat any, go me, and made our way home.
I really wish I had known ahead of time of our trip. It was completely a spur of the moment decision the night before. Had I known, I would have brought a camera, both photo and video, as well as a flashlight and maybe another jacket. It was cold for most of the day, and wandering the halls as we got back to the lower floors and open space it got colder. Though by the time we left the Quad it was sunny as summer out. So go figure.
Here is a site with more photos from 2003.
A site with more photos.
* By “pseudo-cousin” I mean child of our godparents, friends of the family since my parents were in high school. As close as you can get to being relatives without being relatives.
I found out later that night from my sister found out Josh had an accident on the way home in Philly after dropping off the other two party members. Some moron drunk driver hit him with a fucking child in the back seat! The child is apparently okay, so is Josh, just a broken right arm, and I don’t give a crap about the driver of the other car. A fucking child! WTF? Sorry, but what the fuck? Drunk? With a child? God, I feel bad for the child. I hope it gets put somewhere safe. Away from the moron drunk mom or dad. I am sorry. But geeze.
I’m Sticking With FireFox
I just can’t go back to Safari. For all FireFox’s quirks, its lack of suckage makes up for it.
To celebrate, let’s all have some porcupine pie!
Switching to Firefox for a Week…
I’ve decided to switch to FireFox 3 Beta for a week. I have been a solid Safari user and supporter since it came out, but the latest versions have all been horrible. Terrible even. Always beachballing and freezing up causing slowdown and making the OS run sluggish.
In the half hour I’ve used FireFox I’ve noticed quite an improvement over Safari. So I will use it for a week. After that time I will decide whether or not to keep it or go back to Safari.
Some pros:
It looks nice. Very Safari-ish. Clean and streamlined. After setting the icons to small and getting rid of the huge oversized back button it looks almost liike Safari from the future.
It’s fast. To me it feels much better than Safari. No beachballs. No slowdown. Nothing but browsing bliss.
It brought in all my Safari bookmarks. I don’t have too many, a few sites here and there all neatly organized. First thing I did when I opened Firefox was DELETE ALL THE STOCK BOOKMARKS, all of them, and import Safari’s back in again. Clean, fresh, none of that shitty “New PC, here’s a bunch of crap software we install by default because the companies paid us to do it but you can remove it if you fell like a few hours of deleting software you never wanted in the first place” feel anymore. I’m a Mac user. I like it simple. So long default bookmarks! Sayonara!
Some cons: (Maybe they can be remedied)
I miss my vast history. I had every page I visited for the last year in my history. I could open OS X’s Help menu and search my history to find anything I was previously looking at. Obviously I can still do that with Firefox, but it only imported my bookmarks, not my history. But such is life.
It’s not WebKit. Call me crazy, but I get off on how something looks. I can tell if an icon is a pixel wrong or if a page looks a pixel off between browsers, I was used to Safari’s CSS3 effects and shadows and such. Also, I was used to Safari’s lack of “focus rings” (i.e. those dotted lines that form around links when clicked.) and to now have them back and burning my eyes is just a small complaint. If something looks wrong, I will make it look right or damned if I put up with it.
I miss Inquisitor. More often than not, I will type something in Safari’s “Search” box and hit Shift+Return (My key combo for searching Wikipedia instead of Google.) to open it in Wikipedia. This allowed me to search normally, or search Wikipedia on a whim without having to change an option. Now, Firefox does allow me to switch between searching each site, but that actually means I have to manually change it. I’m a lazy son of a bitch. I want my shortcuts dammit!
In a week I expect to write up whether or not I will stay.
Save the Clock Tower!
Watching Back to the Future (The whole thing) again a thought crosses my mind, as it does every time I watch the movies. Why in all those years could they not afford to save the clock tower? Replacing a clock can’t be that expensive. Not only had they been raising money for 60+ years (From 1955 when it was struck by lightning to at least 2015 at which point they were taking in hundreds of dollars in donations per person as opposed to the pocket change they were getting in 1985. If not since 1955, then at least since 1985.) but a clock like that couldn’t have cost that much.
Sure it’s a big clock. It’s about 8 feet in diameter or so, but it’s still the same components as a normal gear-based clock mechanism.
The clock tower was installed in 1885 and struck by lightning in 1955 causing it to stop. Now how did it stop? In 1885 it was probably, most likely powered by a pendulum. No electricity. If they kept it pendulum powered until the 1950’s then logically, could lightning stop the clock? Now, it could have been damaged, maybe a gear was broken by the force of the lightning hitting the tower. If so, a gear would be a lot less costly than a whole clock, right? Now, if they did switch to electricity in the early 20th century, logically couldn’t they still afford to replace the electric motor?
It looks like a fairly simple clock. Nothing special and elaborate. Just a clock with big gears and big hands. If they wanted the clock to stay stopped for historical reasons, there wouldn’t be a fundraiser running to fix it.
The logical answer to this question? Plot device. Still, other than to provide Marty with a piece of paper to write Jennifer’s number on (If she’s his girlfriend, why doesn’t he already have her number?) and give Marty and Doc a means to return to 1985, there’s no reason. Plot device.
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