Row of Ward Doors, Kings Park Psychiatric Center

Kings Park Psychiatric Center opened in 1885 as the Kings Park State Hospital, growing over the decades into a sprawling campus of more than 150 buildings on the north shore of Long Island. At its peak in the early 1950s, the facility housed over 9,000 patients, many held in dense wards connected by long corridors lined with individual doors like these. Changes in psychiatric care, including the introduction of new medications and a national push toward deinstitutionalization, drove steady population declines from the 1960s onward. The hospital closed for good in 1996, and its buildings have sat empty since, gradually giving way to peeling paint, collapsing ceilings, and decay.

Photo taken in September 2008.