Freight Elevator and Ward Doorway, Kings Park Psychiatric Center

Kings Park Psychiatric Center opened in 1885 as the Kings Park State Hospital, built to relieve overcrowding at Brooklyn's asylums and to test a farm-colony model of care that put patients to work in agriculture and trades. The campus grew to more than 150 buildings across 900-plus acres on Long Island's north shore, with its own power plant, farms, and rail spur for deliveries and coal. Population peaked near 9,300 patients in the early 1950s, making it one of the largest psychiatric institutions in the country at the time. Deinstitutionalization policies and the shift toward outpatient care led to a steady decline in the following decades, and the facility closed in 1996. New York State has left most of the campus vacant since then, and many structures, including patient wards fitted with freight elevators for moving supplies between floors, have sat exposed to decades of water damage and decay.

Photo taken in September 2008.