Rusted Door Frames Along a Ward Hallway at Kings Park

Kings Park Psychiatric Center opened in 1885 as the Kings Park State Hospital, part of a wave of New York institutions built to treat the mentally ill under the era's "farm colony" model, where patients worked the grounds as part of their care. At its peak in the 1950s, the campus held more than 9,000 patients across dozens of buildings connected by tunnels and covered walkways. Deinstitutionalization policies and the rise of outpatient psychiatric care drained the population through the 1960s and '70s, and the state closed the hospital in 1996. Many of the original ward buildings, with their plaster walls and cast-iron radiators, have sat untouched since, left to the slow work of moisture and time.