On a quiet stretch of Long Island’s north shore, a thirteen-story brick tower rises above the treeline, visible to sailors navigating the Long Island Sound. For decades, it served as a landmark, though it was never a lighthouse and never a hotel. It is Building 93, the tallest structure ever built inside an American psychiatric hospital, and it has stood sealed and empty for more than thirty years. As of this year, the state of New York has begun the paperwork to tear it down.
Behind that tower lies the ruin of something far larger than a hospital. At its peak, Kings Park Psychiatric Center was a self-contained town. It generated its own electricity, ran its own farm with a dairy herd and slaughterhouse, operated its own bakery, tailor shop, and fire department. It had its own stop on the Long Island Railroad, a private spur that carried supplies and coal directly onto the grounds, and two marinas along its waterfront.
At its height, the institution held more than 9,000 patients at once, a population larger than most of the incorporated towns around it. The staff was so large that locals said Kings Park was the only place in the country the Great Depression never seemed to reach, because the hospital simply kept hiring. The story begins in Brooklyn in the 1880s, when the city’s asylum at Flatbush was catastrophically overcrowded and state inspectors were taking notice. The prevailing idea in American psychiatric care at the time was the farm colony model.
Instead of concentrating patients inside a dense urban building, the theory went, move them to open land, put them to work farming, and let fresh air and physical labor do what medicine could not. Work was considered treatment in itself. A patient hoeing a field was deemed to be participating in his own recovery. In 1885, officials representing Kings County purchased 873 acres of farmland and woodland on the north shore of Long Island, in a rural area then known as Indian Head.
The new institution opened as the Kings County Asylum, later renamed the Kings County Farm. Its first buildings were deliberately modest: just three wooden cottages housing 55 patients, an explicit rejection of the crowded, high-rise asylum model planners considered inhumane. Within a few years, sixteen cottages stood on the property alongside a laundry, a heating plant, and a barn, housing around 450 patients who spent their days working the fields, tending livestock, and helping construct the very buildings that would house the next wave of arrivals. A meaningful share of the campus was literally built by the hands of the people it was built to confine.
The nearby rail station had originally carried a different name, connected to a neighboring charitable community called Saint Johnland, founded by an Episcopal minister named William Augustus Muhlenberg. When the Long Island Railroad used the Saint Johnland name without permission, a dispute followed, and the station was renamed Kings Park after the asylum itself. The surrounding hamlet, once called Indian Head, eventually adopted the same name. The town of Kings Park, New York, quite literally took its name from the psychiatric hospital that built the railroad station the town grew up around.
The farm colony’s early idealism did not survive contact with its own success. By the 1890s, the overcrowding the institution had been built to relieve had reproduced itself on the new site. A state inspection in 1893 delivered a damning verdict: the buildings were unsuitable and unhygienic, facilities inadequate, clothing insufficient and of poor quality, and food often unfit for human consumption. This was a brand new institution, barely eight years old, already failing the basic standards it had been founded specifically to correct.
In 1895, amid mounting complaints about corruption and mismanagement, control of the asylum passed from Kings County to the state of New York, and the institution was renamed the Long Island State Hospital. It went through several more names over the following decades, becoming Kings Park State Hospital in 1905, before settling on Kings Park Psychiatric Center in the mid-1970s. Whatever it was called, the institution kept growing. By 1925, the campus had grown to more than 150 separate buildings scattered across the property.
The infrastructure the state built to keep this small city running explains why locals stopped thinking of Kings Park as merely a hospital. The institution generated its own electricity from an on-site power plant, burning coal delivered directly to the grounds by its private rail spur. It ran its own waterworks and sewage system, entirely independent of surrounding utilities. It operated a working farm, a piggery, a butcher shop, and a bakery.
It had its own tailor shop, its own morgue, its own cemetery, and its own fire department. Many staff lived on the grounds, raising families inside the boundary of the institution. Children born to hospital employees might grow up and never live anywhere but inside the shadow of the wards their parents worked in. As the patient population climbed relentlessly through the first half of the 20th century, the state made a decision that directly contradicted the founding philosophy of the entire farm colony model.
If the whole point had been to avoid the crowded vertical asylum building, the state’s answer to overcrowding by the late 1930s was to build the largest, most vertical structure the institution had ever seen. Construction began in the late 1930s on a thirteen-story tower designed by state architect William E. Haugaard and funded through the Works Progress Administration. Designated simply as Building 93, it was completed in 1939, intended primarily as an infirmary and long-term care facility for the institution’s elderly and chronically ill patients.
At its peak, it housed more than 1,200 patients inside a single structure. It was, in a very real sense, the physical admission that the farm colony’s founding ideal had failed. After the Second World War, the patient population surged even further, driven by returning veterans and admission standards broad enough to sweep in far more than what any modern definition of severe mental illness would recognize. In 1954, the patient census at Kings Park reached its all-time peak: 9,303 people held inside a complex that had swelled past 150 buildings.
The people committed to Kings Park included the genuinely psychotic and severely mentally ill, but also vagrants picked up off city streets, alcoholics, people with epilepsy, orphans and runaway teenagers with no other institution willing to take them, and immigrants. The asylum functioned less as a targeted medical facility and more as society’s catchall, the place every category of person judged inconvenient, unwanted, or simply unclassifiable elsewhere in the system eventually ended up. Daily life inside the wards followed a rigid institutional rhythm built around labor, medication, and treatments that a modern reader will recognize from other institutions. By the time the population reached its 1954 peak, the old rest-and-relaxation philosophy had been succeeded by far more invasive techniques: prefrontal lobotomies and electroshock therapy, administered on a scale that reached deep into the general patient population.
The lobotomy procedure involved inserting a thin metal instrument through the patient’s eye socket and into the skull cavity to sever connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain. Patients who survived often emerged permanently flattened in affect, stripped of the emotional range that had defined them as individuals. Electroshock therapy, administered without the safeguards that govern its modern use, could trigger convulsions violent enough to fracture bones. Patients were strapped to treatment tables specifically because the seizures were powerful enough to throw an unrestrained body into dangerous movement.
Ward staff working these sessions in the 1940s and 1950s often had no specialized psychiatric training whatsoever. One of Kings Park’s most surprising commitments connects this quiet stretch of Long Island directly to Broadway and Hollywood. John Buckmaster was an English stage and film actor, the son of the celebrated actress Dame Gladys Cooper. In February of 1952, shortly after finishing a critically acclaimed Broadway run, Buckmaster suffered a severe mental breakdown, was arrested carrying two knives, taken to Bellevue Hospital for evaluation, and committed to Kings Park.
His release was secured through the direct personal intervention of the actor Jack Merivale and the playwright Noel Coward, both of whom had known Buckmaster through his mother’s circles. One former patient’s account has done more than any other to bring King’s Park’s internal reality to a wider audience. Lucy Winer was seventeen years old on June 21, 1967, when she was committed to the female violent ward following a series of suicide attempts. Winer later became a documentary filmmaker, and more than thirty years after her discharge, she returned to make a feature-length documentary about her own commitment and the institution’s legacy.
In the film, she describes conditions in specific detail: patients were permitted exactly one shower per week, and the shower stalls had no doors. She describes her time as terrifying and harrowing, and recalls the sensation of being medicated with Thorazine, the powerful antipsychotic, as feeling like wearing a lead suit. Winer’s film also returns to an overgrown, largely unmarked area of the property that served as the institution’s own burial ground, a potter’s field where patients whose families could not be located or would not claim them were buried, frequently without a name attached to the grave. To this day, the New York State Office of Mental Health has never released a complete public list of the patients interred there.
The turn away from Kings Park’s peak population began not with a policy reform or court ruling, but with a chemical breakthrough. Thorazine, introduced into widespread American clinical use in the mid-1950s, gave physicians for the first time a pharmaceutical tool capable of managing the acute symptoms of psychosis without surgery or prolonged physical restraint. Nationally, the population held inside American state and county psychiatric hospitals peaked at roughly 558,000 people in 1955 and within three decades had fallen by more than 90 percent. Combined with a broader national shift toward deinstitutionalization, Kings Park’s population began a steady, then accelerating decline from its 1954 peak.
By the early 1970s, that number had already been cut by more than half. By the early 1990s, the once-teeming campus held only a few hundred patients. Building 93 became a visible symbol of that retreat. Beginning in the 1970s, the tower’s upper floors began closing one after another.
By the early 1990s, only the first four floors remained in active use. The building closed entirely in 1992, and its utilities were formally shut off in 1993, three years before the rest of the hospital followed it into closure. In November of 1996, the last patients still remaining at Kings Park were transferred out, and the state formally closed the institution, ending 111 consecutive years of operation. The last executive director would later describe deinstitutionalization in blunt terms as a failed policy, not because closing institutions like Kings Park was wrong in principle, but because it was carried out too hastily, without the community infrastructure in place to catch the population being released.
Some former patients transitioned successfully into group homes and outpatient treatment. Others ended up homeless or cycling through jails and emergency rooms, a pattern researchers would later describe as transinstitutionalization: the relocation of the same population from one kind of confinement to another, less visible one. What happened to the buildings after closure is its own story. By 2000, the state had converted the bulk of the property into the Nissequogue River State Park, a 522-acre public space.
The old private railroad spur that once carried coal onto the grounds was converted in 2003 into a section of public hike-and-bike trail. But the park’s recreational areas exist alongside a scattered ruin of institutional buildings the state has never fully resolved. In 2011, the state released $14 million for the first phase of cleanup, calling for the demolition of nineteen buildings and their connecting underground tunnels. Of the roughly 150 structures that once stood on the property, only sixteen buildings today retain individual eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places.
Building 93 itself sits completely sealed and empty, described by state park officials in the blunt language of a liability rather than a landmark: asbestos-containing materials, lead-based paint, floors that have collapsed in places, open elevator shafts dropping through all thirteen stories, and a documented risk of structural collapse. Park police actively patrol the grounds, particularly around Halloween, when the building’s reputation draws urban explorers and thrill-seekers. That standoff appears finally to be ending through demolition. The master plan governing the future of the park has formally selected the demolition of Building 93 as its preferred outcome, and the state has begun soliciting engineering and architectural firms to conduct the environmental assessment, hazardous materials abatement planning, and structural evaluation required before the tower can legally come down.
There is a small museum on the grounds today, the Kings Park Heritage Museum, run by local historical volunteers rather than the state, housed in one of the surviving structures and staffed largely by former hospital employees and their families. The museum preserves photographs, patient artifacts, staff uniforms, and oral histories before that history disappears along with the buildings that housed it. Kings Park Psychiatric Center is not, in the end, a story about a haunted building. It is the story of what happens when a society decides that the correct response to human suffering, poverty, difference, and illness is to build a self-contained city large enough to make 9,000 people disappear from public view at once, and to keep that city running for 111 years before finally admitting that warehousing was never the same thing as treatment.
The tower is coming down. The farm fields are a state park now, walked by joggers and bird watchers. The potter’s field still has no public list of names attached to it.
And somewhere in the paperwork moving through Albany right now, engineers are drawing up the final plans to remove, floor by floor, the last visible piece of a small city that once held more people than most of the towns around it, and that the state built, filled, and then quietly, gradually, tried to make disappear.