Abandoned Letchworth Village
February 3, 2020
Letchworth Village, established 1911 in Rockland County, New York, is a decaying farm colony that was once a progressive solution to caring for the physically and mentally disabled. And like Staten Island’s Willowbrook State School, the hospital’s treatment of its most vulnerable patients –children– prompted major legislative reforms in the care of people with disabilities. In fact, the same exposé that documented the horrid conditions at Willowbrook also shed light on conditions at Letchworth Village. With physically, emotionally and socially malnourished children utilized as medical experiments and left to sit about neglected and forgotten, both state-run establishments had much in common. But Letchworth Village’s misery remains palpable still, decades later, as its expansive campus decays in Thiells, New York.
I visited and spent a good deal of time within the walls of the remaining structures. An eerie tension stuck with me as I photographed its grounds and remained in me when I got back to my apartment. Despite my discomfort, the photographs are my favorite yet of all my abandoned explorations. Many of the easily accessible buildings are equally as easy to enter. Equipment and belongings remain as does years of vandalism. Forthcoming is another post about the institution’s Potter’s Field, which I visited afterwards. Both stops are fascinating and sad, a mood I hope I may have captured below.
The Computer Lab
Star-spangled hell
They already forgot
A profanity-laced mattress with a pile of new condoms and lubricants on it. I’ll admit that encountering this in an unsecured abandoned building on my own shook me up. I need to take less risks.
With that, I walked swiftly to my car. Done.
It was an exhausting day of exploration and I felt drained of my creative energy, my sunny disposition, upon leaving Letchworth. Some say the buildings are haunted. Maybe. All I know for sure is that something came home with me from Letchworth Village. When I closed lights to go to bed that evening, I was uneasy. I had never experienced that before. I think I need to balance my penchant for macabre subject matter with some portrait photography. Yeah, that’ll be fun!
[…] Letchworth Village‘s cemetery, like that of many state-run institutions, marks its graves with nothing but a number. No dates, no names. The state policy adopted by the Office of Mental Health is to keep burial records for state mental hospitals confidential. But this practice is dated and marked with indignity, like many of the practices of care during the times these large state institutions housed the mentally ill–Lunatics, imbeciles, feeble-minded, and other such words to describe those misfortunate enough to require a support and care unavailable at the time of their operation. This was not sitting right with community members who wanted a means to remember those who had endured an identity-less life by the hands of The State. This plaque was erected to give names to those forgotten no longer, as another marble bench notes. I visited to pay my respects to the patients tucked away in a layer of institutionalized madness. […]