The Rise And Fall Of The Farm At Creedmoor Psychiatric Center

It’s hard to get to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center from Manhattan, Brooklyn and Western Queens—and once you get there it’s harder still to find your way back. The nearest subway station is a 40-minute bus ride away, and although Queens Village is dotted with tidy houses and neat little lawns, a high, unclimbable fence separates Creedmoor’s patients from their impeccable neighbors.

The mental institution owes its name to the Creed family, who in the 1800s farmed a large range of marshy land (“moor”) in Queens Village. With financial support from New York state, the National Rifle Association purchased the Creed’s Farm in 1872. For roughly two decades the land was used for target training and housed the New York State National Guard. There once was a Creedmoor Village train station and even a Creedmoor Range Hotel. But with more and more people moving into the area, the number of complaints about shooting accidents increased. (The Bayside Times later reported that the state used to pay $65 for every cow or horse that was accidentally shot.) In 1891 the state took over the land and the NRA moved their competitions to Seagirt, New Jersey. Today only some of the street names––Sabre, Musket and Range—remind us of Creedmoor’s early history.
In 1912, the Lunacy Commission of New York State established “the farm colony” for the Long Island State Hospital (now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center) on the old Creedmoor land. The move exemplified the idealistic philosophy of an era that was soon to end. The institution aimed to be self-sustaining; fresh air and physical labor were believed to help cure patients from their mental torments. But within a few decades a lack of resources and overcrowding turned Creedmoor into a living hell.

By 1918, 150 patients lived in abandoned National Guards barracks on campus, cultivating surrounding fields and harvesting vegetables for the hospital’s kitchen. In the 1920s and ’30s a storehouse, a firehouse, a kitchen and mess hall and residential units for patients and staff were added. Creedmoor became its own little village far from the rest of the world. By the 1940s it was New York City’s largest hospital for the mentally ill and the fifth largest in the nation. By the early 1960s it housed more than 7,000 patients. Then, following America’s mass deinstitutionalization, Creedmoor’s population dropped dramatically. Today the institution houses some 340 inpatients, and provides psychiatric, psychological and occupational treatment to some 1,700 outpatients. Some of them live on campus, others share their apartments with mentally-ill roommates. Very few live with family.

While Creedmoor’s in-house publication The Creedmoor Times worked on presenting a flawless image of life behind hospital walls, the press would periodically divulge horrifying reports of disease, squalor, understaffing, patient abuse, rape, drug dealing and murderers escaping from supposedly closed wards. Then suddenly, in the late ’80s, the media grew eerily quiet.

Wedged between the large, busy roads of Hillside Avenue, Winchester Boulevard and Cross Island Parkway, Creedmoor has long been a dumping ground for the weak and unwanted. In 1975 its actual farmland, about one mile northeast of today’s Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, was auctioned off to the parks department; three years later the Queens County Farm Museum, which to this day includes some of Creedmoor’s original farm buildings, was established. Many of the buildings on Creedmoor’s campus were abandoned, and twice plans were made to turn some of its derelict buildings into prisons. In 1983, the Department of Sanitation planned to open a parking garage directly behind Creedmoor’s Children’s Pavillion. Shortly after, a homeless shelter was opened on campus. Over the last three decades of the 20th century, pieces of unused land were sold to real estate developers and to local Little Leagues.

Today, Creedmoor’s grounds are home to a potpourri of state and city agencies and nonprofits, including the Office of Mental Health, the Office of General Services, the Department of Sanitation, the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities and SNAP (Services Now for Adult Persons). Between several residential buildings for the mentally ill stands a day care center with the Pollyannaish name “Bright Beginnings.” On its website, Bright Beginnings praises Creedmoor’s campus as “spacious [and] park-like,” offering “ample space and opportunity for walks and other activities.” It does not mention the big ghostly buildings that are overgrown with ivy and serve as homes to feral cats and raccoons.

Smack in the center of Creedmoor’s sprawling campus, surrounded by an army of tan brick buildings, lies a small plot of land. Until recently, it housed a family of white rabbits and a flock of turkeys and chickens. In the spring, crocusses and daffodils crane their necks as if looking back to an era that has long ceased to exist. It is here that my story begins.