Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disabilities located in the Willowbrook neighborhood of Staten Island in New York City from the 1930s until 1987.
The school was designed for 4,000, but by 1965 it had a population of 6,000. At the time it was the biggest state-run institution for the mentally handicapped in the United States.[1] Conditions and questionable medical practices and experiments prompted Sen. Robert Kennedy to call it a "snake pit."[2]
Public outcry led to its closure in 1987, and to federal civil rights legislation protecting the handicapped.
A portion of the grounds and some of the buildings were incorporated into the campus of the College of Staten Island, which moved to Willowbrook in the early 1990s. The rest of the buildings sit abandoned and dilapidated in the Staten Island Greenbelt.
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In 1938, plans were drawn up to build a facility for mentally disabled children on a 375 acres (1.52 km2) site in the Willowbrook section of Staten Island. Construction was completed in 1942, but instead of opening for its original purpose, it was converted into a United States Army hospital and named Halloran General Hospital, after the late Colonel Paul Stacey Halloran. After World War II, proposals were introduced to turn the site over to the Veterans Administration, but in October 1947, the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene opened its facility there as originally planned, and the institution was named Willowbrook State School.
Throughout the first decade of its operation, outbreaks of hepatitis were common at the school. Virtually all children developed hepatitis within six months, primarily hepatitis A. This led to a highly controversial medical study carried out there between the mid-1950s up to the 1970s by medical researchers Saul Krugman and Robert W. McCollum. Healthy children were intentionally inoculated, orally and by injection, with the virus that causes the disease, then monitored to gauge the effects of gamma globulin in combating it.[3] A public outcry forced the study to be discontinued.
By 1965, Willowbrook housed over 6,000 mentally disabled children, despite having a maximum capacity of 4,000. Senator Robert Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo" and offered a series of recommendations for improving conditions.[4] Although the hepatitis study had been discontinued, the residential school's reputation was that of a warehouse for New York City's mentally disabled children, many of whom were presumably abandoned there by their families, foster care agencies or other systems designed to care for them. Donna J. Stone, an advocate for mentally disabled children as well as victims of child abuse, gained access to the school by posing as a recent social work graduate. She then shared her observations with members of the press.[5]
A series of articles in local newspapers, including the Staten Island Advance and the Staten Island Register, described the crowded, filthy living conditions at Willowbrook, and the negligent treatment of some of its residents. Shortly thereafter, in early 1972, Geraldo Rivera, then an investigative reporter for WABC-TV in New York, conducted a series of investigations at Willowbrook uncovering a host of deplorable conditions, including overcrowding, inadequate sanitary facilities, and physical and sexual abuse of residents by members of the school's staff. The exposé, entitled Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace, garnered national attention and won a Peabody Award for Rivera.[6] Rivera later appeared on the nationally televised Dick Cavett Show with film of patients at the school.
As a result of the overcrowding, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the State of New York in federal court on March 17, 1972. A settlement in the case was reached on May 5, 1975, mandating reforms at the site, but several years would pass before all of the violations were corrected. The publicity generated by the case was a major contributing factor to the passage of a federal law, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980.
In 1975, a Willowbrook Consent Decree was signed that committed New York state to improve community placement for the now designated "Willowbrook Class."[7]
In 1983, the state of New York announced plans to close Willowbrook, which had been renamed the Staten Island Developmental Center in 1974. By the end of March 1986, the number of residents housed there had dwindled to 250, and the last children left the grounds on September 17, 1987.
After the developmental center closed, the site became the focus of intense local debate about what should be done with the property. In 1989 a portion of the land was acquired by the city of New York, with the intent of using it to establish a new campus for the College of Staten Island, and the new campus opened at Willowbrook in 1993. At 0.8 square kilometres (200 acres), this campus is the largest maintained by the City University of New York.
Within the year, one of CSI's two other existing campuses, located in the Sunnyside neighborhood, was closed, renovated, and opened in 1995 as the home of a new K-12 Michael J. Petrides School.
The remaining 0.7 square kilometres (170 acres) of the state school's original property, at the south end, is still under the administration of the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD), an agency of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, and houses the New York State Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities and the Staten Island Developmental Disabilities Services Office.
On February 25, 1987, the Federal Court approved the Willowbrook "1987 Stipulation," which set forth guidelines that required OMRDD community placement for the "Willowbrook Class."[7]. Significant members of the "Willowbrook Class" were not as intellectually limited as the term "Developmental delay" would indicate. Cerebral Palsy, which is a "developmental" disability can be accompanied by varying degrees of intellectual impairment, but some members of this class were cognitively quite intact, yet unable to communicate verbally due to the nature of their physical condition. These ex-residents of Willowbrook, many now in their 50's and 60's, live in a variety of community residences and attend day programs throughout New York State, under the care of organizations such as United Cerebral Palsy or the Jewish Guild for the Blind.
In March, 2009, [1] a fire in a residence in upstate Wells, New York, killed four members of the "Willowbrook Class."
Willowbrook State Hospital is mentioned in the 2009 documentary movie Cropsey, as having reportedly housed convicted child kidnapper Andre Rand, who had previously worked there as an orderly.[8] One of Andre's victims, Jennifer Schweiger, was found buried in a shallow grave behind the grounds of the abandoned Willowbrook State School which was built under the same design as Pilgrim State Hospital.
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