Fort Totten Army Hospital

Sadly, very little information is widely available on this hospital building within the Fort Totten landmark district near Bayside, Queens. Built in 1864, the year in which the primary purpose of the Fort shifted from defense of the mouth of the East River to casualty support and hospital care, the facility served the Army in various capacities until 1974, when it was emptied and abandoned. Sometime before 1920 a cafeteria annex was added to the rear of the structure; at some point prior to abandonment, the hospital appears to have been repurposed for office and administrative use, and the basement for storage.

Unfortunately, the building has fallen prey to some fairly signicant demolition-by-neglect. There is considerable water damage which has led much of the building to collapse; the parts that have not collapsed are in imminent danger, as evidenced by the mushy floors and the separation of some rooms’ floors from the load-bearing walls.

Here’s a look at the interior of the hospital. Readers with more knowledge of its history or with stories about its active use are heartily encouraged to comment below.


An operating room, the floor half-gone.


Retrofitted fluorescent lights hang akimbo from a damaged tin ceiling.


A dormitory, one of the few rooms in the building which gives a hint of the original purpose as a hospital. This room would have been lined with beds & side tables, and the outlets spaced along the walls would have provided power.


A large room on the second floor contained what was by far the most bizarre artifact found within the hospital – a child’s riding grasshopper.




Although the floor in this bathroom is completely gone, the plumbing is enough to hold these heavy porcelain sinks in place over the abyss.


The basement is full of military documents. This one-pager explains how to zero a .50 caliber machine gun.


”Battlefield Damage Assessment and Repair for Combat Vehicles”


Surprisingly, the attic was among the most intact sections of the hospital.


A typical attic room showing water damage.


The other side of the door to this room bore the name of a military officer in fading paint.


On the interior side of the door, one of the few artifacts remaining in this building – a fading photo of an Army marching band.

Taken in conjunction with the Pasilalinic-Sympathetic Compass.

Creedmoor State Hospital, Building 25

Current Print Sale: For the next little while, a special gallery of prints from Creedmoor State Hospital, most never offered for sale in any form, will be available at 50% off the usual SmugMug prices.  So if you want to own a (representational) piece of this hospital, now's your chance!

Queens' Creedmoor State Hospital (now Creedmoor Psychiatric Center) had its humble beginnings as the farm colony for Brooklyn State Hospital (now Kingsboro). A prevailing theme in the treatments of the period was that fresh air, a rustic environment, and hard work could help restore the faculties damaged by diseases like dementia praecox and hysteria.

So it was that in 1912, Creedmoor unofficially opened with an initial populace of 32 patients deemed curable; the farmland was worked, which in turn meant less expense for the pantries of the local state hospitals. But the overcrowding typical of public mental hospitals in the first half of this century soon took hold at Creedmoor, which was granted status as an independent psychiatric hospital, and which grew exponentially - by the 50s, there were over 8,000 patients housed in over fifty buildings, including the highrise hospital which is still in use.

But with the advent of Thorazine and similar antipsychotic medications, and the trimming of state hospital budgets (especially under Reagan), deinstitutionalization occurred. The state hospitals were emptied, and large portions of most of the campuses fell into disuse. Creedmoor was no exception. Over the last several decades, the patient population has declined from over 5,000 to under 500. Large portions of the campus were sold off.

One building that is disused but has not been sold off or demolished is Building 25. Among the oldest buildings left on the campus, it was vacated in the early 1970s, and has scarcely been revisited since - with the exception of a squatter who seems to be in it for the long haul. Anecdotally, he has been living in the building for over half a decade; his robust squat (not photographed out of concern for his privacy) would seem to confirm this. While these photos were taken, he was angrily pacing outside the building, acutely aware that his home had been invaded.

Each floor is comprised of a long hallway intersected on either end by a perpendicular wing; one half of each wing was a sunny dorm, in which dozens of patients would have had cots. The other half of each wing was a hallway full of seclusion rooms. The violent, ill-behaved, and incurable patients would live in these tiny rooms, each with a solid metal door. The main hallway connecting the wings contained, on each floor, a kitchen and dining hall, and a number of rooms used for other nonresidential purposes, from storage to lithography.


One of the main hallways which connected the wings.


A standard dorm, capable of accommodating a great number of patients.


A seclusion hallway with private rooms.


This one belonged to Mrs. B. Shaw.

Past each wing, at either end of the long hall, was a dayroom. Patients who were behaved would spend their days here, watching television or playing boardgames, engaging in group therapy or staring at the wall, numbed by powerful sedatives.


A dayroom at the Western end of the third floor.


View from another dayroom towards primary wing junction.

Here are various other scenes from the second and third floors of the hospital; the first floor is boarded off and too dark to shoot.


Two blue chairs have been torn apart by animals under a patient mural, a common sight in abandoned state hospitals.


Wheelchairs have been collected and piled up in a number of adjoining rooms on the second floor.


Layers of paint peel back from the wall.


Another seclusion hall, at the end of which is a heavy grated window typical of this hospital building.


A room on the third floor contains a pair of lithographic presses, a pair of typewriters, and a cash register.


Surprisingly, scrappers seem not to have made any attempts on the copper in this structure.


Research still sits on a desk in a doctor's study, ready to be leafed through.


The third floor cafeteria, later used for chair storage.

The fourth floor is interesting because it contains the evidence of 35+ years' worth of pigeon inhabitance. There are pigeon droppings everywhere; in places, they are knee deep due to accumulation under pigeon "hangouts" - pipes, fixtures, and other perches. It makes for a rather surreal effect, though one starts to get a headache after about 10 minutes on this floor.


Fourth floor dayroom.


Fourth floor seclusion hall.


A chair, sunken into the filth.


Fourth floor bathroom.

But above all this filth and squalor, still partially hidden behind a layer of pink paint, the Virgin Mary shines her beatific smile down upon the empty dayroom, innocently ignorant of the suffering, healing, and humanity which once graced this building.



Images from Jacques Toussaint Benoit, another local photoblogger, are available at the Pasilalinic-Sympathetic Compass.