 the hospital grounds in 1931 would do the same for the 20th: the infamous Bellevue psychiatric hospital. Resembling a forbidding Georgian house, the red brick building was located a few blocks to the north of the hospital on 1st Avenue. This haunting-looking structure, still surrounded by a rusting iron spiked fence and covered in ivy as it was in the 1930s, it has inspired horror films, nightmares, and comic books. A dark building long associated with neglect, dubious, and disturbing psychiatric practices (the first uses of insulin shock therapy happened here), Bellevue was New York’s bedlam, where its homeless alcoholics and insane were left to be forgotten. The New York Times reported in 1983 that, "the Bellevue psychiatrists must try to serve all the disturbed people in New York – the ‘jumpers’ who threaten to leap from the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge; the ‘slashers’ who cut their wrists or chests; people who overdose on narcotic drugs or alcohol, and people who run around without clothes or harass passers-by at Grand Central Station."
This was once home to Mark Chapman, the night he shot John Lennon. Edie Sedgwick, Allen Ginsberg, Eugene O’Neill, and William Burroughs all stayed here at one point, as did Norman Mailer the night he stabbed his wife. In popular culture and the minds of New Yorkers, Bellevue was the end of the road. Billy Wilder’s Oscar winning 1945 picture The Lost Weekend, about the devastating effects of alcoholism, was even set there.
Decades of malpractice soon caught up with the squalor of Bellevue. Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 ground breaking expose of the gruesome Willowbrook on Staten Island shone a desperately needed light on the city’s asylums. The psychiatric unit moved into the newer buildings to the south and is now regarded as one of the countries best facilities.
The old Bellevue psychiatric hospital closed in 1984. Today it’s partially used as a shelter for the homeless, but the imposing building lies mostly empty and abandoned. At night a few lights can be seen behind ragged curtains, where the tireless staff still care for the cities poorest of the poor, just as they did nearly 300 years ago.