12 Comments Posted by Rita

Thanks for these images. I recently learned my great grandmother was a patient at Central Islip in 1920.

hey that looks like my friend naria's shoes!!

This chair was for 1 sick person, cerebral palsy

Indeed, odd- yet cool andy warholish

This was a chair where the Mentally challanged were probably given labotomys...sick place

These weren't schools, this was a place to lock up the mentally retarded and handicapped people. They kept them there because they werent normalized in the community no one wanted to help them. They were beaten, raped , starved and neglected.

I worked with the ones that left there and they were never normal again. The dormatory? look at the room. Cant you imagine 20-30 bed lined up in there?

I Know what happened in those tubs to the clients that I worked with for 11 years...They were never normal again

Now i would be a little nervous to walk through there. It looks like something off of a horror show

I am not sure what to say about the picture. But I do know that it does not bother me. I actually want to work in a morgue.

If this were lit and clean it wouldn't look so bad. I've worked in hospitals built in the 1960s that looked like this.

I don't want to minimize the conditions at Byberry, but this ward does not look as if it were all that horrible in its heyday. WIth filth, falling plaster, and graffiti all over the place now, it does look terrible in this photo. Imagining it clean and well-lit paints a different picture.