1,476 Comments for Letchworth Village

I would like to visit the memorial. Can anyone furnish me with the address for Letchworth Village Cemetery. Cannot find the address listing in the yellow pages. Thanks.

what is that???

i want to get in the hospital really badly, how can i?

MISSA!! =D Hi!!! Lol Yeahh, creepy stuff. Ever been? You, me, Di Di, and Tyler should go one of these days. XD

...It's pretty usual to me....I saw this building everyday last year at school. My friend and I use to try to get a look at it at break.

....I absolutley hated Fieldstone.

i was there this weekend there was a huge sign in front of the place that said they are taking it down this summer coming up in 2009. my friends and i heard a weird beeping sound from a distance after being inside for about 15-20 mins. it scared us we just left

All old (maybe pre-WWII?) fixtures had separate hot and cold faucets. I guess mixer faucets (not sure if that's the correct plumbing term) are a relatively modern invention. My grandma's bathroom had a sink with faucets like this and still does, as far as I know.

We are quick to denounce the institutions, but I started in the field 20 years ago, during one of the big pushes for deinstitutionalization in my state. We wanted to set up a 6-person group home (now that's considered too large, but at the time it was considered optimal) with 24/7 staff. We went door-to-door in the neighborhood, talking to each household individually, then had a public meeting to share our plans. We explained that these people had mental retardation--they were not psychotic, sexual predators, drug addicts, or dangerous. In fact, most of them used wheelchairs and were not independently mobile. Several were blind and/or deaf. Staff would ALWAYS be with them. After this presentation, an educated man, with a high position in a local corporation, still stood up and said (and was quoted in the newspaper the next day), "What if IT (emphasis mine, but his actual word) gets out and rapes one of our women?" A few years later, in another neighborhood, our plans to open a home for a similar group were met by a local coalition who distributed fliers decrying "the cancer spreading through our neighborhood."

OK, I know these comments are a year old, but some of this is deliberate sensationalism at worst and unknowing misunderstanding at best.
These institutions were originally set up because it was thought they would help people...then they were overwhelmed by the enormity of the needs and lack of will to expend the resources needed to meet them.

As in any other profession, there were a few cruel and sadistic staff, others who "snapped" momentarily due to overwork and exhaustion, and the vast majority who came day after day to thankless jobs, doing the best they could, finding joy in a patient's tiniest achievement, taking patients home for holidays so they would have some semblance of a family.

But these were NOT death camps. Private experiments were not done just on some doctor's whim. We have forgotten the huge public health threat that so-called chidhood diseases used to be. My ex-husband nearly died of measles just 50 years ago. His older brother did die of measles. Many children ended up in places like these because of the high fevers and resulting brain damage that went with measles, meningitis, etc. So developing vaccines was imperative, and we have a very false sense of safety today.

Lobotomies were surgical procedures that doctors hoped would help mentally ill patients. In some cases, they may have. For too many, there were untenable side effects. I can't recall ever hearing of a patient, whose only problem was mental retardation, having a lobotomy. They did NOT involve cutting off the top of the person's head and taking out parts of their brain to see which were essential! (although they were horrific procedures--but then what brain surgery isn't pretty horrific, at least to the layperson?) And now brain surgery is done for some patients with severe seizure disorders, surgery that seems in some ways similar to the principles behind lobotomy. In medicine there are many advances that come only after tragic errors.

I have worked with more than a few people who did die very sad deaths...but not until they had lived much longer, in comparatively good health given their underlying disabilities, than doctors ever predicted they would, thanks to the hourly attention and meticulous care provided by the staff too many of us are too eager to condemn.

Sorry so long.

I have worked with older adults whose teeth had all been pulled during long years of living in state mental institutions. Some of my co-workers were of the opinion that their teeth were pulled because they had repeatedly bitten staff at the hospital. This may have been true, although I tend to believe that the extractions were due to the severity of decay in their mouths. This was before widespread fluoridation of water in rural areas, and when poor people did not have access to regular dental care. In a "normal" patient, with financial resources, perhaps a skilled dentist could have restored at least some of the teeth. But in an uninsured, nonpaying, combative, disturbed patient, extractions were easier (and probably all the state would pay some minimal amount for). And as sad as it is to not have teeth, I have seen people whose general physical health, behavior, entire persona changed for the better after their teeth were pulled. In an ideal world, there would have been intervention long before it got to that point, but unfortunately we do not have an ideal world, and most people DO do the very best they can, with the resources they have, in the situation they're in.

I worked there for 3 years in the 80's. If you found that in there it's probably left over from a haunted house they used to do in one of the buildings. Haunted houses pretty much scare the crap out of me anyway but I have to say these buildings were a perfect place to stage these. The staff posed as the "monsters" and other cottages (that's what they called the buildings) were invited to bring their residents through.

I worked there for 3 years. I going to guess and say that was the old revere buidling and the room show is a bathroom. Many patients limbs were so bent that they were put on shower tables for bathing.... the tables were rolled into the bathroom, the curtain was for privacy.

woah budddyy..calm down. dont waste your tme on immature people to tell them that. we all know its sad, but seriously..calm down.

this wasnt part of an office though, its off the morgue in the basement. it was so cold down there, i felt like my soul was being strangled; it was so odd