Greenpoint Hospital

Mar 272014

At a time when New York City real estate is stupid expensive, and historic landmarks are being turned into high rises that look like a game of Tetris, it’s surprising when anything remains abandoned, especially large buildings like the Greenpoint Hospital in Brooklyn.

To clarify, the building in the photos of this post were the nurses’ residence and a rehab facility. The main hospital was repurposed into other uses and is not abandoned.

Before I get into the history stuff, it bears noting the Greenpoint hospital where Frank Serpico was taken in 1971 after he was shot in the face during a drug bust supposedly arranged by other cops who were pissed at him for being a “hippie narc” who blew the whistle on corruption within the NYPD.

Built in 1914, the hospital ran (often inefficiently) until 1982. While the rest of the hospital buildings on the property have gone through various stages of use- apartments, a homeless shelter, squatters’ housing, and work studios- the nurses’ residence and rehab have been vacant since closure.

Above is a googlemaps screenshot of the whole hospital campus. The building in this post is at the bottom right corner, shaped like a C. It was not the main hospital, as it is often erroneously labeled, but for the sake of interest, this post addresses the history of the whole hospital.

The basement had a room of files and notebooks filled with patient artwork from the Greenpoint Hospital Methadone Clinic, which ran from 1970 to 1981. It was shut down after numerous complaints were made, citing a rise in drug activity and drug-related crime in the neighborhood surrounding the hospital. The Greenpoint Hospital failed many inspections over the decades. According to the New York Times, an inspection in 1923 revealed there was only one nurse was on duty at night, overseeing “150 patients in various degrees of helplessness.”

In the 1960s, the hospital underwent a $2.5 million renovation, but quickly fell into financial trouble due to overcrowding, understaffing, and unsanitary conditions. A 1967 inspection found “such conditions of filth and disrepair that the state threatened to close the facility.” The State Health Department claimed the “operating rooms were subject to so much contamination that it was impossible to carry out acceptable procedures. Unscreened windows resulted in “the entrance of pigeon excreta directly into the operating rooms.” Pigeon shit is especially toxic, I’ve addressed it before in regards to Creedmoor, but “bird fancier’s lung” will never stop being funny to me.

A follow-up inspection in 1968 found that almost no repairs had been made, including the imperative window screening. Even the hospital administrator admitted that conditions were unmanageable. “[The hospital] is now infested with flies, even in the nurseries and kitchens,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not an emergency, but it’s a very unpleasant situation.” The hospital never really recovered, and amidst mounting neighborhood complaints and financial trouble, it shut down in 1982.

The interior of the nurses’ residence is pretty cleaned out, minus some paraphernalia from the methadone clinic/rehab days, which included some hand-drawn signs.

The attic of the building has some cool old elevator mechanical stuff going on.

This is the only room with any interior architectural detail left, and the one most photographed to make this building look more interesting than it actually is. Scrappers ripped through most the walls and squatters left behind heaps of garbage.