A Most Crucial And Paradoxical Place
In this image: A matchbook with Halloran Hospital on the cover, printed in the maroon that the military reserved for convalescents.
There is no place that has a more complex or notorious position in the New York City Disability Rights Movement. Infamous for the horrors that went on there right up into the modern era, it has repeatedly yielded massive, even transformative advances for the community.
Today it is the College of Staten Island, a unit of the City University system.
The 380 acre campus of the Willowbrook State School was designated in 1938 to serve as a facility for people with developmental disabilities. Its location in the middle of nowhere, half an hour by bus from the ferry, was typical of the remote settings that used to be favored for such places. Construction was complete by 1942, but plans were put on hold as the Army took it over and converted it into a hospital for soldiers wounded fighting World War Two. Within a few years, renamed Halloran Hospital, the campus had become the world’s largest such installation. It was while convalescing at Halloran that Robert Moss co-founded the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) and the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (EPVA)—a watershed moment which led to the first efforts to create a physically accessible society (see gallery entry on Robert and Lucille Moss).
In this image: A 1972 photo of Willowbrook residents, marooned on wheeled carts.
In 1951, however, the military surrendered Halloran back to the State of New York, which resumed the original program and restored the original name, the Willowbrook State School.
In its new guise, the location become nothing short of hellish. Notwithstanding the “school” designation, Willowbrook’s administrators made little effort to provide adequate care, education, recreation, basic hygiene or even clothing for its residents. Plagued with repeated outbreaks of hepatitis, Willowbrook ran medical experiments that reportedly included deliberately infecting people in order to test therapies like gammaglobulin.
By 1965 Willowbrook was warehousing more than six thousand people, fifty percent more than it was designed to handle. Senator Robert Kennedy toured the campus and denounced it as a “snake pit” holding people who were “living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.” RFK pushed for a plan to improve residents’ treatment, but it apparently had little impact, for in 1972 the television journalist Geraldo Rivera ran a blockbuster expose on WABC entitled “Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace.”
Everyone in my family watched the expose, which ran for several nights as I recall, and it was by far the grimmest thing I’d ever seen. Barely fourteen years old, sitting next my brilliant and charismatic disabled father, I was stunned to realize that but for luck he might have spent his life someplace similar, and I would never have been born.
The expose led to a major political scandal (it also made Rivera a media star). A class action lawsuit followed, which was resolved in 1975 with a consent judgment that required relocation of most of the residents, real investment in improving living conditions, and set some basic standards for custodial care. On the federal level, Willowbrook was a major impetus for the Education For All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, and the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980. These statutes were the first federal civil rights laws covering people with disabilities, and helped lead to enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990.
Part infamous snake pit that devastated thousands of lives, part springboard for critical policy reforms and pioneering social activism, the Willowbrook campus is easily the most paradoxical place in the entire New York City Disability Rights Movement.
Willowbrook finally closed in 1987. Within a few years the site was reconfigured for use by the newly-created College of Staten Island (CSI) (it should be noted that as recently as 2017 the State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability (OMRDD) continued to have jurisdiction over a portion of the former Willowbrook campus).
At first glance, CSI appears to be little more than an unusually spacious CUNY school, centered around some older buildings. But it houses an extensive archives on both Halloran and Willowbrook, and represents a third phase in the site’s strangely bifurcated history.
