Willowbrook State School

This place is on private property. Listing for informational purposes only. Please do not visit without express permission from the land owner. Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disabilities located in the Willowbrook neighborhood on Staten Island in New York City from 1947 until 1987. The school was designed for 4,000, but by 1965 it had a population of 6,000. At the time it was the biggest state-run institution for people with mental disabilities in the United States. Conditions and questionable medical practices and experiments prompted Sen. Robert Kennedy to call it a "snake pit." Public outcry led to its closure in 1987, and to federal civil rights legislation protecting the disabled. A portion of the grounds and some of the buildings were incorporated into the campus of the College of Staten Island, which moved to Willowbrook in the early 1990s. The rest of the buildings sit abandoned and dilapidated in the Staten Island Greenbelt. Willowbrook State Hospital is mentioned in the documentary movie Cropsey (2009), as having reportedly housed convicted child kidnapper Andre Rand, who had previously worked there as an orderly. One of Rand's supposed victims, Jennifer Schweiger, was found buried in a shallow grave behind the grounds of the abandoned Willowbrook State School, which was built under the same design as Pilgrim State Hospital. In 2011, a former resident of Willowbrook State School, a savant named Anthony Torrone, wrote a Christian prayer book titled Anthony's Prayers that was inspired by his time and the abuse he experienced at the school.[14][15] A depiction eerily similar to Geraldo Rivera's documentary, Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace (1972) is briefly portrayed in Season 2, episode 13 of American Horror Story: Asylum, entitled "Madness Ends", in which the fictional journalist Lana Winters brings a camera crew into the Briarcliff Insane Asylum capturing deplorable and inhumane treatment of patients, which Winters later names Briarcliff: An Exposé and thus launches her career and brings her the fame she had worked for.