8/20/2015
Willowbrook State School -- A Voice Behind the Wall: HISTORY
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Willowbrook State School ­­ A Voice Behind
the Wall
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HISTORY
Willowbrook State School, built in the late 1930’s, was a state­supported
institution for mentally retarded children located in central Staten Island in
New York City. The school did not receive its first residents, however, until
after World War II, during which time it was used as a veteran’s hospital
for injured and disabled war heroes. A combination of rising placements,
budget cuts, ignorance, arrogance and indifference, created notorious
conditions at Willowbrook. The school gained notoriety in the 1960’s for
an unethical medical study conducted there. By 1965, with over 6,000
residents in an institution planned for just 4,000, Senator Robert Kennedy
was calling Willowbrook a “snake pit,” yet however at this time public
involvement was limited and conditions continued to worsen. It wasn’t
until the early 1970’s that further abuses were uncovered at the school,
becoming the stimulus for new civil rights legislation. In November 1971,
The Staten Island Advance published a series of articles detailing the
horrible conditions at the school. Following these articles, in January
1972, Geraldo Rivera, the television reporter, began a series of programs
that shook the conscience of New York State and the nation and inspired
parents and others to take legal action. The end result was the signing of a
consent judgment in federal court in 1975.
The Consent Judgment has been called “revolutionary” because of what it
accomplished and for what it inspired. The closure of Willowbrook, the
placement of individuals with developmental disabilities in community
residences, the growth of voluntary agencies and the expansion of day
programs and special education can all be linked to the Judgment. The
Judgment finally recognized and enforced the rights of individuals with
mental retardation and developmental disabilities. And is now the model
used throughout the United States and in many parts of the world.
The school was finally closed in 1987, and the former grounds were
redeveloped extensively to serve as the campus of the College of Staten
Island. Many of the buildings were knocked down due to their excessive
neglect and need for major repair. However, many of the original buildings
are still standing, formly residential buildings housing young girls and
boys. These buildings are now used for offices and classrooms on both
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8/20/2015
Willowbrook State School -- A Voice Behind the Wall: HISTORY
the North and South sides of the campus. The smoke stack and M
buildings near the Victory Blouvard entrance are also originals. Years ago,
these buildings were used for laundry services, preparing meals, which
included a bakery, storage of food as well as other needed services.
Willowbrook State School was a city within a city, quite self­sufficient in
the daily running of the Institution, it did not require many services from
outside it’s walls, therefore isolating itself and its’s residents from the
community even more so. Today, these same buildings are used to
process mail at the college and recently renovated, Staten Island’s new
International High School opened in 2005.
HISTORY
Construction
In 1938, plans were formulated to build a facility for mentally retarded
children on a 375 acres (1.5 km²) site in the Willowbrook section of the
Staten Island. Construction was completed in 1942, but instead of opening
for its original purpose, it was converted into a United States Army
hospital and named Halloran General Hospital, after the late Colonel Paul
Stacey Halloran. After the war, proposals were introduced to turn the site
over to the Veterans Administration, but in October, 1947 the New York
State Department of Mental Hygiene opened its facility there as originally
planned, and the institution was named Willowbrook State School.
Hepatitis Studies
Throughout the first decade of its operation, outbreaks of hepatitis were
common at the school, and this led to a highly controversial medical study
being conducted there between 1963 and 1966, in which healthy children
were intentionally injected with the virus that causes the disease.
These studies were designed to gain an understanding of the natural
history of infectious hepatitis and subsequently to test the effects of
gamma globulin in preventing or combating the disease.
The subjects, all children, were deliberately infected with the hepatitis
virus; early subjects were fed extracts of stools from infected individuals
and later subjects received injections of more purified virus preparations.
Investigators defended the deliberate injection of these children by
pointing out that the vast majority of them acquired the infection anyway
while at Willowbrook, and perhaps it would be better for them to be
infected under carefully controlled research conditions.
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During the course of these studies, Willowbrook closed its doors to new
patients, claiming overcrowded conditions. However, the hepatitis
program, because it occupied its own space at the institution, was able to
continue to admit new patients. Thus, in some cases, parents found that
they were unable to admit their child to Willowbrook unless they agreed to
his or her participation in the studies. This case caused a public outcry
forcing the study to be discontinued because of the perception that
parents and their children were given little choice about whether or not to
participate in research.
More Scandals and Abuses
During the several decades that Willowbrook was opened, there were
continuous allegations of abuse reported on by the local paper, The
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Willowbrook State School -- A Voice Behind the Wall: HISTORY
Staten Island Advance. For many years, these allegations were dismissed
and Willowbrook continued to uphold its well­respected reputation in the
community. However by early 1972, Geraldo Rivera, then a reporter for television
station WABC in New York, conducted a series of investigations at
Willowbrook (on the heels of a previous series of articles in the Staten
Island Advance and Staten Island Register newspapers), uncovering a
host of deplorable conditions, including overcrowding, inadequate
sanitary facilities, and physical abuse of residents by members of the
school's staff. This resulted in a class­action lawsuit being filed against
the State of New York in federal court on March 17, 1972. A settlement in
the case was reached on May 5, 1975, mandating reforms at the site, but
several years would elapse before all of the violations were corrected. The
publicity generated by the case was a major contributing factor to the
passage of a federal law, called the Civil Rights of Institutionalized
Persons Act of 1980.
Closing the School
In 1983, the State of New York announced plans to close Willowbrook,
which had been renamed the Staten Island Developmental Center in 1974.
By the end of March 1986, the number of residents housed there had
dwindled to 250 (down from 5,000 at the height of the scandal exposed by
Rivera), and the last children left the grounds on September 17, 1987.
After the developmental center closed, the site became the focus of
intense local debate about what should be done with the property. In 1989
a portion of the land was acquired by the City of New York, with the intent
of using it to establish a new campus for the College of Staten Island. The
new campus opened at Willowbrook in 1993 (at the same time, one of
CSI's two other existing campuses, located in the island's Sunnyside
neighborhood, was closed and that site became the home of a new high
school). At 204 acres, this campus is the largest maintained by the City
University of New York.
The remaining 171 acres of the state school's original property, at the
south end, is still under the administration of the New York State
Department of Mental Hygiene, which maintains a facility there called the
Institute For Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities. At the
Institution research is conducted on Down Syndrome, Autism, Alzheimer’s
Disease and many rare diseases.
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Willowbrook State School -- A Voice Behind the Wall: HISTORY
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