Stumbling awake, with a migraine huge enough I could carry it with both hands. Stomach acid on overload. The bathroom is bright with the noontime sun blazing through the skylight above. Our newly rescued tiny kitten, who has temporarily moved into the bathroom, tries to sit between me and the toilet. I muster just enough energy to slide him away before the inevitable hangover-like situation. How the hell did it come to this?
12 hours ago:
I’m not one to get sick. Colds, if I get one at all, pass within 24 hours. Somehow this one had lingered 48 hours, but it seemed to be fading, and sitting around “resting” in an utterly restless state on a Friday night just doesn’t compute in my brain. Moping about illness just makes recovery longer. I have to get out there and get some air. Fortunately, there was a fowl smell in the air that night. Sleazy has indeed just blown back into town, so I wheel my boat down his street and pick that pimp brother up.
The agenda for the night is pretty open, so we discuss the potential options. He’s got a water tunnel that sounds confined and contains two feet of water of unknown coloration. I’ve got a plethora of old NYC industrial sites that and a mysterious old nursing home that according to the NYC government is shut down and recently received complaints from neighbors of it being accessible to all manner of reprobate. Given my mild sickness, the tunnel seems like a bad option, health wise, while the nursing home is fresh meat.
Abandoned just 2 years ago (at the time this was written-2011), the Willoughby Nursing Home was apparently terrible nursing home. This 320 room facility was noted for bad service, dating all the way back to the 1970s. In 1974 it was the subject of a state investigation that found Medicaid fraud. At the time, a nursing home could bilk more cash from the feds if it was sold. As the New York Times reported: ““The property,” his preliminary report said, had been sold four times since 1970, each sale between Anne Weiss and a corporation wholly owned by Anne Weiss. The home has four mortgages totaling over $1‐million transferred a total of 22 times, The mortgages have been in many instances between corporations owned or controlled by either Anne Weiss or Dr. Bernard Bergman, her husband.” Sounds like quite the scam. It was again fined by the state in 1975 for “operational deficiencies”. Mice seemed to infest the building, and people were packed 5-6 beds per room.
Prior to it’s life as a nursing home, this building was known as the “Brooklyn Labor Lyceum”. In 1910, it hosted a socialist debate that made headlines in the New York Times. Two thousand people crammed into the building to hear Morris Hillquit and Prof. Isaac Franklin Russell debate with many turned away at the door. Hillquit was the leader of Socialist Party of America. While he unsuccessfully ran for NYC mayor numerous times, he did get around one hundred thousand votes. Isaac Russell was his former professor at NYU, who taught law and had numerous elected officials as his students.
Getting back to more modern times, the nursing home somehow recovered from its varied allegations and survived until around 2007ish when it finally closed for good. The building was vacated and left to rot. I found out about it via someone’s angry blog post about the abuses that took place there just before it was closed.
Adventure Time
We roll up and find ample parking. Of course. Who the fuck wants to park their car on this deserted block? (At the time, no one lived here). I’ll tell you who – ME. I fucking love curbside check-in while exploring. Shift that boat-car Buick from R to ‘P’erfection and we exit directly outside of the building. We look up at the old dark structure. No lights on, no windows open. The front gates and doors are locked with heavy chain. The sidewalk is covered in rubbish with weeds growing pushing through the cracks. Yeap – this is definitely the right place.
We note a huge hatch on the ground. Sloped inward containing a pool of puddle, it looks precarious at best. How many people trip over this every day? (oh wait, no one — who the hell would walk down this block?). Sleazy comments that we can’t open it — not because there’s a lock on it, but because to do so will disturb the puddle and we’ll be breaking like 500 approved ‘UE” ethic rules. Naturally, we lift the hatch.
Below, we find our thoughts of a super easy curbside entrance vanish. Just a few feet below is a huge pool of water — depth unknown — with an entrance beyond it uncertain.
Maybe for a really paranoid person this would have served as a fucking AWESOME warning sign. But to us it was just an obstacle. How the hell are we going to get in this place?
If you think I’m going to tell you, you haven’t been reading this site for long.
Once inside, We are instantly greeted by that smell of abandonment. There’s old wood rot smell in here, mixed with a dash of lead paint dust and … something else? I can’t put my finger on it, but it doesn’t stop us. We press further and further into the building. Room after room of absolutely nothing. An employee locker room yields the first signs of life — notes from unhappy workers posted on many. Union stickers on others. Towards the front we find an office with voided checks laying out. They look like pay checks, and let’s just say they are nowhere near enough to cover the cost of changing granny’s diapers. These people that worked here could probably getting more on unemployment and food stamps than this place would ever pay them. These workers must have been hot tempered about this shit work situation…
Speaking of temperature, did I mention its summer? And that this place is getting more humid the further down the hall we go? Finally we find stairs going up and down, and down reveals exactly what you don’t want to find: a completely flooded basement. We’re talking around 5 feet of water, in a basement that has a huge footprint in terms of square feet. That’s a lot of god damned water down there. No wonder this place is reaching steam room status.
The paint is chipping off nearly every wall as we go up. This building looks like an abandoned mental hospital that has sat exposed to the elements for 20 years. It isn’t. It’s a very well sealed nursing home, with minimal roof leakage and few if any open windows. The humidity from two years worth of flood water in the basement has absolutely destroyed this place. And did have I mentioned that smell? It’s almost dizzying.
Pressing on, we find a few rooms with beds, some obscure graffiti (the taggers are always in first in NYC – always). What we don’t find are squatters, or signs of scrapping. The main attraction in terms of art was some work that may have been done by OverUnder.
The rooftop proves lacking. We’re in the middle of nowhere after all, so there’s not much to see. The city skyline of course is there, in the distance… but far from impressive.
After some time poking around and looking for something of relevance in this huge place, we exhaust all hallways, rooms and options. It’s an unceremonious end to the evening, which is really a-ok by me. A climax escape from cops in helicopters is a great story to tell the grandkids but I’ve already got one of those, and enough silly photos of this place to feel content at having seen it. Sure could have done without that smell though…
Fast forward 4 days.
The scratchy throat and nose still aren’t happy. The best logical guess is some sort of mold in that building tried to kill me. Doctors appointment made (something I haven’t done in who knows how long), I can only sit here tapping out this sordid tale. Soon I’ll be feasting on some steak to recharge the batteries. My better half, on the way home, has picked up even more excellent noms. Whatever it is that’s dragging me down, like so many other things over the years, has failed.
Will I ever explore a place like that again? Sure. Maybe not with an existing cold though, and you know what else? Holy shit, I really rather explore subway tunnels than fucked up buildings. It’s so much god damned safer. In a subway tunnel, you know the air quality is awesome with those 600 volts buzzing in surround sound bacteria killing bliss. The dangers are really obvious, and they aren’t invisible. Yeah, you can die down their — but fuck that. If I’m going to die I want to see what’s going to kill me — not some pansy fucking invisible granny diaper mold virus shit. One way or another this hobby is always trying to kill you. 20 years on, I ain’t dead yet. So fuck you, moldy crap. Fuck you.
Oh and PS, Sleazy didn’t get sick at all. He’s too fucked in the head. Viruses go in that motherfucker and run to their oxygen suicide. And he pimps hot women on south bronx street corners – at least that’s what his rap sheet claims. One day I aspire to grow down enough to be just like Sleazy.
Postmortem
Here we are a few years later (ok, nearly ten years later: 2020), and I have nothing but fond memories of this adventure despite this moldy ass building’s attempt at killing me. A few months after we went, neighbors started complaining to the city that the building was vacant and unsecured. Illegal demolition work began shortly thereafter, and lasted a few years. In 2013 the building was still under construction and FDNY called for an inspection when it was found to be occupied (by someone, apparently illegally). Today, it is simply one more apartment building. Realtors seem to love talking up its socialist history (now that socialism is all the rage again), while bypassing it’s uglier nursing home years. If you’re curious about some ‘after’ photos for this place, there are plenty online.
Update: 5/25/2020.
Edited & Renamed with new research on the building’s history.
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