Manhattan Psychiatric Center
102 Rivers Edge Road | also 600 East 125th Street, 1 Wards Island | Randall's Island | built 1961
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1899
The state takes over the Wards Island asylum as Manhattan State Hospital
The New York City Asylum for the Insane opened on Wards Island in 1863. The state took it over from the city in 1899, expanded it and renamed it Manhattan State Hospital; with 4,400 beds, it was then the largest psychiatric hospital in the world. Composer Scott Joplin died at the hospital in 1917.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1900
Chess champion Wilhelm Steinitz dies in the Wards Island hospital
Wilhelm Steinitz, the first World Chess Champion, held the title from 1886 to 1894. He died of a heart attack on August 12, 1900, in the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island, in the hospital's earlier buildings on this site. He died a pauper, and his second wife and their two young children survived him.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1917
Scott Joplin is admitted to Manhattan State Hospital and dies there two months later
By 1916 the ragtime composer Scott Joplin had developed neurosyphilis. He was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital, in the earlier hospital buildings on this site, on February 2, 1917, and died there of syphilitic dementia on April 1, aged 48. His pauper's grave at St. Michael's Cemetery in East Elmhurst stayed unmarked for 57 years, until 1974, the same year The Sting, with his music in its soundtrack, won the Best Picture Oscar.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1923
A fire kills 27 people in an earlier hospital building on this site
A fire tears through the Wards Island hospital complex that predates the current towers, killing 24 patients and three attendants. The blaze remains one of the deadliest disasters at what was then Manhattan State Hospital, decades before the present tower complex replaces the old Kirkbride-style buildings in the 1950s.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1949
Mabel Boll, the "Queen of Diamonds", dies of a stroke at Manhattan State Hospital
Mabel Boll, a socialite of the early record-flight era, earned the nickname the Queen of Diamonds from the jewelry she wore in public. She left her home in Switzerland in 1939 as war broke out in Europe, and her star status faded over the 1940s. She died of a stroke on April 11, 1949, at the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island, in the hospital buildings that preceded the present complex. In the 1920s she had wanted to be known as the Queen of the Air.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1954
The hospital's present tower complex is built
The hospital's current building complex was constructed in 1954. In 1979 three facilities were combined to form the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, and in 1981 one of its three buildings was given over to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, which treats patients involved with the criminal justice system.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1973
Valerie Solanas escapes from the hospital, then is arrested on her way to a publisher's office
Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who shot Andy Warhol in 1968, was admitted in January 1972 to the Dunlap-Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island. In January 1973 she sent the publisher Barney Rosset a letter threatening to kill him, and in February she escaped. Rosset hired a Pinkerton detective, who traced her to a Chelsea address but found no leads. A few weeks later she made an appointment to discuss a job at Grove Press and was arrested on her way there, after a company executive told the police.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1981
The state carves out Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center within the complex
New York State establishes the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center as a specialized forensic facility within the Wards Island hospital complex, two years after Manhattan State Hospital's three successor institutions merge into the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. Kirby occupies one of the complex's buildings and treats patients involved in the criminal justice system.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Manhattan Psychiatric CenterWikipedia
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