Kings Park Psychiatric Center

The Kings Park Psychiatric Center, known by Kings Park locals as "The Psych Center", is a former state-run psychiatric hospital located in Kings Park, New York. It operated from 1885 until 1996, when the State of New York closed the facility, releasing its few remaining patients or transferring them to the still-operational Pilgrim Psychiatric Center.

The Kings Park Psychiatric Center was established in 1885 by Kings County in nearby Suffolk County, adjoining the Society of St. Johnland established by William Augustus Muhlenberg, prior to the consolidation of Kings County with Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx, to form modern New York City. The official name of the hospital in its first 10 years was the Kings County Asylum, taken from the name of the county that Brooklyn occupied. The hospital was revolutionary at the time in the sense that it was a departure from the asylums of folklore, which were overcrowded places where gross human rights abuses often occurred. The asylum, built by Brooklyn to alleviate overcrowding in its own asylums, was a "farm colony" asylum, where patients worked in a variety of farm-related activities, such as feeding livestock and growing food, as this was considered to be a form of therapy.

Eventually, the Kings County Asylum began to suffer from the very thing that it attempted to relieve—overcrowding. New York State responded to the problem in 1895, when control of the asylum passed into state hands, and it was renamed the Kings Park State Hospital. The surrounding community, which used to be known as Indian Head, adopted the name "Kings Park," by which it is still known today. The state eventually built the hospital into a self-sufficient community that not only grew its own food, but also generated its own heat and electricity, had its own Long Island Rail Road spur and housed its staff on-site.

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