Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic

At his death in 1927, Payne Whitney bestowed the funds to build and endow the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic (PWC) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. An eight-story free-standing hospital, it was immediately affiliated with Cornell University's medical school (now Weill Cornell Medical College or Weill Cornell Medicine) and with the New York Hospital (now New York–Presbyterian Hospital), both of which are adjacent to PWC.

Payne Whitney was a large donor to the Hospital and Medical College, and it has been an issue of long speculation why he chose a psychiatric building to be his primary naming opportunity at New York-Cornell.

The poet Robert Lowell wrote of his hospitalization at Payne Whitney, Marilyn Monroe was hospitalized there in early 1961, and Mary McCarthy based her book, The Group, on her inpatient experience. The poet James Schuyler wrote about his experiences there in the eleven-poem series "The Payne Whitney Poems" which appeared in the New York Review of Books, August 17, 1978 issue. In Woody Allen's 1979 film, Manhattan, a character named Caroline Payne Whitney Smith is featured in a comedy sketch, where she and her husband are considered "normal folks," except for the fact that she is a catatonic.

The Payne Whitney building itself was torn down in the early 1990s to make way for an expansion of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital over the FDR Drive. Since that time, all clinical and research services at the two primary Cornell psychiatric campuses—in Manhattan and in White Plains, New York—have been named after Payne Whitney. The clinic also has an outpatient and Continuing Day Treatment Program in an off-campus building at East 61st Street and York Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

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