Willowbrook State School

Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disability located in the Willowbrook neighborhood on Staten Island in New York City from 1947 until 1987.

The school was designed for 4,000, but by 1965 it had a population of 6,000. At the time, it was the biggest state-run institution for people with mental disabilities in the United States. Conditions and questionable medical practices and experiments prompted Sen. Robert Kennedy to call it a "snake pit". Public outcry led to its closure in 1987, and to federal civil rights legislation protecting people with disabilities.

A portion of the grounds and some of the buildings were incorporated into the campus of the College of Staten Island, which moved to Willowbrook in the early 1990s.

In 1938, plans were drawn up to build a facility for children who had an intellectual disability on 375 acres (152 ha) in the Willowbrook section of 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 World War II, 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.

Throughout the first decade of its operation, outbreaks of hepatitis, primarily hepatitis A, were common at the school. This led to controversial medical studies being carried out there between the late 1950s and the '70s by medical researchers Saul Krugman (New York University) and Robert W. McCollum (Yale University), who monitored subjects to gauge the effects of gamma globulin in combating it. A public outcry forced the research project and medical studies to be discontinued. Accusations were leveled that the researchers had used mentally disabled children as "human guinea pigs," but the chief critic of the project — New York Senator Seymour R. Thaler of Queens — later conceded that the work had been conducted properly. One result of the research was a better understanding of the differences between serum hepatitis, – which is spread by blood transfusions, – from infectious hepatitis, which is spread directly from person to person and is the more common form.

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