Willowbrook State School: America's Most Barbaric Children's Institution

[00:00:00]Just a quick warning before we begin.

[00:00:01]This episode deals with child abuse, the abuse and neglect of disabled people, the unethical human experimentation of children. And although we've covered a variety of dark themes on this channel, we urge discretion for anyone sensitive to those sorts of things. And with that out of the way, the place was called Willowbrook State School and it sat on 375 acres of Staten Island behind a chiple sign and a name that sounded rather pastoral. Behind that sign, thousands of disabled children and adults were packed into overcrowded, understaffed wards. A sitting US senator even taught those wards in 1965 and likened them to a zoo. And Willowbrook [music] stayed open for another 22 years after that. So, uh, good work, Mr. Senator.

[00:00:38]So, how did a school become a human warehouse in the middle of America's largest city? Why did it take a secreted key and a hidden camera for the public to finally see inside? And who exactly were the people unfortunate enough to be locked within it? Let's find out, shall we?

[00:00:57]A school in name only.

[00:01:00]Willoughbrook State School opened in 1947 and operated for 40 years until 1987, mostly under New York's Department of Mental Hygiene. During the 1970s, the name of the institution was changed to the Staten Island Developmental Center.

[00:01:13]Oh, very [music] proper sounding. And this alongside the polished exterior and the general disinterest of the public of what went on inside such asylums in the mid- 20th century allowed the school to continue operating unabated. On paper, this was an institution for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, which nonetheless offered some semblance of classrooms, teachers, and normal learning, which all sounds lovely. But in practice, school describes Willowbrook in roughly the same way that nursery describes my basement. And my basement is not a nursery. It's where I keep my writers.

[00:01:46]Many residents arrived as toddlers and simply never left, aging into adulthood inside the same wards where they'd been deposited as children, depending on which state document you trust. The campus was designed to hold somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 residents. Its population blew past 5,000 by the early 1960s and eventually peaked at roughly 6,000, which made Willowbrook at its height the largest institution of its kind in the US. one facility on one island's burough of New York City holding more disabled people than many entire states. Bernard Caribelloo was a boy sent to Willowbrook in the 1950s at the age of three. Bernard had cerebral palsy, a physical condition affecting movement and muscle control, but doctors misdiagnosed him as intellectually disabled and so was institutionalized for the next 18 years. Asked to later describe the experience, Caribbe went on to become one of America's most prominent disability rights advocates kept it to five words. It was like living in hell. And that raises the obvious question. How does an institution like this get built in the first place? Nobody sets out to construct hell on Staten Island, do they?

[00:02:53]The progressive campus that wasn't?

[00:02:56]Willowbrook was born, strangely enough, out of good intentions. New York State planned the facility in 1938 as a large modern institution for disabled children, part of a wave of mid-century confidence that such campuses could solve social problems at scale. This was the era of institutionalization and enormous state-run or religious asylums were established not only in the US but across the world. Thousands of people would be isolated from society for mental health disorders, poverty or social deviations, whether trifling or severe. Now, this obviously led to all kinds of abuse. Some asylums became little better than prisons, and Willowbrook was far from the only example. And remember, this was still considered the compassionate option. It was not long before this that the infamous pseudoscientific theory of eugenics had come to prominence. This had led the United States to permit the mass sterilization of more than 60,000 Americans, disproportionately women. And in Nazi Germany, as Willowbrook was being built, people with physical and mental disabilities were murdered under the Nazis euthanasia program, especially in hospitals and killing centers and later in some concentration camps. In addition, some US institutions had begun to practice lobotomy on patients, a procedure used to remedy mental illness that was neither effective nor often consensual. So what would become an institution for children to learn and develop in peace was given the ambient circumstances something to be looked at favorably. Construction of Willowbrook pushed ahead until World War II arrived and the nearly finished campus was requisitioned by the military. For several years it served as Heleran General Hospital, an army facility treating wounded soldiers shipped home from Europe and the Pacific. Only in October 1947 did the campus finally open under its intended name and the state made sure the debut looked good.

[00:04:36]Promotional photographs from the early years show clean classrooms, attentive nurses in crisp uniforms, and rows of children seated neatly at desks. The state's own literature described a modern facility. Its phrasing, not ours, and the message to the public was clear.

[00:04:50]This was humane, scientific, up-to-date care, the best that 1940s medicine and 1940s money could buy. The families who sent their children there were not by and large abandoning them. In that era, community services for disabled children barely existed. Inclusive education was decades away and the standard medical advice delivered by doctors in hospitals at the moment of diagnosis was to institutionalize the child for the sake of the family. Victoria Schnaps whose daughter was placed at Willowbrook and who later founded the care organization life's work remembered the advice she was given in exactly those terms. Put her away and forget you had her. Parents were told in effect that a place like Willowbrook offered training, safety, and professional care their child could never get at home. Many believed it because the alternative was raising a disabled child alone with no support, no services, and considerable social stigma. They were choosing what looked like care. The brochure version of Willowbrook was all post-war optimism.

[00:05:49]What actually happened behind those brick walls was something the state worked very hard to keep out of the photographs.

[00:05:57]The campus and the camouflage spread across those 375 acres of central Staten Island. Willowbrook was less a building, more a small isolated town.

[00:06:08]Anyone imagining a single Gothic asylum looming on a hill, you got the wrong idea. Willowbrook was built in what planners called the cottage plan. Dozens of low-rise red brick wards with white trim and slate roofs connected by roads and footpaths dotted with cafeterias, infirmaries, and service buildings. From the air, it could pass for a college campus or a pleasant suburban development. That softness was, in a sense, the point. Out on Victory Boulevard, the entrance sign spelled Willowbrook State School in almost carnival style lettering, cheerful, legitimate, even wholesome. A parent driving up for the first time saw trees, lawns, and handsome colonial revival buildings that looked like they belonged on a postcard. Look closer, though, and the camouflage started to slip. Some wards had barred windows, fenced yards, and chain-link boundaries carved up sections of the grounds, and the overall effect sat somewhere uneasily between a school, a hospital, and a prison, which, as it turns out, was actually a fairly honest summary of what went on here. The campus was also isolated by design, tucked into the middle of Staten Island at a time when the burough itself felt semi- detached from the rest of New York City. Administrators understood the value of that arrangement and defended it. When local reporters or officials raised alarms, and they did repeatedly for decades, state officials downplayed the exposees and steered visitors through cleaned up spaces, while the worst ward stayed conveniently uh off the tour. The only images of Willowbrook that surfaced were of wards that photographed well. It was a strategy that worked for a remarkably long time, right up until people started getting inside without an escort. When they did, the gap between the exterior and the interior stunned even hardened politicians. Mario Bergie, a US congressman and former New York police officer, tooured Willowbrook in 1972 and emerged saying, "These are the worst possible conditions I've ever seen in my life." Diane Buli, who started working there as a 19-year-old staffer and saw the wards from the inside for years, put it more fundamentally, quoting, "Willowbrook as a concept doesn't work.

[00:08:12]We can never go back to it again. For now, the question that matters is the one BRG's quote leaves banging in the air. If the conditions were the worst a veteran congressman and police officer had ever seen, how did this facade survive so long? What exactly did those handsome red brick wards looked like once the tour ended and the visitors cars pulled away down Victory Boulevard?

[00:08:34]Well, this was a campus built for around 4,000 people holding six, staffed by a workforce that kept shrinking as budgets were cut. Everything that follows in today's video, the filth, the disease, the violence, the experiments flows from a state government that did the maths, looked at the results, and decided it was acceptable year after year for decades. Behind the white-trimmed windows, the consequences were already piling up. What the public would eventually see when a young reporter with a borrowed key finally forced the doors open had been happening in plain administrative sight the entire time.

[00:09:12]Wards built like human storage.

[00:09:17]Now, nothing on the footpath outside distinguished one ward building from its neighbors. A typical ward was one large open room lined with rows of metal cribs, cotss, and hard wooden benches with a barren day room attached and almost nowhere for a resident to be alone. Privacy in the architectural sense simply did not exist. 40 to 70 residents typically lived in rooms designed for far fewer. had photographs from the era show cribs packed so tightly that an attendant would have to turn sideways to pass between them with older children and sometimes adults still sleeping in those cribs because a crib with high rails was easier to manage than a bed. Building six, a ward for severely disabled children, would later become the most infamous address on the campus when a young reporter walked through its door with a camera.

[00:09:58]Residents were sorted into these buildings not by individual need, but by crude institutional labels, ambulatory or non-ambulatory, low functioning or high functioning in the language of the time, which in practice meant they were sorted by what was convenient for the staff. These were not houses in the boarding school sense that the word cottage implies. Beneath all of it ran another layer, a network of utility tunnels connecting the buildings built for steam pipes and service traffic. The tunnels have since attracted decades [music] of urban legend. Most of it unverifiable, but the plain fact is strange enough on its own. This campus literally had an underworld, a hidden circulatory system running under the lawns that the visitors so admired. So, what does a morning look like when one person is responsible for up to 40 disabled people? Well, let's begin where the staff began at the start of a shift on an overcrowded ward, shall we? One attendant would arrive in a room full of children who'd soiled themselves overnight because there were too few staff to change them and there weren't enough diapers, even if there had been enough staff. Linens, towels, clean clothing ran short, and so the morning became a race down the rows of beds with whatever supplies existed. Former staff accounts described children being washed with the same buckets and rags that had been used on the floors. Group washing was done at speed, assembly line style, with residents moved through in batches because there was no time to do it any other way. The routine became notorious enough that later investigators used the phrase Willowbrook shower as shorthand for exactly this kind of dehumanizing speed [music] cleaning. Feeding worked the same way. And this is where the most infamous photographs come from. An aid with a single spoon, a cluster of children reaching, food spilling onto the floor, and children eating it off said floor. Many residents [music] had swallowing difficulties or motor impairments that meant a safe meal required time, positioning, and patience, none of which the staff ratio allowed. Meals that should have taken half an hour per child were compressed into hurried spoonfuls, sometimes from shared bowls, and choking was a routine hazard. Victoria Schneps, whose daughter lived at Willowbrook and required constant [music] support, described the gap between what her child needed and what the institution supplied. They were living in conditions that were unsuitable for anyone, especially those like my daughter, who required aroundthe-clock care to [music] be fed, diapered, and bathed. Now, none of this, we should be clear, was primarily a story about cruel individual attendance.

[00:12:19]Although cruelty certainly existed, and we'll come [music] to that. Plenty of staff were decent people drowning in an impossible job doing triage every single morning between the child who was choking and the child who was injured, and the 38 others. By midm morning, the frantic part was over. The residents had been washed after a fashion and fed after a fashion, and the attendant moved on to the next crisis, which left the residents facing the longest stretch of the day with in most cases absolutely nothing in it. So, what did those other 14 hours look like, the long blank day?

[00:12:56]Remember the word over the gate was school, because inside the wards, it must have become very hard to remember that this was a school. By some accounts, fewer than 20% of the children at Willowbrook were receiving classroom instruction at any given time, which means more than four out of five children at a school somehow received no formal education whatsoever. Instead, residents sat on hard benches for hours or lay on bare floors or rocked in place, sometimes remaining in their cribs from morning until night. Some were physically [music] restrained, others were chemically restrained with sedatives reportedly used to keep wards quiet. A claim that surfaces and accounts of the era alongside allegations that some staff diverted those drugs for their own purposes.

[00:13:37]Non-ambulatory children, those unable to walk, were moved and parked in wooden rolling carts, several wedged into each.

[00:13:43]And the staff term for those at the time was astonishingly [ __ ] carts. One surviving photograph showed seven small children packed into one of these with a painted Mickey Mouse smiling down from the wall behind them, the only cheerful object in frame. Toys, where they existed at all, were frequently locked away in cupboards, and donated items had a way of appearing when official visitors tooured and vanishing when they left. The day rooms themselves offered nothing soft, nothing to hold, nothing to look at, nothing to do, hour after hour for years. Dr. William Bronston, a physician on the Willowbrook staff, spent his working days in those rooms and summed them up in seven words. The sadness of the place was overwhelming.

[00:14:25]Remember, these were children and adults with the full human range of curiosity, humor, attachment, and need. Bernard Caribelloo, remember, was in these day rooms for 18 years with a misdiagnosis and a fully intact mind. And yet, a blank day repeated a few thousand times was the best case at Willowbrook. the outcome for a resident who avoided the worst things the institution had to offer. Because overcrowding on such a scale with supervision that thin bred consequences far beyond boredom. And the disgrace by the mid1 1960s was hardly even a secret.

[00:15:00]The warnings everyone filed away.

[00:15:04]People in power did see Willowbrook long before the public did. And the record of what they saw makes the scandal even harder to explain. In 1965, Robert F.

[00:15:14]Kennedy, then a serving senator of New York, turned up at Willowbrook unannounced during a tour of New York State institutions. Kennedy walked the wards without the usual sanitized escort and reportedly emerged visibly shaken.

[00:15:25]The children, he said, were living in filth, their clothing in rags in rooms less comfortable than the cages we put animals in at the zoo. And I think particularly at Willougherbrook that we have a situation that borders on a snake pet.

[00:15:40]>> A sitting US senator had just compared a state school to a zoo. On the record, unfavorably compared it to a zoo, we might add with cameras present. And Robert Kennedy must have known whereof he spoke. His own sister Rosemary had been institutionalized following a labbotomy 24 years earlier and would go on to spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric institution. For a few weeks, Kennedy's words worked.

[00:16:04]Embarrassed officials promised a 5-year improvement plan, and some changes did arrive. Fresh paint, new activity centers, and some other trifling furnishings. But as budgets tightened under Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the late 1960s, and attention moved on, conditions once again slid back down to where they'd been and below. Local journalists kept doing what they could do to sound the alarm. A newspaper called the Staten Island Advance continued reporting on conditions at Willowbrook as it had done for years, even as state officials responded with the standard playbook of minimizing, disrupting, and deflecting. And yet, warnings from the inside proved no more welcome than warnings from the outside.

[00:16:40]Dr. William Bronston, the physician mentioned earlier, began quietly organizing parents from within the institution itself, building the network that would later become a movement. Two other insiders pushed hardest of all.

[00:16:51]Dr. Michael Wilkins, a young pediatrician, and Elizabeth Lee, a social worker, began agitating for basic reforms to Willowbrook in 1971. They campaigned for more staff, more clothing, and actual programs for the residents. When the administration stonewalled them, they started contacting parents and reporters directly. By early 1972, Lee, Wilkins, and other staff activists have been dismissed. Even so, their efforts had an effect as other volunteers started to join the campaign. Victoria Schnaps, who had started out fundraising for Willowbrook through life's work, was by now picketing the gates alongside increasingly concerned parents. And Wilkins, the young pediatrician who'd only recently been dismissed for his efforts to raise awareness, wouldn't give up his cause easily. On January the 6th, 1972, he met in person with a local television reporter named Geraldo Rivera. During the meeting with Rivera, Wilkins slipped him an object that would have an enormous significance in what was to come. It was a key. Wilkins's own key to building six, the ward for severely disabled children. This would be Willowbrook's own smoking gun. Rivera took it, gathered a camera crew, and drove to the campus that same day. The key turned in the lock, and Rivera entered the House of Horrors.

[00:18:03]Building 6 hits television.

[00:18:07]Geraldo Rivera and the WABC TV camera crew immediately began filming and admitting themselves to building six with Wilkins's key. And what their lenses recorded in that day, remains a haunting scene today, more than 50 years later. Dozens of severely disabled children sat naked or half-dressed on wooden benches or lay on a bare floor smeared with excrement under harsh fluorescent light. Some rocked in place, some wailed without paws. A few crawled towards the crew and reached out to them. Toilets stood broken and overflowing, and the lone attendant on duty was lost somewhere in a crowd of children that no single adult could possibly oversee. WABC aired the footage a month later in a report entitled, "Willowbrook, the last great disgrace."

[00:18:51]Standing at the ward doorway with a microphone, Geraldo Rivera delivered a line that would outlive everything else in his career. This is what it looked like. This is what it sounded like. But how can I tell you about the way it smelled? It smelled of filth. It smelled of disease and it smelled of death. One moment in the footage did more damage than all the squalor combined. The camera reportedly caught a staff member striking a child midshift as though it were nothing unusual. For years, the state's official position had been that abuse at Willowbrook was rare and isolated, the work of a handful of bad employees. But a single unplanned visit of the briefest duration had captured abuse happening in real time, uncomfortably demonstrating just how routine it must have been. Then the footage found Bernard Carabelloo, now 21 years old, having spent 18 years in the institution, misdiagnosis still on file, mind perfectly intact. Michael Wilkins had befriended him on the wards, and he brought Caribbeo to Rivera to do the thing almost no other resident could describe Willowbrook from the inside, in his own words, on camera. Cerebral pausy affected Carabo's speech, so he spoke slowly and with visible effort. And that effort transcended the message being delivered. Decades later, Caribbeo admitted he had barely understood what a television reporter even was when Wilkins sat him down in front of one.

[00:20:11]But he knew what he knew, and here was the person to whom it needed to be told.

[00:20:15]Geraldo Rivera's expose helped galvanize political attention, and public reaction was immediate and enormous. Millions watched Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, and the broadcast ultimately went on to win a Peabody Award. Within days, Willowbrook had become a national scandal rather than merely the Staten Island embarrassment it should have been. Anyway, politicians demanded investigations. Clergy preached about the ward. Celebrities lent their names to calls for action, and donations poured into parent organizations like Life's Work. Rivera returned several more times filming additional buildings and for contrast a well-run facility in California making the point that the choice was never between Willowbrook and nothing. Yet almost nothing in Rivera's film was new information. Robert Kennedy had said it in 1965. The Staten Island Advance had printed it for years and fired staff like Wilkins had been entirely unrelenting in their demands for action. But Rivera's footage supplied proof. And the fact that obtaining proof required a smuggled key tells you how effectively the state had managed 7 years of warnings. One question remained, though. What could anyone actually do with a scandal once the entire country had seen it?

[00:21:25]Parents turn horror into order.

[00:21:29]The Willowbrook parents understood better than anyone the short shelf life of public outrage. They'd watched as the Kennedy scandal of 1965 evaporated into a meager, limbless 5-year plan. This time, on March the 17th, 1972, barely 6 weeks after the broadcast, advocates and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class action lawsuit against New York State on behalf of Willowbooks residents. Court records list the case as New York State Association for Children versus Rockefeller, later Kerry. The terminology there obviously belongs to its era. More than 5,000 people fell within the class action suit, including everyone then living in Willowbrook and by extension anyone the state might consider sending there. The complaint read [music] like an inventory of everything we've covered so far, translated into legal ease. It alleged overcrowding and residents left without clothing. It described medical neglect, confinement with no end date and no path out, and the near total absence of the education a school was supposedly built to provide. Underneath the specifics sat a larger constitutional argument. The people held in state institutions have a right to protection from harm. The idea sounds obvious now, but in 1972, no court had ever enforced it for people like Willowbrook's residents at anything close to this scale. Litigation grounds on for 3 years through hearings, expert testimony, and judicial visits to the wards themselves. Finally, on April the 30th, 1975, Judge Orin Jud approved what became known as the Willowbrook Consent Judgment. Under the judgment, New York State agreed to improve care, sharply reduce the population, move residents into small community settings, and formally recognize their right to protection from harm. Judge decree even specified standards for staffing, clothing, and education details a functioning institution would have never needed written into a court order.

[00:23:16]Promises, you see, no longer sufficed.

[00:23:18]New York had pledged improvements in 1965 and in 1972, and both dissolved the moment public attention wandered elsewhere. An order was different because an order came with a judge's command and lawyers who could drag the state back into court every time it fell short. Signing an order and obeying one, however, are two very different activities. Compliance meant moving thousands of institutionalized people into communities that did not especially want them through the same agencies that had failed those people for decades. Our next chapter today is what happens when a federal order collides with well, reality.

[00:23:55]New name, same rot.

[00:23:59]Now, the first response to the consent judgment was, of all things, a [music] name change. Even before the consent judgment in 1974, Willowbrook State School was renamed the Staten Island Developmental Center. And while no internal state document had surfaced, spelling out the motive, most observers read the timing as an attempt to put distance between the institution and its now toxic name. But the wards stayed exactly where they were, and for the time being, so did the people in them.

[00:24:25]Progress after the 1975 decree [music] came slowly enough that a resident admitted as a child could reach middle age waiting for it. Community placements had to be built, funded, staffed, and defended against neighborhoods that fought them, which meant thousands of residents remained on the Staten Island campus for more than a decade after a federal judge had ordered them out.

[00:24:45]Washington eventually added weight of its own when Congress passed the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act in 1980, a law giving the Department of Justice standing to investigate rights violations inside institutions nationwide. Willowbrook had helped make the case for that statute. It now fell squarely within its reach. Yet, the wards themselves remain stubbornly resistant. Lawyer Robert M. visited in the early 1980s, roughly 7 years into a court supervised reform, and found residents still practically naked on the wards, still holding their trousers up with shoelaces because nobody had issued belts. His verdict, in his own words, and from his own visits, was blunt. In many ways, it was [music] still like a concentration camp. Momentum finally arrived from the top. Governor Mario Quo announced in 1983 that the facility would close outright and the population, once 6,000 Hemmed in children, drained steadily away into group homes and community [music] programs. By March of 1986, roughly 250 residents remained on a campus built for thousands, rattling around wards that had once held 40 to a room. Then on September 17th, 1987, the last residents were moved out and Willowbrook formally closed after 40 years of operation. And what matters here is the ending. 15 years passed between Rivera's broadcast and the final bus leaving, [music] and 12 of those years came after a federal court had ordered the state to act. Even dying, this institution moved at a snail-like pace, the small Willowbrooks.

[00:26:16]Walk the former grounds today and you'll find lecture halls, lawns, and students of the College of Staten Island. Since 2016, a memorial route called the Willowbrook Mile has threaded through the campus marked with plaques and sculptures. One installation borrows a doorway motif from the old building, too. Bronze figures stepping out of an institutional frame rather than into it.

[00:26:36]As memorial gestures go, it's pretty pointed. The exit cast in metal is the monument. Legally though, Willowbrook [music] never quite ended. The people who lived there remains the Willowbrook class long after the buildings emptied.

[00:26:50]and a 1993 settlement guaranteed them services for life. An acknowledgement in writing that the state's obligation wasn't over. As of 2020, roughly 2,300 former residents were still alive, most of them elderly now, scattered across group homes throughout New York. The question their advocates keep asking, though, is a rather simple one. Didn't the neglect actually stop, or did it just move to a smaller location?

[00:27:13]Reporting in 2020 gave that question a bit of an uncomfortable answer.

[00:27:17]Investigators documented ongoing abuse and neglect allegations involving former Willowbrook residents in their community placements. One case in particular definitely had a bit of an echo to it.

[00:27:28]In 2014 at a group home on Union Avenue in New York, five former Willowbrook residents were reportedly abused by the people paid to care for them. These were the survivors of the original wards.

[00:27:38]People who had lived through building six, the assembly line mornings, the blank day rooms, encountering the same treatment again half a century later in houses built specifically to replace the place that broke them. The people closest to [music] the Willowbrook class, have been saying something similar for years. Antonia Ferguson, executive director of the Willoughbrook Consumer Advisory Board, the body created to watch over the survivors, offered a four-word assessment of modern care. The system is floundering. Ida Rios, a retired teacher whose son once lived at Willowbrook, went further and gave the problem its name. Now we have small Willowbrooks, she said. As much as things have changed, they don't change.

[00:28:17]And consider what she's describing there. A group home holds eight people instead of 6,000, sits on a residential street instead of a fenced campus, and answers to inspectors instead of hiding from them. Every visible feature of the old institution has been dismantled.

[00:28:31]What Rios and Ferguson are pointing at is the part that's invisible. The understaffing, the low pay, the thin oversight, the residents who can't easily report what happens to them. The same conditions that made Willowbrook what it was, just now distributed across hundreds of ordinary-looking houses.

[00:28:46]That in the end may be Willowbrook's most unsettling legacy. Everyone involved, the senators, the reporters, the judges, the parents, they fought to shut a place down and they won. The place is a college now with a memorial and a walking trail. What they discovered afterwards is that the place was never really the problem. The building was closed, but the system had to be hunted down room by room. Thank you for watching and Jesus Christ, what the