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Town And It's Hospital, And The Ties That Bind
03.19.1993
by Joseph Berger
The New York Times Metro
Wingdale, N.Y. - The people of this farming village unlike those in almost every neighborhood and town in New York State, do not mind having a mental hospital in their backyard. In fact, the people of Wingdale and the surrounding town of Dover have gone to court to stop the state from closing Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, the campus of squat brick buildings that sometimes startles New Yorkers on their leisurely way up Route 22 to weekend homes in the Berkshires.
Some of Wingdale's 600 residents have lived in the Harlem Valley for 69 years and they have come to know there is a friendly soul behind the hospital's facade. They have grown used to the hospital's mostly gentle residents, encountering patients who drop into the post office to pick up stamps or stop at Cousins to savor the diversion of a pizza slice. They are not frightened of them.
Harlem Valley has also given Wingdale is chief livelihood, employing hundreds of siblings, cousins and in-laws who had left the farm. It has even been something of a social hub. Hollywood has given such places the image of Snake Pits or Cuckoo's Nests, but Josette S. Onge, a 46-year-old therapy aide whose cheerful manner would never be confused with Nurse Ratched, cherishes the hospital as the turf of her youth. She remembers hanging out with teen-age friends at the hospital's soda fountain, its bowling alley and its movie theater, the only ones in this hamlet.
"When you came around here you were amongst the patients," said Mrs. St. Onge. "Maybe that's why I have no fear."
This village, set between two humped mountain ridges about 15 miles north of Brewster, was chosen as the site for an asylum in part because officials suspected that people here were powerless to block it. Now the hospital has been chosen for extinction because the village is powerless to stop that as well.
Wingdale has long known the hospital was doomed. The hospital had 5,362 patients in 1955, but now has just 454, while the staff numbers more than 900. The decline followed the vogue in mental health that demanded that patients subsist outside of hospitals, in communal residences or even welfare hotels, with monitoring.
The workers laugh at such notions. They have come to know that residences never materialize, that patients skip medication, become homeless and drift into official oblivion. They know because they have talked to patients who have returned.
"They like the structure," says Susan Gerhards, a veteran therapy aid. "They know when they get up. They know the people they're going to meet. They're given their medication. They don't have to think about it. The food is there. They don't have to think about buying and making it."
But Harlem Valley's workers are taxpayers and know the state can't afford to keep 80 buildings open once most patients have gone. Sure it's Catch-22, but Wingdale has always lived with vagaries: the whims of the seasons, the exhaustion of the marble mines that once provided jobs, the suburbanization that threatens farms. They are practical people.
What makes them angry is that they were assured that the hospital would not close until April 1994, enough time to rearrange their lives. Then, in January, a fiscally pressed Gov. Mario M. Cuomo moved the date to late April, giving 373 laid-off-workers just 90 to find other jobs.
Mostly, the workers will miss their particular little planet, with its sometimes funny, sometimes sad population, and the enchantment of working there.
There is a world where Benita Padilla goes up to strangers and tells them she and Rock Hudson were very much in love, that he kissed her one warm night right on the block where she lived, 123rd Street in Harlem.
The other day 30 female patients who will be transferred to Hudson River Psychiatric Center in Poughkeepsie gathered for an orientation. There were no cosmic questions.
"What kind of shampoo do they have there?" the patients asked. "Will they have a vending-machine room?" "Can we smoke?"
Colleen Murphy, an intense woman with pageboy hair, marched up and shouted: "Do they have a beauty parlor?" Then she returned to her chair, folded her legs in a lotus position, and rocked in metronome fashion.
The line between sanity and insanity is sometimes a thin one. This writer felt the off-balance sensation of what it must be like to work within the locked wards. One patient walked off with his coat, which contained his car keys, his means to return home. Until the coat reappeared, he imagined himself trying to convince people that he really was a reporter for the New York Times.
But the workers have come to cherish their patients' eccentricities and the comedy of their imaginings. They understand, with tenderness, that a patient, who lost a mother as a child would be unhinged by the thought of forsaking even an institutional home.
"They're just like you and I," said Paul Daley, a psychologist. "They have dreams. They have values. They finally connect with someone and now that person is going to be gone."
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