Bellerose Manor lies about as far east as you can get while still staying within New York City limits. The neighborhood sits right on the border between Queens and Nassau County—a dividing line that feels especially arbitrary once you realize there’s also a neighborhood called Bellerose on the other side.
The border runs straight down the middle of Jericho Turnpike, a rather nondescript commercial strip with a sign declaring: “Two Counties, One Town.” Until 2005, the Queens side of Jericho Turnpike was still called Jamaica Avenue, which is somehow even more confusing than having two adjacent neighborhoods with the exact same name.
In 1871, the Central Railroad of Long Island purchased a large parcel of land on the north side of Braddock Avenue, which included the Creed family farm. They sold part of it to the newly formed National Rifle Association for use as a rifle range and training ground for the New York National Guard, which, in the post-Civil War years, had prioritized marching over marksmanship. The NRA named the site Creedmoor, after its former owners and its low, grassy, moor-like terrain.
By 1907, as the surrounding area became more populated and public interest in watching men lie down and shoot at things waned, the range shut down.
In 1912, the Lunacy Commission of New York State opened a farm colony for the Brooklyn State Hospital on the former rifle range. Like the New York Farm Colony on Staten Island, the hospital sent its first 32 patients to the countryside for fresh air and what was then considered therapeutic rural labor.
In the 1930s, during a nationwide expansion of psychiatric institutions, the facility grew to 70 buildings across 300 acres.
By 1956, the complex—now known as Creedmoor State Hospital—was severely overcrowded, housing 6,018 patients in a facility certified for only 4,188. A year later, the towering 17-story Building 40 opened. Creedmoor’s most recognizable landmark, it’s a near-exact replica of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Randall’s Island.
Treatment at Creedmoor ranged from straitjackets and hydrotherapy to electroshock therapy and lobotomies.
Jazz pianist Bud Powell, suffering from migraines after a brutal police beating, spent nearly a year at Creedmoor receiving electroshock therapy. He returned several times over the course of his short life.
In 1959, Lou Reed underwent 24 electroconvulsive sessions here at the urging of his parents.
And in 1966, Woody Guthrie—suffering from Huntington’s disease—was transferred here for the final year of his life.
As antipsychotics like Thorazine became widely used and public attitudes toward psychiatric institutions shifted, large hospitals like Creedmoor fell out of favor. Today, Creedmoor operates primarily as an outpatient facility, with only a few hundred full-time patients.
The high number of writers, musicians, and visual artists who have spent time in mental institutions like Creedmoor might suggest a link between mental instability and creativity, an idea fully endorsed by Creedmoor psychologist Dr. János Marton:
“Extreme creativity and mental illness overlap. And if you are not mentally ill and you are creating great art, you are most likely using drugs or alcohol. You are cheating.
In 1983, Marton and artist Bolek Greczynski turned a dilapidated 40,000-square-foot former dining hall into the Living Museum, the first working studio and gallery dedicated to art made by psychiatric patients. Today, it holds the largest collection of outsider art in the country.
Practically every square inch is devoted to creative expression. Old palettes encrusted with layers of dried paint, soup cans full of Sharpies, multi-colored skeins of yarn, stacks of metal hangers, piles of pastels and pipe cleaners, and towers of spray-painted CRT screens, a collision of color and materials crammed into every corner and corridor.
At the center of the main room, what was once the kitchen, a massive shiny ventilation hood hovers 10 feet off the ground, like a ’60s spaceship, all curves and chrome, festooned with flags and multi colored canvases.
A yarn-wrapped tree branch sprouts from the top of the ventilation hood, and a small bunker-like room built from cinderblocks is tucked away inside it. The room was filled with stacks of LPs ranging from Tchaikovsky to Joni Mitchell and, probably, some Bud Powell and Lou Reed too.
It is a remarkable place, and I think it may be the city’s greatest museum, or at least its most alive.