Almost exactly a year ago, a very close relative of mine had to be briefly admitted into the NYU Medical Center. For a week or two, I found myself regularly visiting the "First Avenue Medical Corridor" wherein large portions of the NYC medical community are situated, only to invariably get lost within the vast confines of the complex facility that my family member was staying in. On my way home each time, I'd walk downtown on First Avenue, always passing by the fearsome, imposing and seemingly rotting edifice of the fabled Bellevue Psychiatric Building. As I peered into its filthy, forbidding windows, I would almost shudder.
It's a creepily captivating place, and looks precisely what you'd imagine an age-old, underfunded asylum for the criminally insane turned massive homeless shelter should look like. I snapped these photographs one fittingly gloomy afternoon, and its spooky aura still completely translates. It looks like an impenetrable fortress of unspeakable, endless suffering. So imagine my surprise to read this item from The Observer (passed along by Vanishing New York) that the City is looking to tranform this inarguably haunted stronghold of insanity into a plush hotel. Seriously, even if they cleaned the place up and slapped on a new coat of paint (and fumagated it and took down all the bars and scrubbed all the mysterious stains off the floors), would you want to spend a night in the place??
Not unless they performed a damn exorcism first, I wouldn't.
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