Touro Law Review Volume 34 Number 4 Dedicated to Professor Ilene Barshay Article 9 2018 Honoring Our Silent Neighbors to the South: The Problem of Abandoned or Forgotten Asylum Cemeteries Louise Harmon Touro Law Center, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/lawreview Part of the Health Law and Policy Commons Recommended Citation Harmon, Louise (2018) "Honoring Our Silent Neighbors to the South: The Problem of Abandoned or Forgotten Asylum Cemeteries," Touro Law Review: Vol. 34 : No. 4 , Article 9. Available at: https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/lawreview/vol34/iss4/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center. It has been accepted for inclusion in Touro Law Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Harmon: Honoring Our Silent Neighbors HONORING OUR SILENT NEIGHBORS TO THE SOUTH: THE PROBLEM OF ABANDONED OR FORGOTTEN ASYLUM CEMETERIES Louise Harmon* Touro Law Center is located on the south shore of Long Island, in Central Islip, almost fifty miles east of New York City. The law school is strategically situated across the street from a large federal and state court complex. Our affiliation with the courts is Touro’s academic claim to fame, and the curriculum is designed to allow our students to participate in the on-going judicial process across the street. We are proud of our legal neighbors. Their proximity, and our involvement with the courts, are featured in glossy brochures and 901 Published by Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center, 2018 1 Touro Law Review, Vol. 34 [2018], No. 4, Art. 9 902 TOURO LAW REVIEW Vol. 34 promotional materials.1 The court complex lies to the west of the law school;2 to the north is a grassy field and a defunct cheese warehouse;3 to the east a working class community of single-family homes; and to the south, our silent neighbors to the south—the subject of this essay. Touro Law Center, as well as the courts and the defunct cheese warehouse, was built on the site of the former Central Islip State Hospital, a mental institution in operation from 1889 to 1998.4 On the other side of the law school’s south parking lot, obscured from view by a tangle of brush, is the cemetery for the hospital’s former patients, as well as for some of the former patients from the other two nearby “farm colon[ies]”5 state psychiatric hospitals, Kings Park and Pilgrim State. Seen from behind the locked, rusting chain-link fence that * Professor Emeritus, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center; J.D., 1979, University of Texas at Austin, L.L.M., 1983, Harvard Law School, Ph.D., 1998, Columbia University, MSW, 2017, University of Connecticut. The author would like to thank Emil P. Albanese, Edward Karan, and Michael A. Morales for their excellent research assistance, and Dean Kenneth A. Rosenblum for his invaluable editing assistance. In addition, the entire Touro Law Center community is deeply grateful for all of the kind support and assistance of Rabbi Melvyn Lerer. 1 See History, TOURO L. CTR., http://www.tourolaw.edu/AboutTouroLaw/?pageid=43 (last visited Nov. 13, 2018) (“Touro Law Center moved to its Central Islip location in 2007, adjacent to and working with a federal courthouse and a state courthouse. It is the first law campus of its kind in the country, and our curriculum not only addresses all aspects of law in today’s changing world, but capitalizes on the proximity of the courthouses. In addition, our 185,000-square-foot building is a state-of-the-art facility with enhanced technology, classrooms, study spaces and more.”). 2 About Touro Law, TOURO L. CTR., http://www.tourolaw.edu/AboutTouroLaw/ (last visited Nov. 13, 2018). 3 See Abby Ellin, Endpaper; Lunch is Served, N.Y. TIMES (Aug. 1, 2004), http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/education/endpaper-lunch-is-served.html (showing that the state took over the property from the Central Islip State Hospital and used it to store donated food, primarily cheese, for later distribution to school lunch programs). 4 John Leita, Central Islip State Hospital, LONG ISLAND RUINS & REMAINS (July 28, 2009), http://li-ruins.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=110. There are a variety of terms that have been used from the nineteenth century to the present day to describe these institutions: “Lunatic Hospital; Lunatic Asylum; Asylum for the Insane; Insane Asylum; State Hospital; Mental Health Center; Psychiatric Hospital; Regional Center; Retreat; Developmental Center; Center; Sanatorium.” Historic Asylums Message Board, ROOTSWEB, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~asylums/mainpage.html (last visited Nov. 13, 2018). This essay may on occasion use historical terms that are not presently deemed appropriate to describe the relevant populations. 5 See LEO POLASKI, THE FARM COLONIES: CARING FOR NEW YORK CITY’S MENTALLY ILL IN LONG ISLAND’S STATE HOSPITALS: KINGS PARK, CENTRAL ISLIP, PILGRIM, EDGEWOOD: A PICTORIAL HISTORY WITH OVER 250 ILLUSTRATIONS 6 (2003) (defining the farm colonies as buildings constructed in the 1800s to take care of the poor and mentally ill, which consisted of “an almshouse, hospital, nursery and lunatic asylum[] adjoin[ed] . [by] a . farm where paupers and the insane grew food”). https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/lawreview/vol34/iss4/9 2 Harmon: Honoring Our Silent Neighbors 2018 HONORING OUR SILENT NEIGHBORS 903 encloses the property, the cemetery looks like a vast park, with a tree- lined central corridor, flanked by two uninterrupted, undulating greens. A weather-ravaged obelisk in the middle is the only visual cue that this was a cemetery. Our trespasser who entered through a hole in the fence—the only way to get in—would notice that the greens undulate in a gridded pattern; his feet would let him know that the ground is studded with row after row of flat, concrete stones, marked only with consecutive numbers. Even then, our trespasser would have to work hard to see them, so many are overgrown with grass. On the eastern edge of the site is an area enclosed by a rusty wrought-iron fence, with a broken gate bearing a Star of David, covered with vines and missing its hinges, delineating an area exclusively for the graves of Jewish residents. It is sobering to learn that while the law school’s neighbors to the east and west are all actively involved in life, judicial and otherwise, the neighbors to the south are far more numerous, and actively involved in nothing. Aside from a ripped mattress, ashes from a nocturnal fire, and some empty beer and wine bottles—the remains of revelry by local youth—there are no signs of life. The wind murmurs through the shuddering pines that shelter the graves, and in the distant background hums the traffic of the Southern State Parkway, with its energy of cars and people on the go. No one in this green, abandoned place is on the go. The sheer numbers of dead are impressive: over 5,000 former patients are buried in this cemetery, located just several feet south of the law school’s parking lot. So many unnamed souls beneath our trespasser’s feet.6 It was the Director of Touro Law Center’s Jewish Law Institute, Sam Levine, who first took an interest in the Jewish portion of the former hospital cemetery.7 While daydreaming one day from 6 The Central Islip Cemetery Restoration Project, TOURO L. CTR., http://law.touro.edu/Jew ishLawInstitute/?pageid=729 (last visited Nov. 13, 2018). There are also a variety of terms to refer to those bodies that are buried in the ground—the dead. “The terms ‘body’ and ‘dead body’ are generally used to describe the bodily remains, although ‘corpse,’ ‘cadaver,’ ‘decedent,’ ‘deceased party,’ or simply ‘the deceased’ are also used at times.” RONALD G.E. SMITH, THE DEATH CARE INDUSTRIES IN THE UNITED STATES 7 (1996). Again, this essay may use a number of these terms. 7 I would be remiss not to mention that one of our former law librarians, James G. Durham, was the first to mention to anyone in the law school in 2007 his suspicion that there were many people buried on the other side of our parking lot. His assumption was that the cemetery was a potter’s field, and suggested that the law students organize a project to clean up the cemetery, an idea that never came to fruition. At that time, no one at the law school was aware of cemetery’s history, nor of its scope. Published by Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center, 2018 3 Touro Law Review, Vol. 34 [2018], No. 4, Art. 9 904 TOURO LAW REVIEW Vol. 34 our Jewish Law Collection on the third floor of the library, Sam had an aerial view of the cemetery and the obelisk. It led him to ponder: if there are truly Jewish dead buried next to the law school, perhaps the Jewish Law Institute ought to take stewardship of those graves. He approached our then Dean, Larry Raful, who was enthusiastic about the project. We were also soon joined in the project by Andrew E. Schultz, the Executive Director of the Community Association for Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries (“CAJAC”).8 CAJAC is “dedicated to the ideal of hesed shel emet,” or faithful benevolence, a “Jewish designation for kindness toward the deceased who are unable to make claims or offer thanks.”9 After a meeting with CAJAC and the officials from the New York State Office of Mental Health, the agency that now maintains the state-owned cemetery, we began to make plans for the restoration of the Jewish portion, and possibly for the creation of a park for the rest of the cemetery.