As the most densely populated state in the country, New Jersey has seen its fair share of development. However, despite parking lots and shopping malls seemingly everywhere you turn, there is Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital that have been forgotten and left to rot by the wayside.
The hospital was first built in 1907 as a tuberculosis sanatorium and was owned and operated by the state. It was supposed to be a model institution for tuberculosis care with a mission to treat only the “curable,” so those with severe cases were unable to be admitted.
History of Abandoned Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital
Hagedorn opened in 1907 as a tuberculosis hospital, providing health care to 500 patients a year. Between 1907 and 1929, the hospital treated 10,000 people. In the 1920’s the hospital opened up to treating all cases no matter how sever.
The sanatorium’s treatment methods remained relatively unchanged until the middle of the 20th century, when newer and more innovative medicines began to be developed. In 1950, the sanatorium broadened its scope of treatments once more, this time to include all chest diseases. The hospital was closed down in the late 1970s, and was left to fall apart.
Senator Hagedorn built a psychiatric hospital next to the abandoned tuberculosis. It first started as a nursing home, and then a 288- bed psychiatric hospital. In 2011, New Jersey governor Chis Christie announced that the hospital would shut down as part of an effort to save $9 million a year in expenses. In 2012 the new hospital was closed and is now lying abandoned along side the old hospital.
That decision required some patients to be relocated to other hospitals and, according to a list of concerns filed with the state in December by Greystone board members, added 100 elderly individuals annually, on average, to the population at the Glenn Gardner facility. Now, both hulking structures are left to decay, standing side by side as the elements slowly take their toll.
Photos of Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital
