From 1873 to 1939, a countywide “Lunatic Asylum” accepted patients on the grassy hill in Secaucus that is now home to Laurel Hill County Park – and back then, the asylum was side by side with other fear-instilling countywide institutions including a debtor’s prison, a tuberculosis hospital, a smallpox hospital, and a county jail.
The most infamous of the county facilities was the legendary “Hudson County Lunatic Asylum,” which adopted the more politically correct name of “Mental Disease Hospital” in the 1930s. When it was first built in 1873, the hospital had the capacity to house 140 people. By the time it closed in 1939, it held 1,872.
It wasn’t too hard to get a patient admitted back then, and residents sometimes signed in their elderly relatives when they could no longer afford to care for them. There are still adults in Hudson County who tell stories of growing up wondering where their grandfather or grandmother went – only to find out years later that they were signed into the mental hospital by ashamed relatives.
Back then, the 190-acre Laurel Hill area of Secaucus was known by the more sinister name of Snake Hill. Along with the jails and hospitals, it held churches of three different denominations, and two almshouses, which are poor houses that provided shelter for the indigent and the elderly.
County kept it quiet
“The insane are a county charge, under the orders of the board of [county] freeholders. They are maintained at the insane asylum at Snake Hill,” says the 1874 volume of a report by the American Social Science Association. The biggest collection of documents about the asylum and the other Snake Hill facilities belongs to Secaucus Town Historian Dan McDonough.
McDonough, who grew up in Union City but is now a resident of Secaucus, became fascinated by the Laurel/Snake Hill area after volunteering to be an altar boy at the Catholic Church on the hill in the mid 1950s. Over the years, he has collected books, photographs, and records of the many institutions on the hill, including the asylum.
“A lot of records [about the asylum] aren’t available because people didn’t talk about it,” he said. The asylums of the 19th century are considered by many to be symbols of a dark period in mental health care. They are often remembered for their negative practices – involuntary incarceration, inhumane treatment for patients, and therapeutic methods that bordered on torture. The Hudson County Lunatic Asylum was no exception.
Documents chronicle shock therapy that was conducted by Dr. Leon Rezinkoff, the clinical director of the hospital, to treat schizophrenics. A report written by the doctor in 1939 and later published in Psychiatric Quarterly states:
“Both Insulin and Metrazol shock therapies were employed during the year in the treatment of the schizophrenic patients. The number of patients treated with insulin shock was not sufficiently large to form any definite conclusions to the effectiveness of this method. Of the 50 patients treated during 1939 with Metrazol shock, 30 improved sufficiently to be paroled in the custody of their families. Eight patients treated during 1938 and the early part of 1939 and previously paroled had to be returned to the institution because of a reoccurrence of their mental symptoms.”
‘Anybody could sign somebody in’
The building that housed the insane of Hudson County had two wings separating the male and female patients. Rooms were off long corridors, and there were several beds to a room.
McDonough said that people were admitted for a number of disorders ranging from schizophrenia to syphilis. But there was another group of people who often got signed in: otherwise-healthy residents who were determined to be a burden on their relatives.
Among them was the grandmother of Jersey City resident Diane Brulé. Brule did not know much about her paternal grandmother growing up. She had only been told that her grandfather had signed her into a mental institution somewhere in New Jersey.
It was only in 2003, when the NJ Turnpike Authority was moving the graves of those who had died in Laurel Hill’s institutions (among others) in order to build Turnpike Exit 15X, that they located records of her grandmother, Alfoncina Pansini. As it turned out, Pansini died in 1928.
A private archeological company called Louis Berger Group in East Orange was hired by the Turnpike in 2003 to find any descendants of those buried, so they could receive proper burial. They managed to trace and find Brulé’s grandmother so she could receive a proper burial, which she did in October of 2003. (See sidebar).
According to Susan Grzybowski, assistant director of cultural resources for the Louis Berger Group, there was no indication of what Pansini died from. In fact, the cause of death was often not recorded for patients, because they were given a pauper’s funeral at the potter’s field.
Residents also sent away elderly parents or mentally handicapped relatives to the asylum.
“Anybody could sign somebody in,” said McDonough last month. “But you would need three doctors to sign you out.”
The asylum warden’s annual report for 1939, submitted to the county, describes the demographics of those admitted. In the report, Warden Arthur Orr lists the number of patients received that year as 325. That same year, there were 111 patients discharged. Of those, 22 were considered recovered, 62 were listed as improved, and 27 were listed as unimproved.
Of those admitted, 268 were first-time admissions, and there were 57 re-admissions. Four patients were transferred from other New Jersey institutions for mental diseases, and six people had been patients in mental disease hospitals outside the state of New Jersey. 176 were males and 149 were females.
Decades of decadence
In the 1930s, the Mental Disease Hospital was moved further down on County Avenue in Secaucus, to where Meadowview Hospital now stands. In fact, the Mental Disease Hospital closed when Meadowview began operations.
Many of the other institutions soon followed suit, moving away from what had once been a completely independent city on a hill. Snake Hill had begun in 1863 with the alms house, penitentiary, and lunatic asylum, and later grew to include a general hospital, a tuberculosis hospital, an isolation hospital, a children’s eye infirmary, a smallpox hospital, a special laboratory, a school, a Lutheran Church, a Catholic Church, an Episcopal Church, and a cemetery.
There were also support facilities that sustained the area, including its own reservoir, an electricity plant, laundry and incinerator buildings, and a sewer system.
By the 1950s and 1960s, most of the properties were empty, and fell into disrepair. The Secaucus Home News, a weekly newspaper, reported at the time on how a series of fires ravaged the properties.
In the 1960s, much of the actual “hill” was drilled away to make room for parts of the New Jersey Turnpike. Today, of the over 50 buildings that once existed on Snake Hill, only the foundation of the old alms house remains, nestled in the wilderness of Laurel Hill County Park.
To comment on this story, e-mail mfriedman@hudsonreporter.com. To comment on the series, e-mail editorial@hudsonreporter.com. Finding their long-lost grandparents
The Hudson County institutions at Laurel Hill, including the mental hospital, buried their dead in a potter’s field located on the hill, along with other residents of the county who could not afford a funeral.
The poor, the sick, the incarcerated, and the insane were all buried together, usually without grave markers, in a plot known as the Hudson County Burial Grounds.
In 2004, the remains of these 4,571 individuals were moved from the site on Snake Hill to Maple Grove Park Cemetery in Hackensack after the N.J. Turnpike Authority began excavation to build Exit 15X.
Before work on the project began, the Turnpike Authority hired the Louis Berger Group in East Orange to perform research and even contact some relatives of the dead.
Archaeologist Susan Grzybowski said that the county originally believed that there were 3,500 people buried in the cemetery. But through the use of old maps, original burial ledgers, osteological (bone) examinations and in-person interviews, Grzybowski and her team found over 1,000 additional bodies. They were also able to identify some of the remains.
But it was not easy.
“It’s not like we had coffins or caskets that said ‘Here lies…,’ ” Grzybowski said. “It was a lot of detective work.”
Through that detective work, they were able to help two New Jersey residents locate lost relatives. Jersey City resident Diane Brulé located her paternal grandmother, Alfoncina Pansini. Brulé had heard that her grandfather had had Pansini committed to a mental institution in New Jersey before she died, but didn’t know where her body was.
Grzybowski’s team also helped Patrick Andriani, of Roxbury, N.J. locate the remains of his great-grandfather, Leonardo, after an almost life-long search. It was determined that the great-grandfather had been in the mental institution.
Pansini’s and Adriani’s remains were later returned to their relatives, and they received proper burials. -MF