In Kings Park, walks, whispers and winds of time

Long Island is ideal for walking. Much of it is flat, forgiving terrain, although there are enough hills to challenge the more ambitious. A few years ago, my wife, Dianne, and I relocated from Huntington to Kings Park.

My Huntington walking routes included the perimeter of the Walt Whitman Shops’ parking lot before stores opened in the morning, the harbor area, up and down West Shore Road, and the stretch of West Neck Road leading from West Neck Beach to Caumsett State Park.

Since moving to Kings Park, I have been exploring the many locations for a good walk near our new home. Sunken Meadow State Park, with its scenic boardwalk and view of the Long Island Sound, is truly a walker’s mecca. My new neighborhood also offers a pleasant setting for getting out into the fresh air.

My favorite destination, though, is Nissequogue River State Park with its hike and bike trail, which was once a spur of the Long Island Rail Road serving the former Kings Park Psychiatric Center.

The old psychiatric hospital grounds have become the park. It is largely undeveloped as an actual park. There are no modern playgrounds or welcoming picnic areas. Aside from the vast 521-acre sprawl, it has little to offer besides open spaces for walking, for both people and dogs and the occasional bike rider or runner.

A milelong center access road, Kings Park Boulevard, runs north from the entrance on Route 25A, to St. Johnland Road and the nearby Tiffany Field. A marina is used for launching canoes and kayaks, and trails lead to the bluffs overlooking the Sound. But these features are not visible to the casual visitor unless you know where they are located.

The real draw and backdrop for the park are the many abandoned buildings that stand silently, sentinels and witnesses to the history of the psychiatric center. My walks usually take me past the boarded-up firehouse and the imposing 13-story “Building 93,” a reminder that this was a self-contained community with a population of over 9,000. Building 93, with its striking architecture, was once the tallest building on Long Island, even visible from the Sound, and remains standing as a kind of local landmark.

After 111 years, the psychiatric center was closed in 1996. It’s many long-vacant buildings dominate the park landscape, formidable in varying degrees of ruin and decay. Walking the grounds, their presence cannot be ignored. They demand attention. Stories of patient abuses and now arcane medical treatment belie what once was a state of the art, fresh-air alternative to the dark insane asylums of the past.

One can easily imagine cows grazing in the fields, and crops tended by patients and hospital staff. These same fields are home today to protected wildlife including egrets, deer and foxes. Rumors of eerie sounds and ghostly sightings still persist, however, prompting a police presence every Halloween to discourage would-be thrill seekers from desecrating the remaining structures.

As for me, I enjoy the open space and fresh air and opportunity to walk unimpeded by the noise and pollution of traffic. Whatever its past, Nissequogue River State Park represents the present and the promise of future development in the hamlet of Kings Park. And yet, there are those ominous rumors . . .

 Reader Victor Caliman lives in Kings Park.