Lawrence Downes’ essay “Erasing the Past at the Ghost Hospital” makes for good reading if you’re interested in dark tourism. The Kings Point mental hospital, now in advanced ruins, is proving to be an attractive destination for people who view mental illness through Hollywood lenses–perhaps they see David Caruso with a gas mask as they walk the paths of what was essentially a concentration camp for the mentally ill? In America we like to make things gothic with a small g, rather than see what our most segregationist impulses have always been about. Today the largest mental hospital in the US is the Los Angeles County jail system. Any tourists up for visiting that?
Planet of the Blind 