32 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 32 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 32 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 201TUTU111
At Heartland, dollars and scents
By WARREN STRUGATCH
When Pilgrim State Hospital opened in Brentwood
during the Great Depression, it was set up
to provide not just housing and treatment for the
state’s surging population of schizophrenics, but
to distribute government-issued substitutes for
family and community.
Institutions like Pilgrim, Central Islip and Kings
Park were self-sufficient communities equipped
with power generators, vast kitchen facilities,
burial grounds and acres of farmland for patients
to cultivate as therapy. Whatever patients
needed was to be available inside the institutional
gates, according to state policy.
Pilgrim’s population peaked at nearly 14,000
patients in 1954, the year it was declared the
world’s largest hospital. In the decades that
followed, several generations of improved psychiatric
drugs led officials to close most of the
hospital’s units and discharge patients into the
community.
Talk about irony. The self-sufficiency of Pilgrim
State Hospital – later Pilgrim Psychiatric Center
– predates the much-ballyhooed New Urbanism
espoused by community planners and progressive
developers. Soon-to-be-constructed Heartland
Town Square, as you know unless you’ve
lived under a rock, is the $4 billion, 452-acre
live-work-play redevelopment project whose first
phase Islip Town Board approved in July.
The partial approval followed more than 15
years of political lap-dancing over union hiring
requirements, who pays what in infrastructure
costs, how to allocate subsidies for housing and
government services, and – last but not least –
the best way to update zoning.
Changing zoning of course raises thorny land
use questions, debates over population density,
and discussions of ownership-vs-rental ratios.
That’s just scratching the contentious surface.
The fact is that many Long Islanders harbor the
delusion that the 1950s never truly ended, steadfastly
defending zoning regs, village ordinances
and building requirements put in place when
Ozzie and Harriet last went house hunting.
In her classic work on urbanism, “The Death
and Life of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs
warned of the sterile planned neighborhood
“that shows a strange inability to update itself,
enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after,
out of choice, by a new generation.”
Such a community, she wrote, “is dead.”
“Actually, it’s dead from birth but nobody noticed
this much until the corpse began to smell.”
Heartland Square is not just another planned
community. Its proper planning, construction
and leasing is essential to providing the kind of
walkable, open-street, diversely-populated 21st
century community that’s been shepherded into
existence all across the country by savvy coalitions
of business leaders, community advocates
and government officials.
Everywhere except here on Long Island.
Heartland could be – and perhaps will be – the
kind of community Long Island desperately
needs. I’m talking about a community where
you can walk to work, ride your bike without
fear of death, hang out in a Great Good Place
until late, mingle with interesting strangers and
rent without being stigmatized.
Much has been made of the exodus of young
Long Islanders in recent years. The diaspora is
usually attributed to inadequate job creation.
That’s certainly one cause. Another’s the lack
of housing options. The shortage of residential
choices drives plenty of young folks to the bridges
and airports. Many recent graduates – and
plenty of divorcees, singles and empty nesters as
well - have no use for the white picket fence fantasy.
As the millennials say, that’s so last century.
It isn’t just about housing stock. It’s about community.
Long Island is all about Mom, Dad and
the Kids. Real estate agents greet prospects with
patter about great schools, quiet night streets,
and heartfelt odes to suburban insularity.
Did I leave out how near we are to the malls?
It speaks to the lunacy of Long Island’s housing
and zoning policies that Gerald and David
Wolkoff, the father-and-son developers who
spent over 15 years preparing to transform a
one-time psychiatric hospital into a vast planned
community designed in the spirit of New Urbanism,
only to discover that the state’s discredited
legacy of mental health institutionalization
policies offers the most progressive community
planning insights available.
Still, I’m banking on the Wolkoffs. I think
Heartland’s going to work out fine.
Strugatch is a consultant and writer based in Stony
Brook. His website is WarrenStrugatch.com.
BUSINESS
Despite a few last minute challenges, developer Gerry Wolkoff ’s 15-year effort to convert a
former psychiatric center into new suburbia is about to break ground.