No one saw me poking around the old Fort Totten Post Hospital, except for a suspicious raccoon that seemed to be the unofficial watchman of the place. I ignored him and stepped through an open door at the back of the building. That’s when he must have followed me inside.
I hadn’t bothered to look over my shoulder as I made my way past ancient kitchen cabinets piled high with dust. I sidled through a two-story cave-in—a dimly lit hallway that visibly slumped a foot or two lower than any floor should. With as light a step as my husky frame allowed, I headed down a spongy staircase to the basement to check in on my favorite sight in the hospital—a mind-bending spot where you can look straight up through three stories of collapsed rooms to the dormer windows in the attic.
As a photographer who’d spent the last year-and-a-half shooting New York City’s decaying factories, institutions, schools and cemeteries, Fort Totten, a former U.S. Army installation in Queens, had just the right combination of history and dilapidation I was looking for. The defunct military base is gradually being improved as a public park, but vast areas of the peninsula are all but overtaken by wild things, and dozens of historic structures are falling to rack and ruin.
That day, I pushed my luck all the way to the top floor, through a sturdy stairwell in the heart of the building. It was just as I remembered from my first visit a year before, only farther gone. I settled on a bit of stable ground and assembled my camera. The hall was silent. And suddenly, it wasn’t.
Tiny footsteps emanated from a doorway just a few feet ahead of me. A moment later, the culprit presented himself, unfurling a banded tail. It was the same raccoon I’d passed on the way in, and he must have been following me around all morning. He froze when I spotted him and locked his eyes with mine in an expression of unfeeling animal curiosity. I fumbled to switch lenses and get a few pictures of him. There was no mistaking the question in his gaze—what are you doing here? I could have asked him the same thing.
I was backed into a corner and he was getting too close for comfort. He took two steps toward me with no sign of apprehension, making it clear that I was the outsider, that wilderness had laid claim to this forsaken place long ago. My animal instincts kicked in and I found myself acting out a ridiculous gesture of intimidation—stomping my feet, flapping my arms, hissing like a maniac. It was unnerving how long it took him to react. For what seemed like minutes, he just kept staring.
More out of boredom than fear, he wandered into an adjacent room, traipsing over wafer-thin floors that even the most foolhardy explorer would know to avoid. I set up my tripod and attempted to coax him into the light with the kind of tk tk tk sound that never fails to get the attention of house cats. Predictably, my companion was unmoved. He backed into a brightly lit dayroom and crept out of sight. I reframed the camera and waited for him to step into my picture. Ten minutes later, there was still no sign of him.
I left my gear and followed the direction of his movements, hugging close to the stairwell where the floor was still attached. Every door I passed opened into another scene of unbridled decay—vines overflowing from a broken window, saplings taking root in the floorboards, the bones of the old hospital bleached and rotting in the rafters. Tk tk tk tk tk? A breeze rambled through the top floor, stirring a bank of dry leaves. Tk tk tk? I reached the end of the hall where his tracks ended, but all I found was an empty room. I was alone in the dark again, back in the crumbling corridors, left only with his incisive question. What the hell was I doing there?
The floor gave a little. Through a doorway to my right, I looked straight down to the basement floor three stories below me and decided to never set foot in that building again.
Send us a story tip
