New York’s best known asylums and ruins have quietly stopped being abandoned. The city itself is a different case. Several are hotels, tours or working hospitals now. A couple of the rest are closed for reasons that matter more than trespass law.
What each one actually is
Buffalo State Hospital, the H. H. Richardson complex in Buffalo, is partly a hotel. The Towers building reopened as Hotel Richardson with 88 rooms in March 2023, there is a restaurant and there are paid guided tours of the campus. The Lipsey Architecture Center broke ground in October 2025 for completion in early 2027. The other two thirds of the campus is still unrenovated, fenced and alarmed.
The Ellis Island immigrant hospitals on the south side of the island have been stabilised, and you can get inside them legally on a Save Ellis Island hard hat tour, which has run since September 2014. Hard hats and a guide are mandatory because the wards still have lead paint, asbestos and failing plaster ceilings. Wandering off on your own is prohibited.
Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg is an operating New York State Office of Mental Health facility with 410 inpatient beds. It is not an abandoned asylum. Most of the oldest buildings were demolished in 2018 after JPMorgan Chase bought 60 acres of the campus for a data centre, and what vacant buildings remain are closed and posted.
The Roosevelt Island Smallpox Hospital is the only landmarked ruin in New York City, designated in 1976. It is permanently fenced, stabilised only enough to stop it falling further, and part of the north wing collapsed in December 2007. You view it from the free path in Four Freedoms Park, where it has been lit at night since 1995.
Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel in the Catskills is gone. The golf clubhouse came down in July 2018, the last building on 19 October 2018, and a remaining structure burned in August 2022. The land is private and there is nothing left to photograph.
Access and one warning
Buffalo and Ellis Island are ticketed and legal. Roosevelt Island is free to look at and impossible to enter. Rockland and Grossinger’s are both off limits. The warning is Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn: the National Park Service closed roughly 84 acres of the southern site in August 2020 after radium-226 deck markers were found in the eroding landfill, and the closure was still in force on the NPS page updated in June 2025. Entering it is a federal offence, and the contamination is the actual reason.
Full state list with check dates: abandoned places in New York.