Orange [County] is the New Black

Greg McAvoy
May 5, 2023

Another Bad Camp.

Do you want to know what Orange County, N.Y. has that the prolific Orange County, C.A. doesn’t? An abandoned women’s correctional facility. Do you want to know what they do have? Money, warm weather year round, perfect tans, etc. Just about everything else, but better. Dancing on the lines between Blooming Grove and Chester rests over 250 acres of decay – Camp LaGuardia.

Built 1918, Camp LaGuardia, known as Greycourt Prison at the time, was a prison that only admitted women into its facility. These were the type of women that the online community of men swears they can fix, but ends up castrated after a fight over who forgot to replace the empty roll of toilet paper. Lucky number one was admitted in 1924 and not a decade later, the prison shut down in ’34 because the women of the Lower Hudson Valley finally settled down. Not long after, the old, homeless, and drunk population of men showed up at Greycourt’s doorstep and decided to fuck everything up, per usual.

Just Remarkable

Named after the mayor of New York at the time, Fiorello LaGuardia, Greycourt became Camp LaGuardia and what some referred to as a ‘human repair shop’ for those battling the effects of the Great Depression. The idea was to give home to those who were out of work, and provide to them living quarters and a job upstate on that same land. Mayor LaGuardia was praised for his progressive thinking in that time, and a scale of the shelter was even shown off at the World Fair. As I have stated before, though, some things just look better on paper.

Drugs: 1 LaGuardia: 0

As the crack-cocaine epidemic began to soar in the ‘80s, so did the homeless population. Camp LaGuardia fell victim to the full extent of those people’s misfortune. The place became wildly crowded with the drunk and homeless men of the city looking for any bit of shelter they can find. This also included attempts to get their hands on drugs at all times.

This continued throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, and eventually the camp became a place for the addicted, the homeless, the drunks, and the chronically ill men who were no longer admitted into mental asylums. The camp became a cesspool of muggings and vices. Residents of Chester began to find wandering derelicts and syringes on their property. From there, the rest is history. Numerous policies were set in place along with a transfer of ownership to the Volunteers of America, and although efforts were made to stabilize the community, they were futile. The place officially shut its doors in 2008.

A Not-So Grand Reopening?

The entirety of Camp LaGuardia was sold to Orange County for $8.5 million. There have been many whispers as of what to do with the 258-acres of land quietly lying there. Some have made proposals to turn into a park for the town and county. There was a bid made in 2020 to reopen it as a homeless shelter again. It would once again be a haven for them to try and rebuild their lives with an honest day’s work. Is that a good idea? Who knows? In my unprofessional opinion – same toilet, different shit.

Our Experience

Originally, we had plans of checking out this old abandoned home for boys that was owned by the Salesians. We arrived and the place was right behind a pretty active library. That, and there was this wench that felt as if it were her duty to watch us the whole. fucking. time. We walked the property and found what I thought was the craziest thing of the day: an altar of what might have been deer and bird bones. Mind you, this was right off of a pretty active walking path. After checking out a small cemetery in the back, we headed off to Camp LaGuardia.

After driving down a long gravel road, we put the white lion (1997 Volvo [white] V90) in park and set off towards the abandoned camp. Immediately, a few old school trucks dressed in spray paint were there to greet us. We dipped and ducked into a few collapsing buildings that must had been administrative buildings. Eventually, a little to the left of where we entered, sat an old cemetery with a few American flags.

I have seen plenty of old war memorials and cemeteries that pay homage to our fallen. This site, however, was almost too old to decipher these headstones. After checking out a few, we came to realize that these weren’t WWI or WWII graves. They were headstones marking the graves of a Revolutionary soldier and his family. I was damn near seconds away from contacting my local recruiter to enlist. I felt beyond patriotic on that gravesite. Unfortunately, we felt so patriotic that we forgot to take any photos of the site. Yes, I swear I’m not fucking lying, a scout’s promise.

Spine-Tingling

Bone chilling, one might even say. Aside from the entire place being a ghost of its former self, I definitely did not feel alone there. In the kitchen of the place, the water dripped so inconsistently that it began to sound like footsteps sprinting towards us. At another point in the kitchen, it sounded as if an enormous cooler door slammed shut from a section of the kitchen not far enough away. The scariest moment was when we headed down into the basement of the kitchen, and far in the back, in the pure darkness, was the sound of paint being scratched of the wall. I gave myself whiplash from turning so fast.