Camp Jened was located in the northern Catskills, on over 250 acres (which is about ⅓ the size of Central Park, or as big as 250 football fields) with 22 buildings near the town of Hunter, New York.
Willowbrook opened in 1947. The number of people living at institutions in and around New York City increased in the early twentieth century as physicians frequently told parents of “mentally retarded” children to send them to institutions where they could be rehabilitated.
Parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities were often told to send their children to a state residential school if their IQ scores were low.
In the late 1800s through the early 1900s, educators and social reformers created institutions for people they called “idiots,” “feeble minded,” or later, “mentally retarded.
A school for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities opened on Randall’s Island in the East River in the 1860s - alongside the city’s almshouse, hospitals, and prisons.
Many blind people lived in dire conditions in the city almshouse for the poor, because they were not able to support themselves and had no other place to go.
