Status: Demolished

I recall days back when I was in high school. All my friends and I would pile into someone’s car and trek down Rt. 601 down to the Record Exchange in Princeton to look for new music. We would always pass signs across from the Skillman School for Boys which read “North Princeton Developmental Center”. I pegged the grounds as some kind of research facility for the University. Little did I know a few years later the true history of the compound would reveal itself.

When we actually decided to turn off the road and into one of the long entrances at the grounds we were shocked by the large number of totally abandoned buildings. There were acres and acres of land with little bungalow type houses, larger brick buildings, a power/pump house and some sort of main hospital building. This place looked like it was totally self sufficient in its heyday. There were water mains and power lines leading from one building to another which were all fed from the power/pump house. Some of the transformer boxes which were scattered around “hummed” like they still had current running through them.

This establishment had served many different purposes when it was functional. It started as a home for epileptics in 1898. It then became a neuro-psychiatric hospital in 1953, then a home for the developmentally challenged in 1983. It finally closed its doors in 1998.

Probably the weirdest part of all this was that they decided to build an elementary school right smack in the middle of these grounds. I guess the local government figured they may as well use this space for something. If I was a kid in 1st grade I would feel kind of irked going to a school that’s surrounded by decrepit buildings that were falling apart and overgrown with weeds.

The school was obviously off limits and of no interest for exploration. We did manage to have a look around in some of the little houses and the larger brick buildings since the doors were wide open. We saw some murals of magazine pictures in a couple of the buildings. They were mostly of animals and the Mets winning the world series. The larger “main hospital building” showed us some more interesting things like a crematorium and a morgue. The township of Montgomery has great interest in purchasing the land. Not sure what they plan on using it for, or how much longer the buildings are going to be around.

While visiting NPDC, we found the Sacred Grounds Upper Cemetery, which is the cemetery where the patients were laid to rest. Check it out.

- 5witchbhakk, 2003