Norman Mailer Slept Here

Growing up when I did, the politically correct way to say that someone was "nuts" was to announce they should go to, be in, or be forced to go to, Bellevue. Bellevue was and still is a NYC hospital, treating all kinds of conditions. It was always large, and has gotten even larger. But the place became best known as a psychiatric center where the police took people who needed to be "observed" because of what they had done. They might have done it to themselves, as in surviving a suicide attempt, or, something that hurt others, perhaps even killing them.

If the person you were referring to was really around the bend there always was a reference to the key that should be thrown away that might otherwise someday be used to release them. "Throw the key away" was always reserved for special cases.

Occasionally as a teenager I had to deliver flowers to someone who was in Bellevue. Not someone locked up in the psychiatric ward, but the more general medical/surgery wards. At the time, these were large rooms with lots of beds filled with people who didn't seem to move. And there didn't seem to be anyone around to watch that nothing was happening, or to even make something happen. I wandered around until I found the person in Ward J, say, and placed the flowers on the night table. People in hospitals never tipped. They barely seemed to breathe.

Anyway, I was reminded of Bellevue when I came across a passage about it in the recently published book, 'The Mad Bomber of New York, The Extraordinary True Story of the Manhunt that Paralyzed a City,' by Michael M. Greenburg.

Yes, true, and the bomber, George Metesky, is quite a story, having been finally found in 1957, after starting his version of a reign of terror in 1940. After some police and court formalities, he was sent to Bellevue, for observation.

Mr. Greenburg quite delightfully and accurately describes the place, the circumstances that still place people there, while adding the names of other notables that have passed through its iron gates. Certainly revealing something of his own personality, Mr. Greenburg cites a jazz musician, a writer, a playwright and a fictional Santa Claus as being sent to the same place they sent "The Mad Bomber" to be observed.

The nine-story brick and limestone structure that housed the cheerless if not gruesome psychiatric division of the Bellevue Hospital stood against the gray winter skies of Manhattan like a dismal shadow--a harbinger of stormy weather. The fetid East River quietly flowed at the rear of the building while its decaying piers clung tenuously to wooden retention walls along its banks. Tough Bellevue Hospital Center--said to be the oldest general public hospital in the United States--was a cluster of hospital pavilions extending four city blocks along First Avenue and interconnected by a labyrinth of foreboding underground tunnels, the epithet "Bellevue" was often used to denote only its infamous and gloomy psychiatric division.

The red brick and wrought iron gates of the Bellevue asylum had, by the 1950s, been firmly ensconced in the public imagination. A temporary (and often longer) home to the wretched and the poor, the facility also hosted notables such as Charlie Parker, Norman Mailer, and Eugene O'Neill for observation following crimes or activities that defied sanity.

And for a while, George Metesky slept there.

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