Ghosts of Overbrook, by Pamela Petro

Thursday, July 21, 2011

I took the photos of trees in spring, 2008, and printed them on scavenged slate roofing tiles in spring, 2009, when I also returned them to the site--the campus of the former Overbrook Mental Hospital in Cedar Grove, New Jersey.

Ghosts of Overbrook

Overbrook is the most haunted place in New Jersey, if you believe the internet.

It’s a former mental hospital in Cedar Grove, set on 100 acres of parkland near the top of Second Mountain, the highest point in Essex County. It opened in 1896 and closed a hundred years later, in the 1990s. The county wanted to sell the land for housing—just what Essex County needs, more houses—but decided not to build. It will be open space now, once the trees and the buildings are gone.

I grew up in the shadow of Overbrook. When I was a kid there were two horns that sounded in Verona—my town, neighboring Cedar Grove—and you could hear them townwide. One was the firehouse siren, the other Overbrook’s, hoarser, higher-pitched, and it would sound when someone "escaped" from the hospital.

An early memory: a neighbor, heavy and white, panting down the block, chasing a young black man, shouting to me— a little girl of 5 or 6—to call the police. "He's escaping!" the neighbor shouted, breathless. I remember their gaits: the loping, easy run of the chased, the cramped, bicycle pumping of the chaser. One was Elmer Fudd. The other, Bugs Bunny.

The Overbrook buildings have been decaying and crumbling earthwards for a decade now, alongside the dead, dying, neglected trees. Weeping beeches, copper beeches, oaks, elms, evergreens. They wear tree wisdom in knots and gnarls and scars of carved and forgotten love.

One day at the tail end of 2008 I was walking my dog through the ruins of Overbrook and came upon a neat pile of slate roofing tiles next to a razed building. I remembered a striking passage from a book I'd reviewed called Slate of Hand, by Judy and Ted Buswick.

Each fragment of slate has a sound locked in it. It used to be said that a quarry could be identified blindfolded, by the song of the tips as they settled.

On this day the tip didn’t sing. It greyed into the grey of December, a short shadowless day at year’s end. Damp and grey and darkling at a quarter to dusk. No living creatures, just me and the dog. The backhoe was still. The buildings empty. My dog sniffed and pawed and the slate roofing tiles slipped. That was when the tip started to sing.

There was a sign that told me to keep out, but I paid no attention. I put the dog in the car and began pulling tiles from the tip. A thief, a rescuer, a musician. The slate orchestra played as I stole one, two, three roofing tiles, maybe 20 in all, and put them in the car with my dog.

Music broke the grey afternoon and it seemed that the trees listened; the sap listened in the copper beech and the weeping beeches across the way. Grey ghosts of trees graying by the cold music of slate.

Later, in 2009 and '10, I printed photographs of Overbrooks trees on the slate tiles, and returned them to the campus to photograph them on site. It made sense to call the series "Ghosts of Overbrook." Note the photo below, that I took into the window of a rubble-strewn hallway in a condemned building. A reflection of budding trees is superimposed over the hallway, in which sits...Something. I don't know what. I certainly didn't see it when I took the picture...