The psychiatric hospital that links Donald Trump’s baseball career and Lou Reed
Other than their common connection to New York City, you would assume that there’s not much connection between Donald J Trump and one of the greatest songwriters to ever walk the planet, but, as it turns out, Lou Reed was connected to the US president through a strange blend of baseball and exploitative psychiatric treatment.
Both Reed and Trump are around the same age, with the songwriter entering the world via Brooklyn back in 1942, and Trump following in Queens four years later, but even though the two came of age in the same city during the same time period, there aren’t many similarities other than that.
After all, the future president was born into riches, with his father, Fred Trump, one of the most prolific and feared real-estate developers in the Big Apple – so infamous, in fact, that he was once the subject of a searing Woody Guthrie song – while Reed was much further down the social hierarchy.
Nothing represented that social disparity quite like the pair’s very different connections to the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center back in the 1950s. Originally opened by the Lunacy Commission of New York State in 1912, the building on Winchester Boulevard is among the most imposing buildings in Queens, and it boasts a rather dark history.
Like many psychiatric institutions in the USA, Creedmoor was the site of some horrendous exploitation of cognitively disabled people, and it also housed a number of criminals who had been committed to the institution on grounds of insanity. While it would be easy to take the low-hanging fruit and suggest that Trump’s connection to the institution is a result of his clear cognitive decline, that wouldn’t be wholly accurate.
During a recent, and typically incoherent, public address, Trump reflected on his childhood in Queens for reasons that are largely unknown. “I grew up in Queens; we had a place called Creedmoor,” he shared. “I said, ‘Mom, where are those bars on the building?’” Seemingly, the only reason that Trump ever came across the building was as a result of his childhood interest in the realm of baseball.
“I used to play little league baseball there, at a place called Cunningham Park,” he claimed, citing a park which is multiple miles away from the Creedmoor building. In his typical fashion, the president then went down a self-aggrandising rabbit hole about his baseball talents. “I was quite the baseball player, you wouldn’t believe, but I said to my mother ‘Mom’ – She said ‘Son, you could be a professional baseball player’. I said, ‘Thanks, Mom,’” he continued.
“I said why are those bars on the windows – big building, big, powerful building, it loomed over the park, actually,” Trump circled the increasingly elusive point he was trying to make for some time. “She said, ‘Well, people that are very sick are in that building.’ I said, ‘Boy’. I used to always look at that building and I’d see, this big building – big tall building, it loomed over the park, now that I think of it, it was a pretty unfriendly sight.”
Depending on the exact time period of Trump’s alleged baseball stardom, though, one of the patients behind those bars might very well have been Lou Reed. During the future Velvet Underground founder’s first year at college, in the late 1950s, he suffered an apparent mental breakdown, causing him to visit a psychiatrist.
Eventually, that led Reed through the – as Trump called them – looming doors of Creedmoor, where he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, which he later claimed he believed was an attempt to discourage homosexual tendencies. That experience seemed to stick with the songwriter, too, with him later exploring its traumatic nature in the track ‘Kill Your Sons’, focusing on his resentment towards his parents for allowing the electroshock therapy to take place.
Although Reed doesn’t mention seeing a rotund baseball player with a ghoulish-looking father through the barred windows of the institution, it is strange to think that both the songwriter and the future president might once have been within walking distance of one another.
Even stranger, still, Creedmoor was also the place where Woody Guthrie – the man who had once lamented Fred Trump in musical form – spent his final months before ultimately passing away in 1967.
