New York City mayor Eric Adams plans to tour the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center and Aqueduct Racetrack with an eye toward using the destitute facilities as temporary housing as the city struggles to accommodate a massive influx of illegal migrants.

The city greenlit construction on the temporary housing sites last week, an Adams administration source told The City. The sites are expected to house around 1,000 adult illegal immigrants each and will be opened in the next two to three weeks.

Donovan Richards, the Queens Borough President, was frustrated by the development. “How many migrants are in Queens? I can’t get a breakdown,” he told the New York Post. “The city must also leave no stone unturned to ensure the safety of all involved — both the surrounding communities and those housed at the sites alike — and ensure that there is adequate local transportation for our asylum seekers who need to travel elsewhere.”

“As the mayor has said, all options are on the table as we deal with this crisis and no humanitarian relief centers are final until announced,” a spokesperson for the mayor’s office told the Post. “With over 53,000 asylum seekers currently in the city’s care, we need additional support from state and federal partners.”

Data released from July 3 to 7 revealed that over 100,000 people were reliant on New York City shelters, prompting officials to commandeer hotels and commercial spaces as well as set up emergency tent villages. The Adams administration projects that the strain of housing migrants could be as high as $4.3 billion by the end of 2023.

“A lot of the folks that we’re getting now are coming from other parts of the United States, where other people in other cities are running out of space,” deputy mayor Anne Williams-Isom told reporters during a press conference on Wednesday. “Since we have a front door that is open, people are finding themselves here.”

The Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village was purchased by the state legislature in 1870 to host New York’s National Guard detachment. However, in 1912, the property was converted to serve as a “farm colony” for the Brooklyn State Hospital. From 1918, when the property held only 150 patients across its 50 buildings, Creedmoor ballooned in size, hosting 8,000 people by the 1950s until deinstitutionalization progressively winnowed down the number.

Creedmoor became infamous for its terrible condition. “By 1974, the hospital was completely out of control, with on-campus crime reaching horrifying numbers: three rapes, 22 assaults, 52 fires, 130 burglaries, six suicides, a shooting, a riot, and an attempted murder occurred within 20 months of each other. And then, in 1984, a patient died after being restrained in a straitjacket and beaten by a staff member with a blackjack,” an Atlas Obscura article explained.

A Times story from November 1977 highlighted the mental hospital’s policy of keeping its front gate open at all times, which permitted Richard Reisenberg, a man accused of killing his wife and 17-month-old child, of leaving the premises frequently. “He was supposed to be under tight security, always accompanied while on the grounds, but in reality, he left on his own dozens of times,” the outlet reported.

“For patients at Creedmoor, there are at least as many ways of going out as of coming in, and there is a great deal of casual two‐way traffic. The dozen or so exits vary from open gates to bent bars, tree limbs reaching out to freedom and picnic tables stacked together next to the eight‐foot fence.”

In June 1984, the Times ran another story highlighting the terrible conditions of the psychiatric hospital entitled, “Fear and Brutality in a Creedmoor Ward.” “No one remembers exactly when it began. But the fear, the beatings, the brutality in a special ward of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens did not end until after a mentally ill patient had died while bound in a cloth straitjacket, his throat crushed,” the Times reported.

A “review of hospital documents and scores of interviews with Creedmoor staff members…[has] shown that a climate of violence and neglect took hold in the unit.”