Shutter Island Comes to Fishkill
By Michael Boyajian
The Fishkill Town historian Willa Skinner once tried to explain the mentality of Fishkill to a local newcomer and activist, Mara Farrell, as being something based on the society that once surrounded what was the largest facility for the criminally insane in the country and the town’s largest employer.
This attempted explanation still made it difficult to understand why the town with its grand Victorian homes and open land was razed to make way for strip malls, truck stop diners and eight lane highways after the closing of the asylum. To many new arrivals from New York City and Westchester trying to understand the devastation here is extremely difficult leaving many to wonder if they had not ended up in a mental health facility like the one featured in the film Shutter Island and they were actually acting out a fantasy where they were fighting rabid developers and their allies in the local government and that all are really hopelessly insane and out of touch with reality.
That in reality the town did not tear down its Victorian homes, eviscerate its summer stock theater and pave over the largest Revolutionary War site in the country. That town fathers had indeed taken the correct fork in the road in the 1960s and the town was now a cultural, historical and park filled place resembling something of an affluent hamlet often found in neighboring Connecticut. A place where environmental activists are not arrested for reporting wrongdoing to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where there is more parkland per capita than New York City, where the Town Supervisor does not rant that no one is going to tell her where she can and cannot build.
Or perhaps this is the reality of the town government here. That life is treated by them as if they were overseers of a vast asylum and residents are to be treated as if they are insane and things must be done against their will for their own good even if it requires a mass lobotomy of the electorate that votes in the same scoundrels year in and year out; a group of politicians that caters to the needs of developers rather than voters. That it had to tear down historic homes and animal habitat to enrich themselves at the expense of all others for the public good.
Could it be when you open your back door that you are not seeing starving animals who have lost their precious habitat and that when you drive through town you do not pass blocks of gray cement but rather old chestnut trees and elegant Victorian homes? It is hard to say in Fishkill if you are living a nightmare or the delusions of the criminally insane.
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