East End Houses Celebrate 30 Year Anniversary

In 1977, the year that FREE began, the original Board of Directors envisioned residential alternatives to hospitalization and immediately started to plan for this.  Although FREE was originally founded to support persons with mental illness, within the founding year, the agency expanded its vision to embrace persons with developmental disabilities.  In the fall of 1979, the dream of residential alternatives became a reality when four homes known as Pineway, Abbott, Maplewood and Eleanor opened their doors on the East End of Long Island.  Facilitated by a contract with the NYS Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, the houses were purchased as bank foreclosures and rehabilitation was done right away. The houses were designed to support three persons per house.     Once the renovations were completed, the houses were furnished with the help of NYS employees who joined with FREE staff on moving day to unload the furniture into each new home and to help prepare it for the new residents.

These were the first independent free-standing residences that FREE established.  The opening of these homes was a matter of great celebration for the agency, not only because it had achieved its very first goal, but more importantly because individuals moving into this home-like setting would have quality living typical of a neighborhood on Long Island in Suffolk County.  For OMRDD, it was a new venture too, since, at the time, this model for support and habilitation of persons with developmental disabilities within the community was uncommon.    This joint effort between FREE and NYS was a response to what was revealed by Geraldo Rivera in his expose of Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, an institution of infamy where maltreatment and lack of treatment of individuals became the subject of a major lawsuit against NYS and its management of such institutions.  These new residences also became an option for people who had been living at home with their families but could now be served in a community environment rather than being admitted to a state institution.

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In the beginning, the homes were staffed by live-in house parents and the residents attended day programs run by other agencies because FREE did not have a day service program of its own.   Later, FREE named the new Day Services East in honor of   Anita Smith, remembered in the Agency as a house parent par excellence.  Another beloved staff person in those first years was Kathy Johnsen who began as a part-time nurse in the East End houses.  The Auborn residence was renamed in her honor. While some of the consumers had parents, most did not and they had no experience of family living.  They had to learn how to do everything: including their personal care, housecleaning and cooking.  There were new ways of having fun as well: being out-of-doors in the backyard and enjoying barbecues.   For these residents, being seen and known to the community had never happened before either.    For “fearful” neighbors, the adjustment to the group homes in the community was also a learning experience, and a successful one at that.

In the late 80’s, FREE had enough equity in the homes to do additional renovations that expanded the homes to accommodate four residents.  Staffing with house parents transitioned to staffing with rotating shifts.   Some of the FREE employees with the longest tenure in the agency, began working in the East End houses.   Most of the people who came to live in one of these homes, stayed there for the rest of their lives.  Two of the original residents live there to this day.  For FREE, this venture had a happy beginning with no end in sight.