The Overbrook Forsythia

Forsythia are in bloom. A stubborn plant, it heralds spring in its brassy garish way, flourishing where people want it, where they never wanted it, where no one remembers it even exists.

Pitted against neglect and decay, as here, it mocks our indifference to what we have left behind.

This is one of the roughly 40 buildings that remain standing on the 100 acres of the former Essex County Hospital Center in Verona and Cedar Grove.

Known as Overbrook, the hospital complex housed mental patients for more than a century. K. Hovanian has bought other portions of the land and has plans to acquire this sprawling, sloping site as well, tearing down the abandoned 1890s buildings and putting up new residences.

Abandoned buildings have a certain pathos. The bigger and grander they were, the more their purposes were removed from everyday life--whether to serve the very wealthy or hide the very afflicted--the more a ghostly poignance descends on their remains.

And this is to say nothing of the most forbidding sites of all, where the monstrosity of past suffering imposes a stunned silence made of dread, pity, outrage, gratitude, guilt, and awe.Photography's limits are exposed not only in these but in milder moments, if we expect it to explain what it can only abstract in its deceptively literal way.

Tags: Verona | forsythia | Essex County Hospital Center | Cedar Grove

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