Valley Crest Nursing Home

Cinder block halls unfold ahead of you. Mundane and bleak, flanked by repeating rooms, the only defining feature between them being the color of the curtain draped in front of their simple square window frames. Even when this place was active, its tenacious adhesion to the lowest cost of form-follows-function must have created an atmosphere of uncaring sterility - No matter how respectable the care here may have been, the building was always cold and indifferent to those in its care. Block walls, flat roofs, and simple trimming made this hospital indistinguishable from a low-security prison. A far cry from the castles and manors this country built for its patients just half a century prior.

These remains, for better or worse, are what remains of the Valley Crest Nursing Home. A once-admired establishment built on a clearing overlooking Plains Township in Pennsylvania. Opening in the autumn of 1961 with some 300 beds, it stood for decades as a highly regarded. Many praised not only its medical care, but the quality of its food. The immense kitchen and the meals it produced were treated with much more consideration than that of a traditional hospital, quickly becoming a hallmark of the nursing home. All-in-all it seemed that families were truly happy to have their loved ones reside here, which was great because during its earlier years there really was nowhere else to go, even if one wished to. But that changed over time.

As competitive nursing homes and assisted living facilities started popping up, the population at Valley Crest began to stagnate and then decline. With the lower population came smaller budgets, and though Valley Crest was never a poor-quality facility, it had certainly lost much of its luster by the later 1990s. Then, in 2001, it was discovered that years of errors in administrative paperwork had collectively over-billed Medicare to the amount of $2.35 million, which Luzerne County was ordered to pay back via installments through 2004. The hospital was never able to recover from this financial disaster and shuttered for good in 2005. Most of the equipment and fixtures of the hospital were auctioned off in an attempt by the county to mitigate some of the expenses incurred by the failed institution.

On the day of our visit not much remained, save for the walls and a few bolted-down items such as hydrotherapy tubs, commercial kitchen equipment, and linen cleaning machines in the massive warehouse of a laundry facility - Simple things which hinted at the greater life of the campus. Some wards had come to be vandalized and torn apart by people, while others were torn apart by nature and rot. Still, others remained eerily clean and untraveled, as if newly closed or even awaiting their next resident. Together they formed a meandering collection of halls, chambers, stairwells, and rooms that were once a home to many over the years. It's easily forgotten, but to a great number of people over the years, this was the last place they ever knew. This was where thousands had found warmth in their twilight years. A warmth that was nowhere to be found for the hospital in its own twilight. Stripped out, battered, worn, and broken it sat on a lawn that had long transformed into a grassy field. The broken glass of its windows laid out on the cracked sidewalk, glinting in the sunlight as a myriad of plants root into its roofs and seams. The town it once watched over had long forgotten it.

Today the Valley Crest Nursing Home is no more, demolished in 2021 to make way for a modern $100 million facility in the same spot. Its name will live on though, as the newly constructed hospital center will be adopting the Valley Crest moniker. One can hope it may again become a name the community is proud of.