ABSTRACT
In the winter of 1980, the Willowbrook wars entered a new phase, the third in their almost decade-long history. Public interest was keen and participants shared a sense of a crusade; good and evil were clear-cut and no cause seemed more worth fighting for than closing Willowbrook. Indeed, had the Willowbrook wars ended in 1979, they would have seemed an unqualified victory and the lawyers, the OMRDD administrators, the judge, and the review panel all deserving of decoration. The campaigns continued, however, with strong counterattacks and reversals, never to the point where all the first hard-won gains were lost but with major defeats nevertheless. In the early 1960s, some 160 of Willowbrook’s most disabled children had been moved into empty wards of this antiquated hospital on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and two decades later it was hard to decide whether the residents or the buildings were in worse shape.
