“So, they put me into 85th Street, which was the mother house. That was the first mistake they made with me, because I didn’t have that kind of experience. And I would say I didn’t do a good job, or I didn’t do a job at all, for that matter, so I didn’t last very long there. In the meantime, they had created Hart Island, there were five facilities out there. And they gave me one of the facilities with a core group of people. This is essentially where I slowly developed the skills necessary to manage a
therapeutic community.”
Biography: Tony Endre, a Brooklynite by birth and upbringing, was the principle founder of Odyssey House and went on to have a long career in addiction services in and around New York City. Over the course of four decades, Tony worked at nearly all of the leading institutions, including the City’s Addiction Services Agency, Phoenix House, Odyssey House, Samaritan House, APPLE, and Daytop Village. At Phoenix House, he was the director at Hart Island for many years, and later served as director at the Long Island City facility. Of modest education, Tony’s expertise came from his experience as an addict and criminal in his early adulthood, and then from his experience of recovery with a group of ex-addicts in the detox ward of Metropolitan Hospital.
Keywords: Phoenix House; Synanon; Daytop Village; Mitchell Rosenthal; administration; therapeutic community; psychology; New York City government; New York City; substance abuse; policy; rehabilitation
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