Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCZHrp4340[/youtube]

A few days ago, psychiatrist Dr. William J. Resch emailed me about this film featuring Columbus State Hospital. “City of the Sick” is a documentary about CSH (and to some extent all psychiatric hositals) narrated by a fictional hospital attendant. Judging by the film’s look and feel, it was produced some time in the late 1940s or early 1950s. In spite of its quaint mid-20th century style, it’s worth watching for the footage of the Kirkbride building and the insights regarding life inside the hospital. I’m sure the latter were at least a little whitewashed, but I wouldn’t fault the film’s producers for that since part of their purpose was to minimize the stigma attached to mental illness and state hospitals.

Dr. Resch received a copy of the film when he spent part of his Ohio State University residency working at Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare in Columbus (CSH’s replacement and sister hospital to the former Twin Valley psychiatric center in Dayton). He just recently put this digitized version online. The second half can be seen here: City of the Sick – Part II.

As a follow up to my last post about Oregon State Hospital, I thought I’d refer you to this story about one person’s personal connection to the Library of Dust.

Grandpa Was One of 3,500 Who Didn’t Fly over the Cuckoo’s Nest

While the story itself is interesting, I also bring it up because I think it’s important to connect actual, personal stories about these places with the more abstract discussions about architecture and general history that usually go on here. A little while back the daughter of a former clinical director of Columbus State Hospital wrote to me and shared her memories of the hospital. It gave me the idea of making KirkbrideBuildings.com something more than a collection of pictures and brief factual histories, and I’ve been trying to collect more personal anecdotes and memories from other people. History is a lot more than just a series of dates and names. Unfortunately, it’s been slow going so far. But M-Explorer over at Asylum Projects has had the same idea and, although the idea hasn’t taken off yet and there are still some related issues to work out, I’m hoping that this will eventually take web sites like ours to a new level of documentation. It seems like a logical next step.

And in case you’ve somehow missed it, a great example of this kind of documentation exists on John Gray’s Danvers State Insane Asylum. His Former DSH Employee Interview is a great read. Check it out if you haven’t already.

As promised in my last post, here’s another collection of links to old photographs of Kirkbride asylums. There aren’t as many left for me to share as I thought. I really should have just thrown these in with the last bunch, but oh well… (more…)

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been adding pages for Kirkbride buildings that no longer exist. If you go to the main buildings page and scroll down to the demolished Kirkbride list, you’ll see that some locations are now linked to pages for a particular asylum. So far I’ve added content for Columbus State Hospital (OH), Elgin State Hospital (IL), Mount Pleasant State Hospital (IA), Jackson State Hospital (MS), Nevada State Hospital (MO), and Rochester State Hospital (MN). I also put up a page for Saint Joseph State Hospital (MO) since what’s left of the building is now part of an active prison and I’m not likely to get photos of the place. (more…)

A while ago I came across some photos of Taunton State Hospital on the Library of Congress’ American Memory web site. They’re part of a collection of photos put together by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) to document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States. Of course I immediately searched for images of other asylums, but didn’t find much of interest in terms of Kirkbrides (except for these photos of Buffalo State Hospital). A few days ago I had a few hours to kill and discovered that there were actually lots of photos of other Kirkbride buildings in the collection. Here’s what I found: (more…)