Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

I’m a little behind on this, sorry, but there’s a new book out about Northampton State Hospital. Co-authored by Anna Schuleit and J. Michael Moore, Northampton State Hospital is part of Arcadia Publishing’s popular Images of America series and contains 128 pages full of historic images of the hospital—including many of its beautiful Kirkbride building. You can read a bit about the book’s backstory in this article: Northampton State Hospital’s History Shared in Images.

There’s a special exhibit focusing on Northampton State Hospital at Historic Northampton in (where else?) Northampton, Massachusetts. “Vanished: the Hospital on the Hill” will run from February 8th till March 7th and features photographs by Stan Sherer and text by J. Michael Moore. More information can be found at the Historic Northampton website.

Even though the exhibit is already ongoing, the opening reception is this Friday, February 14 from 5 to 8 PM. The reception will feature a talk by Tom Riddell at 6 PM: “The Long March to Memorializing Northampton State Hospital.”

Read an interview with photographer Stan Sherer here: New exhibit tells story of Northampton State Hospital.

An article in the Valley Advocate describes multiple problems with the creation of a Northampton State Hospital memorial: The Theft of Memory. As the article’s subtitle says, “In spite of contractual and moral obligation, there may be no memorial to the mentally ill on the prime land that was their legacy from the state.”

While I can almost understand (but definitely not agree with) the desire to demolish an old asylum, it seems unconscionable to me to destroy such a place and then willfully, or even unintentionally, make it difficult for a fitting memorial to be created. This also reminds me that the memorial at Avalon Danvers hasn’t been completed either. I guess developers here in Massachusetts either 1) really are afraid that any hint of a psych hospital connection will scare away prospective customers (as if people are too clueless to discover the connection without a memorial), or 2) are just too stingy to spend a tiny fraction of their budget on a memorial, even when they’re obligated to by contract. Even if those two possibilities are false, we’re still left with the fact that the memorials are obviously the last thing on the developers’ minds and will probably end up being hastily tossed together displays not worthy of being called memorials. It’s a sad final chapter in the story of these old asylums.

I just heard this from a friend: on June 3rd, Nor-East Architectural Antiques burned to the ground. Nor’East was the company that won salvage rights to Danvers State Hospital as well as to the Northampton, Foxboro, and Metropolitan state hospitals.

Not only have we lost most of the buildings, but now all these artifacts are gone as well. I don’t know all the details, but there must have been many beautiful pieces of asylum history that burnt in the flames. Hopefully a good number of items salvaged from the hospitals were sold well before this tragedy though. (more…)

Former Northampton State Hospital preservation advocate Mark Roessler writes about the renaming of Hospital Hill in this Valley Advocate article: What’s in a Name?

It’s a pretty good, lengthy article that ranges from before the Northampton asylum was built to the present day, with the Kirkbride only a memory. One thing I have to comment on in particular is this statement at the head of the article: (more…)

The demolition of Old Main is discussed with both Jack Hornor (Citizens Advisory Committee member) and Mark Roessler (Save Old Main preservation advocate) in the podcast available here:

Roessler Meets Hornor on Hospital Hill

This audio was originally broadcast on WXOJ, Northampton.

At least once a month I browse through my site statistics’ list of web pages linking to KirkbrideBuildings.com. Besides links from the usual asylum and urban exploration sites, KB.com gets a good number of referrals from the not-so-well-traveled corners of the web. Sometimes I find interesting bits of information and personal anecdotes by visiting these pages, most of time I don’t though, and occasionally I see things that I wish I could forget. Anyway, filtered out for your safety and convenience, here are a handful of referring pages from over the years that you may find worth looking at: (more…)

Not content with merely eradicating the historic Old Main building at the former Northampton State Hospital, MassDevelopment has changed the name of the development property from Village at Hospital Hill to Village Hill Northampton. According to their press release, the name was changed “to mark the birth of a new community and a new use for the former hospital grounds.” As Fred Contrada reports in a recent article on stigma, marketing, and “wiping out history”, their reason is a little less lofty than that…