Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

The classic Danvers State Hospital posters from DanversStateInsaneAsylum.com are available for purchase again. A few days ago, the reclusive John Gray posted about them on the forum. If you can spare a twenty, I’d recommend getting a copy. It’s a fantastic image with lots of interesting detail — as you can tell from the graphic above. More information is available on this page: Danvers State Hospital Posters.

Chris Payne’s upcoming book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals is available for pre-purchase on Amazon. In case you don’t know, Chris Payne has been taking fantastic photographs of state hospitals for many years now. Although we’ve never met in person, our paths have crossed a few times as we both travelled around the country visiting many of the same psychiatric hospitals. Mr. Payne, however, has visited more hospitals and taken more photos than I have—better quality photos too. I haven’t seen a copy yet, but I’m certain this book will be worth purchasing if you have any interest in asylums and asylum architecture. I’ll write more about it after I get a copy to look through. That will probably be some time in early October.

Aside from a video with some nice photos and footage of the Buffalo Kirkbride, there’s not much new in this article about the rehabilitation project there: Plans for the Richardson. It’s good to hear things are progressing, but I just mainly wanted to point out the video (it appears directly after the text of the article).

What could be one of the last walking tours of the Saint Elizabeths West Campus before construction begins on the new Coast Guard and DHS headquarters will be held on Saturday, September 19th. If you want to participate, you have to make a reservation.

To register, contact the DC Preservation League office by phone at (+1) 202.783.5144 or email rsvp@dcpreservation.org. They’ll ask for your name, mailing address, phone number, email address and the names of any other people that will be with you.

One of Iowa’s four state psychiatric hospitals will be shut down according to an article in the Sioux City Journal: State May Close Mental Health Facility. This means yet another Kirkbride may be abandoned in the not too distant future, unless the facility at Mount Pleasant is the one that gets closed. The Kirkbride there, of course, being long gone. I really hope Cherokee, Clarinda and Independence get to hang on. It would be a shame to see any of them abandoned after all these years.

The Otter Tail County Historical Society in Minnesota will be hosting an event titled Myths and Legends: Stories from the Fergus Falls State Hospital. It will be held on the grounds of the abandoned facility at 5:30PM on September 4th, September 18th and October 16th. The event coincides with an exhibit at the historical society’s museum also titled Myths and Legends which deals with lore from the entire county, but includes stories and equipment from the state hospital. Attending the event will cost $5. More information is available here and here.

A little over a month ago I wrote about a promo for the television series House and how it contained footage of the Greystone Kirkbride‘s interior. However, more than one person told me that there was no sign of the show filming inside the interior. I can now confirm they were correct since Fox released a video about building sets for the interior of their fictional Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital. You can watch the video at www.snakesonastick.com. Better check it out soon because the video will probably be replaced eventually.

It’s amazing how much detail and work went into the show’s effort to reproduce the look of Greystone. I still don’t understand why they didn’t just use the hospital itself. Seems like they could have spiffed up a few areas for a lot less work than it took to build these sets.

Since I’m a Kirkbride enthusiast and an amateur chess player (quite a sexy combo, eh?), you’d think I would have found out about this a long time ago… there’s a chess opening named for Danvers State Hospital! For those of you who aren’t familiar with chess, an opening is the first few moves of a game. Sequences of opening moves which follow a recognized pattern are usually given names (eg. Two Knights Defence, King’s Gambit or Bishop’s Opening). The Danvers Opening (or Danvers Attack) is illustrated in the diagram at left. The moves are… 1. e4 e5, 2. Qh5

Even though this sequence of moves does go by other names (such as Queen’s Attack, the Kentucky Opening, the Patzer Opening and Parham’s Opening among others), it got its Danvers-related moniker when it was used by Dr. Elmer E. Southard in the years 1906 through 1909 when he was assistant physician and pathologist at Danvers State Hospital.

Guess what opening I’m going to try next time I play chess?

The beautiful gate behind Building 50 at the former Traverse City State Hospital has been stolen. If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of the gate, please call The Village at Grand Traverse Commons at (+1) 231.941.1900.

Update: Information leading to the safe recovery and return of the gate will be rewarded with an overnight stay in a furnished Village condo plus a full guided tour.

August has proven to be a pretty quiet month for Kirkbride buildings news. Hopefully those of you in the northern hemishpere are too busy getting in some summer fun to notice. So I’m taking this opportunity to quietly (but still shamelessly) announce that I’m going to try selling prints of my Kirkbride photos from the site. You can view the available photographs on the new prints page.

Prints are available in 8×10 and 11×14 sizes. I may make even larger prints available in the future. If there’s actually any interest in this, I’ll be adding more photos to choose from as time goes on. And if you’d like a particular photo on the site as a print and it isn’t yet listed on the prints page, please feel free to ask if I can make a print of it for you. I’ve chosen what I think are among the stronger pictures I’ve taken, but it’s always good to hear what people are really interested in.