Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

I found the above image online at the University of Medecine & Dentistry of New Jersey web site. It looks very much like a small Kirkbride Plan asylum located in Hopewell Township, New Jersey.  Genealogy Trails lists the institution as being open in 1899. However, Philadelphia Architects & Buildings attributes its design to architect Thomas Edward Ash, born in 1888. Either somebody’s got their data mixed up, or this particular building was added to the asylum much later than 1899. (more…)

Pennsylvania state representative Kathy Rapp is working to “protect the patients, jobs and community services at Warren State Hospital.” Evidently there’s an effort in the state government to privatize elements of the institution. This effort is part of a larger “deinstitutionalization scheme”, which could possibly lead to further closings of state psychiatric centers such as Warren State Hospital. I found out about this at Pennsylvania Mental Health Issues which has a few posts about Warren State Hospital listed here. (more…)

There’s a location in Second Life modeled after Danvers State Hospital. It’s called Ryder Asylum. If you’re a Second Life user, you can teleport there from this page. You can also rent rooms in the Kirkbride. (more…)

An article in The Washington Post and another at Examiner.com describe a new report on St. Elizabeths Hospital by University Legal Services, an advocacy group for Washington D.C.’s disabled population. The report criticizes serious “deficiencies”, “dysfunction”, and “failure” on the part of the hospital staff, blaming the poor quality of care at the hospital for the deaths of eleven patients in 2007. It’s disturbing, but not too surprising given the long history of such problems at public psychiatric hospitals. That’s not to say that all treatment at psychiatric hospitals has been poor or inadequate, but it is unarguably a recurring issue. (more…)

On the Buffalo State University web site, I found this podcast of a forum discussing the problems and possibilities of bringing life back to the Richardson Complex. The forum took place on May 5th, 2007.  Apart from the discussion of  ideas and visions for re-use, there are some tidbits of history mentioned, as well as explanations of the usual problems encountered when trying to find new uses for a Kirkbride building.

As I’m sure most of you already know, late last summer a private individual purchased the former Weston State Hospital and is working to preserve the Kirkbride building. In case you haven’t already found it, let me direct your attention to a fairly new web site in connection with this:

www.TheWestonStateHospital.com

In addition to the usual photos and background information you’d expect, there’s also a place where you can donate funds for the restoration of the building, and directions for subscribing to their email newsletter and list-serv. If you sign up for the newsletter you’ll be notified of upcoming tours. Tours aren’t being given yet, but they plan to have them in the near future.

On her blog Designspiel, Joanne Molina posts about the Willard Suitcase Exhibit currently showing at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library until January 31st. (Includes text from an older New York Times article on the subject.)

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…)

There’s more news today on the possible transformation of the Fergus Falls Kirkbride into a college for cross-cultural studies. Read about it here: Chinese Get Invitation to Fergus Falls

In addition, there’s an article on Willard State Hospital which also mentions a photography exhibit titled “Willard: Behind the Walls of the Asylum for the Insane” showing in Binghampton, NY this weekend. You can read it here: Willard: The Buildings They Left Behind

I’ve received confirmation from a respectable source: demolition at Worcester State Hospital will definitely take place this Spring. Not only that but portions of what used to be the Kirkbride will be taken down. Demolition is scheduled to start March 31st and everything but the Clocktower and Hooper rotunda (the one closest to the functioning buildings) will be destroyed.

This is sad news, but not completely unexpected.