Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

I decided to bring the forum back. Part of my future plan for KirkbrideBuildings.com is to welcome contributions from other people who have had first-hand experience of the various buildings. Having a forum is an obvious first step toward that goal. Feel free to contribute with information, questions, or comments. (more…)

A little while back, someone from the Arkansas History Commission & State Archives informed me that there was once a Kirkbride at the state hospital in Little Rock. I had suspected that there was one there, but wasn’t sure until I got their email. The stunning building pictured above opened as the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum in 1883. Unfortunately, it was demolished in the 1960s. You can learn the asylum’s history at this web page which also includes a few more images. I’ve added Arkansas, and a few other lost Kirkbrides, to the list of demolished Kirkbrides.

Source: Google Maps

Above is Google’s Street View of Worcester State Hospital. Click on the image and drag your mouse around to explore it. You can see the Clocktower and other remaining pieces of the Kirkbride, as well as the rest of the hospital campus. (more…)

The “Kirkbride Family History” blog is a collection of excerpts from a book about…the Kirkbride family history. The book was written by Sherman Kirkbride and published in 1913. The blog hasn’t been updated in several months, but there are already some interesting facts posted. The blog author plans on posting more when she has the time. If anything pertaining to Thomas Story Kirkbride comes up I’ll link to it here, but you can also keep an eye on the blog yourself at kirkbrides.blogspot.com.

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.

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…)

It’s long been my goal to transcribe the entire contents of Dr. Kirkbride’s book, On the Contruction, Organization, and General Arrangments of Hospitals for the Insane, and make it available online. I even tracked down and bought an original copy for a few hundred dollars and spent hours copying chapters into digital form so I could post them here. I got as far as chapter fifty, and then essentially gave up. I always meant to continue, but it’s questionable that I ever would have either. It was just too tedious. (more…)

Although it looks like they’ve been around for a bit, this is news to me: the Richardson Center Corporation has a web site where you can learn about their mission to preserve the Richardson Complex and its surrounding grounds.

The most exciting thing (apart from the fact that they’re trying to save the building) is the creation of an Architecture and Visitor Center in the central part of the Kirkbride. They say its creation is already underway, but I don’t know if that means they’ve actually started moving in yet. Regardless, it seems likely that in the near future it’ll be possible for people to go inside the building. So that’s good news.

As a web designer, I recently put together blogs for a few companies. That experience plus some recent Kirkbride-related news inspired me to try out a blog on this site. Ideally it will keep the site more current (I haven’t made a significant update in well over a year now) while also being a place for you to find news about Kirkbride buildings and other bits of information that don’t really fit in anywhere else. I’m hoping it’ll work into something worthwhile and won’t go the way of the forum. (Remember that?)

It will also help me get the ball rolling on a long overdue site update and redesign. I’ve got pictures of buildings not listed on the site, and new pictures of some of the ones that are. There will probably be a few other little features to add and maybe I’ll finally put up more chapters of Dr. Kirkbride’s book.

Anyway, feel free to comment and/or send me Kirkbride-related information you think should be posted here. Thanks.