January 7th, 2008
Referrer Referrals – Part I
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:
A NewTek user builds a mostly accurate virtual model of the Northampton Kirkbride (and calls my photos “awful”:/).
A blogger provides links to several satellite views of Kirkbride buildings. Looking for these can be painful if you don’t have an exact address, so it’s nice to have a few sort of archived like this, even if the view of Dixmont is just a big empty dirt field now.
A short discussion on Metafilter from 2005 cleverly entitled “I’m Mental for Kirkbride“. (Yeah, Metafilter is a pretty well-traveled site, but I’m including this referral anyway.)
Here’s an article on artist Elizabeth Huey’s work featuring Kirkbride buildings and some thumbnails of her pictures exploring the effect of architecture on America’s mentally ill.
If you’re looking to kill some time, check out this monstrous collection of links and text called “Case Histories from the History of Psychiatry” on the Alpert Medical School web site.
Then there’s this audio report titled “New Life for Old Asylums” focusing on the preservation of Building 50 in Traverse City, Michigan.
And lastly, these impressions of Hudson River State Hospital with a link to an half-hour audio interview with Dr. Roger Christenfeld about the hospital. (If you’re familiar with the history of asylums, you might want to skip the first four minutes of the audio file.)
That’s it for now. If I find more in the archives or get more in the future, there’ll be a part two for this post.
Wow… cool links. I think it’s funny someone posted “Google Earth” pics of Kirkbrides… I thought I was the only one who had taken the time to do something like that… these sites were definately worth looking at! Thanks!
No, you’re not the only one. There are lots of people who look for those pictures. There was a site that had an even bigger collection of them, but I can’t remember where it was.
have been looking for info on dixmont? grandmother was in there for 60 years from 1922-1982 trying to find pictures of people that were in there.
Tracy, try looking on http://www.dixmontstatehospital.com. The web site is down right now, but when it comes back it’ll be the most likely place to find stuff like that online. Other than that, you might want to try the Pennsylvania state archives. Good luck.