Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

A public forum to discuss the future of Clarinda MHI will be held on Monday, October 12th in the MHI auditorium. The scheduled time is 3:00 – 5:00PM. If you live in the area and are concerned with keeping the Clarinda facility open, you should attend and make your voice heard.  Here’s a flyer for the event: Attention Citizens of Clarinda (4.7 megabyte PDF). The forum is part of Iowa’s investigation into whether one of it’s four state psychiatric facilities should be closed. You can read more about that story here: Iowa to Close a Kirkbride?, and in the forum within the various Iowa hospital threads.

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 museum in the former Clarinda State Hospital Kirkbride will be open to the public (without the need for an appointment) on Saturday, June 7th. It’ll be open as part of an Explore Clarinda Day sponsored by the city’s tourism committee.

I found out about this here: Explore Clarinda Allows Residents to See City Like Tourists. What’s not clear from the article is whether non-residents will be allowed to participate. If you don’t live in Clarinda and plan on going, you should probably call ahead just to be sure. You can always call to schedule a visit some other time too. The museum is well worth seeing. The city of Clarinda itself is a really pleasant place to visit as well. I recommend taking a trip there if you live in the general area.

A while ago I came across some photos of Taunton State Hospital on the Library of Congress’ American Memory web site. They’re part of a collection of photos put together by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) to document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States. Of course I immediately searched for images of other asylums, but didn’t find much of interest in terms of Kirkbrides (except for these photos of Buffalo State Hospital). A few days ago I had a few hours to kill and discovered that there were actually lots of photos of other Kirkbride buildings in the collection. Here’s what I found: (more…)

There’s finally a page for Clarinda State Hospital. I visited the place back in 2004…

2004… the days when I absolutely, positively NEEDED a camera that fit in my pocket. The days before I knew what a tripod was for, or had ever heard of things like bracketing. What I’m trying to say that most of the pictures are a bit iffy. Still, there are plenty of other pictures on this site from the same time period, and these Clarinda shots are the best from my Iowa excursion. Looking at some of them though I just can’t help feeling disappointed. Why didn’t I step back a few feet here? Why didn’t I turn two degrees to the right there? How did my @#%*! finger get in front of the lens? (more…)