January 5th, 2009
Buffalo State Hospital and The Natural
A couple weeks ago I found a blog post at Forgotten Buffalo describing how parts of the classic baseball film The Natural 
About an hour and half into the movie, Robert Redford’s character Roy Hobbs is sent to a hospital. The Kirkbride plays the part of the hospital (not a psychiatric facility) and does a pretty good job I might add. There’s probably around twenty minutes worth of scenes inside the building. There are no views of the building’s exterior. Unfortunately, a lot of the shots inside Redford’s room (actually a medium-to-large dormitory style space he shares with other patients) are pretty “tight” and you don’t get to see much. But there are a few shots of a ward hallway which give you a sense of what a Buffalo ward looked like in the 1930s—even though in real life there probably would’ve been beds in the hall and other signs of overcrowding by that time.
Oddly enough, The Natural has another connection to a different Kirkbride building. The inspiration for character Roy Hobbs was the real-life baseball player Eddie Waitkus who was shot in a Chicago hotel room by deranged superfan Ruth Ann Steinhagen. After the incident, Steinhagen was declared insane and sent to Kankakee State Hospital for a few years.
Below are some screen-grabs from the film showing the Buffalo Kirkbride interior views. Check out the movie for larger, better versions. It’s not a bad movie either. Not one of my all times favorites, but good.
I worked there in the 60s and the floors were the
washed, waxed and buffed from morning till night.
Especially for visitors day when the families came
to see their relatives they put away.