Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

Google and LIFE Magazine recently arranged a deal whereby LIFE’s vast photo archive will be placed online. You can find a portal to the collection here. What I really want to draw your attention to though is a handful of images taken by photographer Herbert Gehr at a mental hospital in Worchester [sic], Massachusetts in 1949. One of these photos (reproduced above) leaves no doubt that they were indeed taken at Worcester State Hospital. Anyone that’s been inside the Worcester Kirkbride will recognize the space in which three women create this somewhat surreal scene.

I don’t think all the photos in this collection were taken inside the Kirkbride, but I believe most of them were. They’re really a pretty fascinating group of images too—some are slightly bizarre, some are disturbing, and others are hauntingly beautiful. It’s weird to see that the basement almost looked creepier in use than it did after it was abandoned. Below are links to all the pictures. (Note that you can view a larger version of each image by clicking the “View full size” link on the image page.)

1) Patients Square Dancing
2) Doctors & Researchers
3) Patient Lifting a Table
4) Electric Shock Treatment
5) Patient on Scales
6) Insulin Shock Therapy I
7) Insulin Shock Therapy II
8) Insulin Shock Therapy III
9) Insulin Shock Therapy IV
9) Patient Receiving Treatment
10) Sweat Study
11) Hormone Treatment
12) Spinning Treatment
13) Research Equipment
14) Breaking Down Sugars
15) Woman Alone in a Room

There will probably be images from other Kirkbride hospitals in the future as more of LIFE’s collection is made available. I’ll keep you posted if I come across any. In the meantime, if you want to see pictures from non-Kirkbride psych hospitals, try a search using terms like “mental hospital” or “state hospital” at the portal. There are lots of old pictures from other institutions. If you’re really impressed with any of them, you can even purchase a framed print too. I have to say though that I don’t quite agree with selling photos clearly revealing a patient’s face (like this one for example). It seems a bit dehumanizing.

Things have been really slow in Kirkbride news lately. While there have been some minor developments, they’re really nothing new, definite or exciting—just incremental changes in the status of a few buildings. I haven’t been creative enough lately to come up with posts in spite of that lack of activity too, so I have to apologize again for the lack of new information here lately. When I started the blog I planned on posting once a week. Until now, I actually managed to do that—surprising since I half expected to run out of things to post about after a few months.

Anyway, for the lack of anything better to post, I thought I’d point you to a collection of Kirkbride building desktop wallpaper. The backgrounds are mostly old historical images we’ve all seen before, but here they’re nice and big to fit on your computer desktop. Enjoy.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been busy and haven’t heard anything noteworthy about Kirkbride buildings or related topics in a while. But just to keep things going, here’s another installment in The Lost Kirkbrides series: Agnews State Hospital, a Kirkbride building I found out about only recently…

Agnews State Hospital in Santa Clara, California opened in 1889 as The Great Asylum for the Insane. Its Kirkbride building stood for just seventeen years until the great earthquake of 1906 caused irreparable damage to the structure and the death of 117 people. The dead were buried in mass graves on the hospital grounds. The Kirkbride had to be torn down. It was replaced in 1911 by a new arrangement of buildings based on the Cottage Plan.

There are some images of the Kirkbride available online, including several that show the damage from the earthquake:

Under Construction

1) Agnews Asylum Under Construction

After the Quake

1) General View from the Southwest
2) South End Male Ward Building
3) Earthquake Damage at Agnews Asylum
4) Agnews State Hospital
5) Agnews State Hospital
6) Agnews Insane Asylum
7) North Side of Female Wards

The old cottage plan campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, but vacated by the hospital the following year. Sun Microsystems purchased the site and restored four of the historic buildings. It’s now their corporate headquarters, but some parts are open to the public.

Of course they didn’t really tear it down, but Google Maps did replace the old aerial photograph of Danvers State Hospital (which included the full Kirkbride in all its glory) with a more recent photo showing a half built Avalon Danvers. It was always something of a comfort that even though Danvers was gone, Google Maps still had an image of the untouched Kirkbride up. Now they’ve updated and the illusion is gone.

Microsoft’s “bird’s eye view” of the former DSH campus still shows the full Kirkbride. But you’d better see it while you can. I’m sure it won’t be around for too much longer either. There’ll always be Historic Aerials of course, but somehow it’s not the same.

Looking around on Flickr this weekend I came across this photo set: Danvers State Hospital & Session 9. The pictures were taken by Russ Fischer who apparently did some work on the set of Session 9, snapping away whenever he had a spare second or two. It’s always great to find photos from before there were boards on all the windows and you could see without a flashlight or camera flash. My favorite photos from the set are this one, this one, and this one.

And by the way, if you haven’t seen Session 9 yet, I highly recommend it. It’s a thriller about an asbestos abatement crew given the job of cleaning up DSH and what happens to them as they uncover the hospital’s secrets (as well as some of their own). It may not be the best movie you’ll ever see, but it’s good and it has some amazing footage of the Danvers State Hospital Kirkbride. And October would be a great time to watch it…

I came across some nice documentation of Athens State Hospital which was made available online by Ohio University’s library. Most impressive is Katherine Ziff’s lengthy dissertation Asylum & Community, and this collection of old images. I was especially pleased to see the alligator in the fountain. Till now I STILL didn’t quite believe that an alligator really lived there, even though several sources said so. The story just screamed urban legend to me.

But now I know the truth and I can finally sleep through the night—no more waking up at 2AM wondering “Did an alligator REALLY live in the fountain at Athens? It CAN’T be true…Can it?”

A somewhat related item is an online comic about the infamous stain inside the Athens Kirkbride. Darkhorse Comics recently added it to their MySpace profile. It’s a little on the spooky side, but it’s October, so I’ll play along:) It is kind of cool to see a Kirkbride drawn like that too. There should be more Kirkbride buildings in comics I think. (more…)

There’s a new web site dedicated to Harrisburg State Hospital: The City on the Hill. It’s the work of Phil Thomas (otherwise known as thomasp94 on the forum) who has diligently compiled old pictures, his own photographs, and lots of historical facts to create the site. It includes a healthy portion of information about the Kirkbride building there (which was demolished a long time ago).

It’s worth taking a look, especially for the Kirkbride gallery which includes blueprints, maps, and old photos from inside the Kirkbride. Strangely, Phil has found more photos of the interior than the exterior.

Yesterday, Richard Nickel, Jr. over at The Kingston Lounge posted about the Buffalo State Hospital Kirkbride. Along with a nice write-up about the building, he included some first-rate photos of the Kirkbride’s interior, something my own site is still sorely lacking:(

It’s worth checking out, and you can do so here: BSH - The H. H. Richardson Complex.

Forum member Swansod made a post today about a small treasure trove of newspaper clippings he found while researching Worcester State Hospital. The clippings are from the 1930s, ’60s and ’90s. You can see reproductions on Swansod’s Zenfolio pages: WSH Related. (Hint: click on a thumbnail, then hover your mouse cursor over the larger version to get the download link. Download the file for a more legible version.)

Some high points from the articles include a map identifying each part of the Kirkbride (pictured above), mention of some films made by superintendent Dr William Bryan (which I’m trying to find more about), descriptions of various renovations over the years, LSD experiments, pictures of the hospital’s operating room, and information about the first phase of demolition which happened shortly after the Kirkbride fire in 1991.

Our little paper, gotten up for the benefit of the patients of the Alabama Insane Hospital and to give the patrons of the institution an insight into some details of its practical operations, is printed on quarto Novelty Press, without expense to the State—the whole labor of type-setting and putting to press being performed by the patients, or by employees of the Hospital in intervals of leisure from their regular duties…

That’s how The Meteor—a newspaper written and published by Bryce Hospital’s patients—describes itself in its inaugural issue published in 1872. The Alabama Department of Archives and History has put eleven issues of The Meteor online in PDF format (note that at the time of this writing the link for the second issue isn’t working). While not quite the juicy rag you might hope for, the paper’s articles do offer some glimpses of life at the hospital as well as into the minds of the patients.

My favorite part is from the very first issue where one patient compares Alabama’s hospital for the insane with its neighbor the state university by saying, “The inmates of the University come to acquire ideas. We to get rid of them.” (more…)