Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

Queenseyes at Buffalo Rising posted about his authorized look inside the Buffalo State Hospital Kirkbride after the recent fire. From his write-up, it appears the damage was very limited and the Richardson-Olmsted Corporation is getting serious about keeping trespassers out of the building. Read the story and view photos here: Richardson Triage Slide Show.

Update: The Richardson-Olmsted Corporation just sent out this email message…

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On Sunday April 18th, there will be a special ceremony  in honor of those buried in the four cemeteries at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It will take place in the hospital’s chapel at 2PM. Directions and further information can be found in this invitation: Bryce Hospital Cemetery Memorial Dedication Ceremony (1.52MB PDF File).

While relatives of patients, former patients, friends and hospital employees are especially invited, the event is open to the public and all are welcome. Following the ceremony and a reception, there will be a tour of Bryce’s Kirkbride building.

Related to this story is a relatively new web site: Bryce Hospital - Historic Preservation Project. It’s not quite complete, but there’s already a lot of historical data contained there and it’s worth taking a good long look through it. Also included on the site is information about volunteering for or making donations to the historical preservation project.

This is a “reprinting” of an email message from Preserve Greystone, the group dedicated to saving the Greystone Park Kirkbride building.

“On Thursday, March 25, the statewide historic group Preservation New Jersey will be holding an ‘Endangered Sites Summit’ to draw attention to five Places in New Jersey that are particularly at-risk of decay and demolition but particularly promising for reuse and valuable as landmarks. A few Preserve Greystone members will be at this idea-sharing, strategy-formulating season to present on Greystone and discuss the state of efforts to save it. Afterwards, there will be a press conference to draw further attention to issues discussed and the objectives set. As an intensive discussion group, the Summit is limited to about 20 participants, but the press conference is open to the public; the bigger the turnout the better a message it will send to politicians and the media of the interest people show and the stake they feel they have in these sites. I’m sure the other groups are rallying their troops and it will be good to have a sizable Greystone contingent too.

The press conference will be held at Centennial Hall in the Newark Public Library, 5 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102 at 12:30PM (the same location as the Summit earlier that morning). Please feel free to email mcgovernix@gmail.com with any questions.”

Just before 2009 ended, Alabama’s board of mental health approved the sale of the Bryce Hospital campus to the University of Alabama. The university will pay $60 million for the property and Bryce Hospital will move to a new location within Tuscaloosa. According to the Associated Press, UA has “indicated it will maintain the nearly 150-year-old main building, which opened in 1861. The white structure is expected to be used by the university for office space and maintained as a museum.” Read more here: Sale of Bryce Hospital to the University of Alabama Approved.

Points North, a show on Interlochen Public Radio in Michigan, recently produced a program about Traverse City State Hospital: listen here. The program is 50+ minutes and full of personal history told by hospital employees and patients of the hospital. In the beginning you even get to listen in as former employees tour the Kirkbride building and tell stories of their experiences—the mundane and unusual, the humorous and sad.

What’s particularly fascinating is the contrast between the patients’ feelings and the those of the employees. The former almost exclusively express a fondness for the hospital, while the patients interviewed express good and bad feelings about the hospital.

The end of the program is about Heidi Johnson and her connection to the hospital. It tells a sad side of her story that I personally hadn’t heard before and was surprised to learn.

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.

The transformation of  Traverse City State Hospital into The Village at Grand Traverse Commons is probably a familiar story to most of you reading this blog. Reuse of the buildings there is moving steadily forward and the project has largely been a success. It continues to amaze me that more cities haven’t yet followed this example with their own abandoned Kirkbrides. NPR recently produced a piece on the project describing how it could be a model for developing sustainable neighborhoods in Michigan—a state that’s been hit especially hard by the economic downturn. Listen here:

And lest we forget the past while we’re contemplating the future, I’d just like to remind you that a few former TCSH patients continue to share their memories of the hospital on the forum. You can read their thread here: Forgotten Children of Hall 18, Hall 7.

On Wednesday, September 16th at 10AM there will be a public hearing concerning the historic buildings at the state hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. The Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation is asking everyone interested in preserving these structures to attend the meeting and show support. More information can be found here: Crunch Time! Join the Palmetto Trust and Have a Voice!

Here are a few recent articles describing what’s going on with these buildings (including the Kirkbride): State Nearing Sale of Old Bull Street Mental Hospital and Dual Plans in Motion to Make Use of Old Bull Street Hospital.

Anybody living in South Carolina that can attend and support preservation of these buildings, please do!

(Sorry this is such short notice. I only just found out about it.)

Aside from a video with some nice photos and footage of the Buffalo Kirkbride, there’s not much new in this article about the rehabilitation project there: Plans for the Richardson. It’s good to hear things are progressing, but I just mainly wanted to point out the video (it appears directly after the text of the article).

The Otter Tail County Historical Society in Minnesota will be hosting an event titled Myths and Legends: Stories from the Fergus Falls State Hospital. It will be held on the grounds of the abandoned facility at 5:30PM on September 4th, September 18th and October 16th. The event coincides with an exhibit at the historical society’s museum also titled Myths and Legends which deals with lore from the entire county, but includes stories and equipment from the state hospital. Attending the event will cost $5. More information is available here and here.