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.

The DC Preservation League will be giving a special walking tour of Saint Elizabeths’s historic west campus on December 13th. This is your chance to see the Saint Elizabeths Kirkbride building up close, plus the breathtaking view of Washington DC from the hilltop the Kirkbride sits on! You may not get many more opportunities since the west campus is closed to the public and slated to become home to the the Department of Homeland Defense in a couple years. Chances are the tour will fill up quick, so you’d better reserve a spot soon. To put your name on the list call 202-783-5144.

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.

In case you ever doubted the legitimacy of “The Stain” inside the Athens State Hospital Kirkbride, Ohio University researcher Glen Jackson has found that it is indeed a remnant of Margaret Schilling’s decomposing body. You can read about Jackson’s findings in The Athens News: Forensics Tackles Athens Lore. As the article explains, a residue of decomposed human tissue and a chemical cleaner mixed to cause the discoloration.

While there really wasn’t much room for skepticism as to whether Schilling’s corpse caused the stain 30 years ago, there was a bit of mystery over what process actually left the mark. This study dispels most of that mystery, but as Jackson says, it’s still not clear how the stain took the form of a human body. If somebody had cleaned the floor the way you’d expect them to, the stain would have been much more irregular. It might be wrong to expect people to always do things the way you’d expect them to though.

In case you read this post and were wondering how the voting went, the Richardson-Olmsted Complex is the winning architectural landmark! With 34% of the vote, the old asylum building will be featured in this year’s snow globe. Unfortunately, it sounds like the globe won’t be available for the holidays. Read more on Buffalo Rising. I thought it was interesting that people tried to “stuff the ballot box” as they put it. Who’d have thought people were so passionate about a snow globe? My only problem with this whole thing is that I can’t find any information on how to actually buy a globe. I guess maybe you have to go to The Floristry in Buffalo to get one?

An article in the Valley Advocate describes multiple problems with the creation of a Northampton State Hospital memorial: The Theft of Memory. As the article’s subtitle says, “In spite of contractual and moral obligation, there may be no memorial to the mentally ill on the prime land that was their legacy from the state.”

While I can almost understand (but definitely not agree with) the desire to demolish an old asylum, it seems unconscionable to me to destroy such a place and then willfully, or even unintentionally, make it difficult for a fitting memorial to be created. This also reminds me that the memorial at Avalon Danvers hasn’t been completed either. I guess developers here in Massachusetts either 1) really are afraid that any hint of a psych hospital connection will scare away prospective customers (as if people are too clueless to discover the connection without a memorial), or 2) are just too stingy to spend a tiny fraction of their budget on a memorial, even when they’re obligated to by contract. Even if those two possibilities are false, we’re still left with the fact that the memorials are obviously the last thing on the developers’ minds and will probably end up being hastily tossed together displays not worthy of being called memorials. It’s a sad final chapter in the story of these old asylums.

The recent tours of Oregon State Hospital’s J Building proved to be very popular. However, the Statesman Journal reports that there won’t be any more of them because of demands on staff and upcoming asbestos abatement. You can read their article on the subject here: Popularity of J Building Tours Isn’t Enough to Continue Them. Make sure to check out the video tour. There’s a 10+ minute version in the upper left right (ah, duhhh…), and an unedited 48 minute version at the end of the article (which I’ll also include here to save you a click). It’s pretty interesting, especially if you’re a fan of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (more…)

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…