Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

There’s a special exhibit focusing on Northampton State Hospital at Historic Northampton in (where else?) Northampton, Massachusetts. “Vanished: the Hospital on the Hill” will run from February 8th till March 7th and features photographs by Stan Sherer and text by J. Michael Moore. More information can be found at the Historic Northampton website.

Even though the exhibit is already ongoing, the opening reception is this Friday, February 14 from 5 to 8 PM. The reception will feature a talk by Tom Riddell at 6 PM: “The Long March to Memorializing Northampton State Hospital.”

Read an interview with photographer Stan Sherer here: New exhibit tells story of Northampton State Hospital.

Former Northampton State Hospital preservation advocate Mark Roessler writes about the renaming of Hospital Hill in this Valley Advocate article: What’s in a Name?

It’s a pretty good, lengthy article that ranges from before the Northampton asylum was built to the present day, with the Kirkbride only a memory. One thing I have to comment on in particular is this statement at the head of the article: (more…)

The demolition of Old Main is discussed with both Jack Hornor (Citizens Advisory Committee member) and Mark Roessler (Save Old Main preservation advocate) in the podcast available here:

Roessler Meets Hornor on Hospital Hill

This audio was originally broadcast on WXOJ, Northampton.

At least once a month I browse through my site statistics’ list of web pages linking to KirkbrideBuildings.com. Besides links from the usual asylum and urban exploration sites, KB.com gets a good number of referrals from the not-so-well-traveled corners of the web. Sometimes I find interesting bits of information and personal anecdotes by visiting these pages, most of time I don’t though, and occasionally I see things that I wish I could forget. Anyway, filtered out for your safety and convenience, here are a handful of referring pages from over the years that you may find worth looking at: (more…)

Not content with merely eradicating the historic Old Main building at the former Northampton State Hospital, MassDevelopment has changed the name of the development property from Village at Hospital Hill to Village Hill Northampton. According to their press release, the name was changed “to mark the birth of a new community and a new use for the former hospital grounds.” As Fred Contrada reports in a recent article on stigma, marketing, and “wiping out history”, their reason is a little less lofty than that…