Kirkbride Buildings - Historic Insane Asylum Architecture

One of Iowa’s four state psychiatric hospitals will be shut down according to an article in the Sioux City Journal: State May Close Mental Health Facility. This means yet another Kirkbride may be abandoned in the not too distant future, unless the facility at Mount Pleasant is the one that gets closed. The Kirkbride there, of course, being long gone. I really hope Cherokee, Clarinda and Independence get to hang on. It would be a shame to see any of them abandoned after all these years.

Those familiar with 19th century asylums know all about the sometimes trivial or bizarre reasons people were “adjudged insane”. If you do any kind of research into asylums or the history of psychology, you invariably come across lists of weird explanations for why certain people were committed to asylums.

But I was surprised by a list on Roots Web I came across recently. The list was compiled from late 19th and early 20th century newspaper items describing people committed to the Mount Pleasant asylum in Iowa. (more…)

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been adding pages for Kirkbride buildings that no longer exist. If you go to the main buildings page and scroll down to the demolished Kirkbride list, you’ll see that some locations are now linked to pages for a particular asylum. So far I’ve added content for Columbus State Hospital (OH), Elgin State Hospital (IL), Mount Pleasant State Hospital (IA), Jackson State Hospital (MS), Nevada State Hospital (MO), and Rochester State Hospital (MN). I also put up a page for Saint Joseph State Hospital (MO) since what’s left of the building is now part of an active prison and I’m not likely to get photos of the place. (more…)

A while ago I came across some photos of Taunton State Hospital on the Library of Congress’ American Memory web site. They’re part of a collection of photos put together by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) to document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States. Of course I immediately searched for images of other asylums, but didn’t find much of interest in terms of Kirkbrides (except for these photos of Buffalo State Hospital). A few days ago I had a few hours to kill and discovered that there were actually lots of photos of other Kirkbride buildings in the collection. Here’s what I found: (more…)