{"id":394,"date":"2009-01-05T06:30:43","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T10:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/?p=394"},"modified":"2012-11-09T16:04:51","modified_gmt":"2012-11-09T20:04:51","slug":"buffalo-state-hospital-and-the-natural","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/buffalo-state-hospital-and-the-natural","title":{"rendered":"Buffalo State Hospital and The Natural"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nA couple weeks ago I found a blog post at Forgotten Buffalo<\/a> describing how parts of the classic baseball film The Natural<\/em><\/a> \"\"were filmed at various locations in Buffalo, New York: Tour of “The Natural” Sites<\/a>. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that some scenes were filmed inside the abandoned Buffalo State Hospital<\/a> Kirkbride building. This past weekend I finally got to watch the movie and see for myself.<\/p>\n

About an hour and half into the movie, Robert Redford’s character Roy Hobbs is sent to a hospital. The Kirkbride plays the part of the hospital (not a psychiatric facility) and does a pretty good job I might add. There’s probably around twenty minutes worth of scenes inside the building. There are no views of the building’s exterior. Unfortunately, a lot of the shots inside Redford’s room (actually a medium-to-large dormitory style space he shares with other patients) are pretty “tight” and you don’t get to see much. But there are a few shots of a ward hallway which give you a sense of what a Buffalo ward looked like in the 1930s\u2014even though in real life there probably would’ve been beds in the hall and other signs of overcrowding by that time.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, The Natural<\/em> has another connection to a different Kirkbride building. The inspiration for character Roy Hobbs was the real-life baseball player Eddie Waitkus who was shot in a Chicago hotel room by deranged superfan Ruth Ann Steinhagen. After the incident, Steinhagen was declared insane and sent to Kankakee State Hospital for a few years.<\/p>\n

Below are some screen-grabs from the film showing the Buffalo Kirkbride interior views. Check out the movie for larger, better versions. It’s not a bad movie either. Not one of my all times favorites, but good.<\/p>\n

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A couple weeks ago I found a blog post at Forgotten Buffalo describing how parts of the classic baseball film The Natural were filmed at various locations in Buffalo, New York: Tour of “The Natural” Sites. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that some scenes were filmed inside the abandoned Buffalo State Hospital Kirkbride building. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-films","tag-buffalo-state-hospital"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}