{"id":55,"date":"2008-03-24T11:34:14","date_gmt":"2008-03-24T15:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/independence-state-hospital"},"modified":"2015-11-17T11:21:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T15:21:58","slug":"independence-state-hospital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/independence-state-hospital","title":{"rendered":"Independence State Hospital"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IndependenceI’ve added an Independence State Hospital<\/a> page where you can see my photos of the Kirkbride and learn a little about its history. The photos are from a visit to Iowa I took back in 2004. As I mentioned in the Clarinda post<\/a>, the quality of the pictures leaves something to be desired. I think these are even a full step down from the Clarinda photos<\/a>. (The ones from Cherokee are even worse. I don’t even want to post those, but I probably will just to be as complete as possible. Watch for them in the future…)<\/p>\n

Independence is a nice looking Kirkbride. It’s facade isn’t as dramatic as some, but it’s still a pretty impressive sight, set back from the main road, sitting at the end of a long stretch of open lawn. Its relative simplicity in design would probably have pleased Dr. Kirkbride.<\/p>\n

It was a rainy day when I was there which kind of put a damper on things. It was a very pleasant visit in spite of the clouds and rain though. Independence is still a functioning mental health facility, but like most state pysch centers these days, it’s nowhere near as crowded as it used to be.<\/p>\n

One thing I’ve heard about Independence which I haven’t been able to verify is that the main building started life as a mansion which was converted into a Kirkbride building. I have a hard time believing that’s true since Kirkbrides were almost exclusively purpose built from the foundation up. I don’t know of any that were adapted from existing buildings. If that’s true about Independence, it would be an interesting little side note. I still need to find some verifying documents though.<\/p>\n

Another interesting fact is the Kirkbride was designed by architect Steven Vaughn Shipman. Shipman apparently designed at least five Kirkbride buildings. The five I know about were in Anna, Illinois; Elgin, Illinois; Independence, Iowa; Mendota, Wisconsin; and Oshkosh, Wisonsin. That’s pretty prolific. Unfortunately, I believe that Independence is the only one that survives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve added an Independence State Hospital page where you can see my photos of the Kirkbride and learn a little about its history. The photos are from a visit to Iowa I took back in 2004. As I mentioned in the Clarinda post, the quality of the pictures leaves something to be desired. I think […]<\/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":[1,13,32],"tags":[145,134,113,97,280],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-pictures","category-web-sites","tag-history","tag-independence","tag-independence-state-hospital","tag-iowa","tag-pictures"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","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=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1345,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/1345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kirkbridebuildings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}