Please consider signing an online petition to pardon Fergus Falls State Hospital from demolition at www.savekirkbride.com.

Visit kirkbridebuildings.com to learn more about the kirkbride.

This Pennsylvania State Hospital opened in 1891 for the chronic insane, which meant patients were not admitted by order of the court, but were transferred from their mandated state hospital after [at least] one year of admission when in-need of extended care.

^{State Hospital, Pennsylvania}

When a patient was incapable of receiving treatment, their release from an institution was an unlikely occurrence. Therefore, state hospitals were occupied by the chronic and space was limited for those who were susceptible to treatment and a separate institution was constructed.

^{Proposed sketch}

The patients chosen for this institution were not of violent nature; the wards were without bars and the serene grounds without walls. The colonial design of the hospital was to reflect the aesthetic beauty of the Pennsylvania Hospital and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and consists of a central administration building flanked by eight dormitories.

This three minute forty-one second walk-through was filmed inside an abandoned state hospital in Virginia.

^{Old Main, Central Virginia}

In 1848 slaves in Virginia could be admitted to private asylums if their owners paid for their treatment, but not all owners could afford it and whites were always given priority admission. It was also believed that drapetomania was a mental illness which caused blacks to free captivity. Samuel Cartwright stated that the malady was a consequence of masters who “made themselves too familiar with slaves, treating them as equals.” It’s difficult to imagine what kind of scientific treatment these unfortunate men and women received.

The Confederacy established a hospital in 1862 for wounded soldiers at Howard’s Grove. In 1870 these buildings were re-used for “colored persons of unsound mind” and was the first to offer exclusive treatment to the black population of Virginia.

In 1875 Dorothea Dix visited the newly established institution during her travels for mental health reform and donated pictures and musical instruments.

In 1885 the patients from Howard’s Grove were transferred to a newly constructed red-bricked and gray granite trimmed hospital with a central four-story administration building flanked on either side by a three-story wing comprised of six wards, which is known as the kirkbride plan and was a symbol of moral treatment. The East and West buildings were built on either side of the Main building in 1890 and 1892 to treat the more severe cases.

^{News Clipping, 1900}

The Legislature of 1893 changed the title of state “asylums” to state “hospitals” and the lunatic asylum was renamed a state hospital.

In 1896 the hospital became one of the first to exclusively care for epileptics when a two-story brick pavilion was built. Patients were classified and assigned to wards for the recent and acute, chronic, demented, sick, tubercular, epileptic, criminal and suicidal – the suicidal wards were the least furnished.

Mayfield Cottage was built in 1750 and was the oldest brick residence in the county. The hospital purchased the farm land it was built upon and used it as a storehouse for many years.

^{Occupational Therapy}

In 1904 a one-and-a-half story chapel was constructed as a multi-purpose activities space for worship services, dances, concerts, and graduation ceremonies for the hospital’s nursing students. Its eighty-by-fifty foot gothic-revival design was simple and envisioned by Dr. William Francis Drewry and constructed by G. B. Keeler & Son.

Twenty-four fire hydrants were installed and a fire house was built. Drying machinery was purchased to make laundry more effective and an internal telephone system was installed and a shop for carpentry, shoe mending, broom and mattress making was built as occupational therapy.

^{Building for Chronic Female Patients, 1915}

The building for chronic females was built in 1915 for one-hundred-and-sixty patients along with its counter-part for male patients. In 1925 hydrotherapy tubs were installed on the first floor as a new form of treatment.

The alleged cause of psychosis of those admitted since the opening of the hospital until the year 1915 ranged from abortion, desertion, emancipation, marriage, masturbation, and typhoid fever. Some of the crops grown on the farm were alfalfa, peanuts, wheat, radishes, pumpkins, okra, watermelon, turkey, and milk.

^{Building for Delinquent Girls, 1929}

The building for delinquent or feeble-minded girls was built in 1929 with a one-hundred foot brick and barred arcade leading to the center building of the group.

^{Medical Building, 1929}

In 1930 the new medical building was built for one-hundred beds and with potential for future wings to be added, which they were. The first floor was used for surgery, examinations, dentistry, lectures, x-rays, laboratories, treatment, and drug therapy and the second and third floors were for in-bed patients who were not disturbed by out-patient and ambulatory services downstairs.

In 1938 a State Colony for Epileptics was established on the grounds of the State Hospital and admitted the mentally disabled in 1913. It was renamed a Training School and Hospital in 1954 and then a Training Center in 1971.

In the 1950s the patient population reached four-thousand-eight-hundred when a maximum security forensic building and geriatric unit were constructed. Overcrowding was an increasing problem when the East View ward had three-hundred patients in one large room and patients in the criminal building were sleeping on the floor.

The hospital served only African Americans until the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. In 1967 the hospital accepted all races and nationalities. In 1978 Mayfield Cottage was sold to the Caudle family who moved the structure a mile away to save it from demolition and turned it into a bed and breakfast which opened in 1986. In 1980 seventeen-hundred patients were sterilized without their consent. Four out of seven-thousand-two-hundred-and-five individuals sterilized in the state of Virginia filed a class-action lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, which required the state of Virginia to notify every patient who was sterilized between the years 1924 and 1973 and pay for operations to reverse the procedure. In 2010 the chapel was registered on the National Register of Historic Places as a symbol of the state’s unequal treatment of African Americans during the period of segregation.

This is an open ward in the medical building where patients slept and the alcoves were once filled with beds:

Brown bunny rabbit wearing a blue bow tie is painted on the wall of an alcove. I wonder who painted it?

Creative and artistic tiling on a second-story screened-in sun porch where patients would have enjoyed fresh air:

Covered walkway connecting two wards:

The interior of a large, open ward:

Bathtub and showers in a bathroom:

^{Administration Building, Pittsburgh City Home and Hospital}

In 1804, the first poor house for Pittsburgh was built and grew to capacity. In 1818, Allegheny City Almshouse was built and also grew to capacity. In 1852, the City Poor Farm at Homestead was built and a separate building for the insane was built in 1879, which grew to capacity.

Named after a London prison known for debtors, pirates, and smugglers, Marshalsea was built in 1893 by the city of Pittsburgh to alleviate the City Poor Farm.

On two-hundred-and-sixty-seven acres, the new brick and stone hospital cost apx. five-hundred-thousand dollars to construct. The Administration building was positioned in-front of all other buildings and had only one staircase and a lack of doors to prevent the inmates from accessing it.

The main building was oblong with circular towers and housed the female paupers on one end and male on the other. Separated by congregate refectories, this limited the interaction between sexes.

The kitchen was located directly behind these refectories along with the bakery and laundry buildings. Further behind these was the “dead house” or mortuary, dispensary, store rooms, meat storage, ice supply and the power plant and behind these were the male and female hospital for the insane.

In 1916, Marshalsea was re-named to the Pittsburgh City Home and Hospital and in 1941, Marshalsea was turned over to the state at a patient population of thirty-two-hundred.

In 1946, an Observation unit was added. In 1967, there were 3,785 patients and twelve-hundred staff members. In 1974, the Forensic unit was added; in 1982, the Adolescent unit; and in 1984, the Deaf unit.

The hospital closed in 2008 with thirty-seven patients and two-hundred-and-fifty-nine employees; later sold to a private developer in 2010.

Toilet commode in a hallway:

Empty dining area in the Dietary building:

Sleeping quarters with wall dividers:

A view of Dietary from a ward window:

Decorate stairwell dividing the male and female ward:

The darkened auditorium with light flooding in from the lobby:

Sun-lights in the Administration building:

Empty, dark, and clean patient ward:

Training bars used in physical therapy routines:

Empty gymnasium with a modern zigzag roof:

This is a revision from an older post. To view the post, click here.

This New York State Homeopathic hospital was established in 1869 to treat mental illness with the help of forty-one-thousand dollars in private subscriptions and an amendment made to section two of the Act of Establishment in which the state donated twenty-thousand dollars for every ten-thousand raised.

^{Main Building, New York State Homeopathic Hospital}

Homeopathic treatment is a therapeutic method formulated in the “similia similibus curentur” principle or the Law of Similars: let similar things take care of similar things. This alternate form of medicine founded by Samuel Hahnemann includes the use of remedies, isopathy, electrohomeopathy, and moral treatment.

“The means used for the recovery of patients are numerous and varied. We cannot pin our faith to a single measure. We seek to adopt all which experience has proved likely to be beneficial.” -Dr. Selden Talcott

When the hospital opened in 1874, both male and female patients were admitted to a single building called the Main building, which housed both the administrative staff and patients. When the Pavilion building opened in 1876, the patients were transferred to it from the Main building.

Dr. Talcott, who was the third Superintendent, introduced gas lighting and well water to the hospital along with activities that improved quality of life such as the parole system and an extensive landscaping program. Following Talcott’s death in 1902, Dr. Ashley became the fourth Superintendent to a patient population of apx. twelve-thousand.

In the first few years of operation, Dr. Butler, who was the Assistant Physician, took fifty patients to the opera house to enjoy an oratorio. On Thanksgiving, patients were allowed an extra helping of apples and cider accompanied by music and dancing. During Christmas, gifts such as food, clothing, furniture, fruit, and candy were donated; along with a visit from a young group of carolers from the Presbyterian Church. In the winter months, night-time sleigh rides were taken several miles along country roads.

Patients sold chrysanthemums, basketry, braided rag quilts, towels, aprons, pinned dolls, knitted shawls, babies’ reins, Irish crochet bags, white work luncheon sets, centerpieces, bed sets, napkins and lingerie and the earnings were put into their amusement fund, which included dances, parties, and motion pictures.

There was a desperate need for a “dead house” or mortuary to hold the bodies of the deceased until their family was summoned, as well as a laboratory to perform postmortem examinations. Other buildings needed were a laundry house, store room, medical library, barns, silos, employee quarters, poultry house, workshops, ice house, and a building for convalescents and tubercular.

The hospital was a work in progress, but was the first to recognize baseball as therapy.

By the year 1918 a mortuary, laboratory, dairy barn and tuberculosis building were constructed and the old power plant was converted into a mechanical shop along with the construction of two small bridges across a stream on campus.

On October 18, 1921 the Main building, which was the first constructed, was partially destroyed by a fire in the attic. In it’s place was constructed a new heavily fire-proof building, which opened in 1927 along with the installment of water mains and hydrants.

^{Main Building, post-fire damage}

During the fifty-year mark, a total of twelve-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fifty-seven patients had been admitted and the hospital employed a total of fifty physicians and only two stewards.

When Dr. Woodman became Superintendent, one-hundred-and-thirteen acres were added to the hospital for future development.

In 1952 a power house, rehabilitation center, and buildings for the disturbed and geriatric were constructed to aide over three-thousand patients.

In 1999 the roads on campus were re-named to commemorate important figures in mental health such as Dorothea Dix, Lawrence Kolb, and Harriet Tubman. Roads were also named after words of wisdom such as Jason place, which means “the healer” and Chancella drive, which means “a sanctuary”.

Only one-hundred-or-so patients are cared for at the hospital today as many modern and elder buildings quietly sit vacant, which is a comparison compared to fifty years prior thanks to de-institutionalization, which released patients from State hospitals into the community to utilize out-patient or private psychiatric services.

A dark, green room with a large bay window:

A wheelchair in a patient’s room:

The wheel of a gurney on a dirty ward floor:

‘D-2′ painted on a green, unhinged door that rests against its door-jam:

One of the members of our group balancing his picture-taking skills:

Today, the hospital is a Community Campus with various public and non-profit agencies geared toward patients who can access services and programs without feeling isolated from the community.

Although the buildings scattered throughout the campus are in disarray, they are beautifully designed reminders of the early correlation between mental health and homeopathy.

The Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic, otherwise known as Pennhurst, opened on November 23, 1908 under the Act of May 15, 1903, P.L. 446, in Spring City, Pennsylvania in Chester County on Crab Hill. Crab Hill is a one-thousand-four-hundred acre peninsula of rural farmland on the Schuylkill River bend thirty miles north-west from the city of Philadelphia.

^{Pennhurst State School and Hospital}

This small, incomplete, red-bricked, cottage-style institution opened to serve five-hundred feeble-minded male youth in the thirty-four Pennsylvania counties east of the Allegheny Mountains.

In 1913 it was decided by a commission appointed by legislature that the mentally and physically disabled were criminal and unfit for citizenship because they posed a menace to the peace of society and a threat to the health of the nation.

Sara M. Soffel, a county court judge, said in nineteen-thirty-five, “If we selectively sterilize the feeble-minded, we will block off a large part of the population who contribute to our social problem,” when a bill advocating the sterilization of the unfit was presented to the board of the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women.

An Act for the Prevention of Idiocy and the PA Senate bill 560 both mandated sterilization of feeble-minded persons and were vetoed by the governor as unconstitutional.

Pennhurst later drew attention on harsh conditions in a five-part 1968 television report anchored by news correspondent Bill Baldini entitled, “Suffer the Little Children,” and the 1974 lawsuit, Halderman vs. Pennhurst State School and Hospital where the institution was found guilty of violating patient’s constitutional rights.

Pennhurst was forced to close by 1986, which led to a nationwide investigation of all state institutions and furthermore, the process of deinstitutionalisation.

These are a few artifacts from the institution.

Third Shift Ward Routine:

Closure of Industry Hall I:

Medication Stop Order:

Institutional Bus Schedule:

Program Statement for Pennhurst Center:

Report of Hazardous Condition – Devon Hall:

Special Report – Industry Hall:

These are invoices from defunct companies in Philadelphia such as Cook & Brother, Wood, Bacon & Co., Pennsylvania Globe Gas Light Co., Hicks and Brother, Brooke & Pugh, W. J. Buck, Sons & Co., A. C. Brown & Co., Aikman & Auman, Edwin H. Fitler & Co., Bullock & Crenshaw, and John Mundell & Co. who prior to 1890, provided service to the Girard Estate.

The Girard Estate ran from modern day Mifflin to Pollock Streets and Broad to 22nd Streets in south Philadelphia and is predominantly Irish and Italian according to a recent census.

When Stephen Girard died in 1831, he was the richest man in the United States and left his seven million dollar estate to the city of Philadelphia which he called, ‘Gentilhommiere,’ under the conditions that the city will establish a school for, “poor orphaned white boys,” which opened in 1848 as Girard College.

^{Girard College, 1907}

Four-hundred-and-eighty-one semi-detached twin homes were built by James H. Windrim in styles such as colonial revival, Tudor revival, prairie, arts and crafts, and Spanish colonial and were rented by white middle-class lawyers, bankers, managers and naval officers.

In the 1940s, African-American boys who applied to Girard College were rejected on the terms of Girard’s will.

Based on the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education six more African-American boys applied for admission to Girard College but were denied admission.

Led by Cecil B. Moore, President of the local chapter of the NAACP, a demonstration was held near the school for several months and concluded in 1965 after the city of Philadelphia filed suit against Girard College, which ended the racial ban in 1968.

In 1984, the first female was admitted.

In 1979, the 2300 block of Lambert Street was a filming location for Rocky II when Rocky Balboa purchases 2313 S. Lambert Street.

_References:

_{Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia. Accessed December 5, 2011, http://northerncity.library.temple.edu/people-and-places/girard-college}

This week, I met my friend’s new puppy, went exploring and helped with an anthropology project, had coffee with a friend, captured the beauty of fall, visited Occupy Philadelphia, and got a new kitten.

Autumn, my friend’s new puppy:

Dayroom at sunset in a Pennsylvania State Hospital:

Raspberry mocha latte and a handful of chocolate covered coffee beans from a coffee shop in center city:

Red, orange, and yellow leaves on a tree from an attic window in a New Jersey State Hospital:

My bag, favorite drink, and friends in the bubble chair room:

The Idea Wall at Occupy Philadelphia:

Ron Paul and “Abolish Prison Realty” protest sign:

My neighbor had kittens and asked if I would like to keep one. How could I say no? I think he’s white and tabby:

In the early fifteenth century, Flavio Biondo created a guide to the ruins and topography of ancient Rome, for which he has been called the father of archeology, which developed into geology, the theory of evolution, the classification of the Ages, maritime archaeology, urban archaeology, and rescue archaeology. Archaeology is the study of human society through the recovery of artifacts and environmental data, which includes architecture, biofacts, and cultural landscapes to study human and cultural evolution.

Similar to archaeology, urban exploring utilizes the same key areas of research: surveyance, excavation, and analysis. Surveying or scouting the location, excavating or exploring the location and analyzing or documenting what you’ve discovered or re-discovered by reviewing your photographs and any other form of documentation to make sense and use of it: What does it mean to you? What will it mean to others? Is this art? What was the building used for? Why is it abandoned? These are all very simple and generalized questions, but the act of going through these questions and finding the answers is part of post-excavation analysis, regardless of how easy they are to answer or how easy the answers are to access.

Since we are living in a technologically advanced society, it’s incredibly easy to find the answers to everything at your finger tips, literally. It’s become possible to search archived newspaper articles, research papers, Wikipedia entries, electronic copies of old and new books, and tune into a free lecture on dark matter from a Berkeley physics class on iTunes University – it’s fascinating how we electronically document everything, including our everyday lives, and how easy it is to access and it’s not because we have to; we want to.

Everyone documents. If you use Facebook, you’re documenting. If you make a scrap book, you’re documenting. If you collect receipts, you’re documenting …or paying your taxes. We want to remember everything and not only do we want to remember it, but we want to access it and re-live it again and again.

Archaeology is not just the study of dusty, old things, but that’s what most people think of when they hear the term. For instance, when I think of the term, I automatically think of the study of human society prior to written documentation stemming from language by trying to make sense of clues: artifacts. I think of men and women in khakis crawling around in the desert brushing bones and sipping warm water. If you discover a pointed object with a handle, you might think it’s a tool for pottery-making until you discover a human skull that has a hole in it and you realize maybe since they are in close proximity, the tool was used to create the hole and the questions arise: why would someone create a hole in someone’s head? How was the hole made? Was it post-mortem or while the individual was alive? How old are the bones? What are significant cultural or religious practices during this time that may have influenced this type of procedure?

Without written documentation and with the use of clues, you can put a theory together which requires talent and intelligence: a skill. It does not take talent and intelligence to read a paper that details exactly what happened simply because you found it on the floor of a building. But unlike millions of years ago, we are not locating, entering and depicting cave paintings or finding tools that have no documentation of their use – almost every tool created in the past century has a patent or instruction manual. We document everything so we can pass the knowledge to future generations …and avoid legal issues. There are procedures on how to properly restrain a patient, a daily schedule of events, how to draw blood, how to insert a catheter, how to force feed, and change a diaper. At this rate, if it’s not documented, then it must mean it’s intentionally hidden and becomes a secret worth exposing, because everrrrryyyything must be documented – it’s a cultural obsession; it’s the social norm.

Urban Exploring is a social activity, which is ironic. It seems as though most explorers go to abandoned locations for many reasons, and one is to get away from people and society, just as a hiker would retreat into the depths of nature. I’ve come to dislike exploring alone very much, because I like to plot with others on the best trail through the woods, the best entry method, and the best departure. I like having someone help handle bags as we climb through a window, someone to keep a look-out in the direction I’m not looking, someone to do all the talking if we are stopped, and someone to admire things with – the beauty of a hallway with just the right lighting; but this someone cannot be anyone. With the right group of people, you feel less anxious. With the wrong group of people, you feel overly anxious.

There’s a social balance that’s required – I can’t imagine exploring with just anyone. I’ve grown close to the people I explore with and am comfortable with them. Analyzing your group is fun; something will make one person jump while the other doesn’t move a muscle, some may sense a threat and flee from the environment and some may freeze in motionless silence and watch like a prowling cat – you can imagine the drama that comes along with a disagreement in character, “Why are you running away and leaving me behind, don’t you have my back? Aren’t we a team or is it every person for themselves?” Once these differences are worked-out and your group becomes strong, your chances of getting caught decrease because you work together, build each other up, and have more fun – just like when a broken bone doesn’t heal properly and you have to break it and set it again.

Getting caught… that’s something very unique to urban explorers. No one wants to get caught by security, an owner, or the police. It’s often a game of cat and mouse or pure fear; I avoid the fear part. I love to play games with my suppressors.

The purpose of archaeology is to learn about past societies and the development of the human race. We’re not necessarily doing that, because for the most part, it’s all been documented. Although, there are documents left behind that originate prior to electronic archiving, so it’s possible they are the only copies in existence. So, the question becomes obvious: should we take them out of their environment and secure them for their future study and use? Are they of use? Are they of intellectual value or are they worthless?

Is it ethical to remove artifacts from their environment? The artifacts have been exposed to the elements for years, so you would think someone would have removed them by now if they were of importance and the buildings are like a graveyard of intellectual data.

Am I qualified to remove these artifacts? What does that mean though; qualified? Is it illegal to remove the artifacts? Isn’t it illegal to leave them behind? I’m trespassing so even if it’s illegal to leave them behind it’s illegal to be in here to remove them.

Urban Exploration is not a field of study, it’s not a licensed practice, and it’s obscure, so who says what is right or wrong? Well, for one thing, the law does. But ethics unregulated by law are regulated by peers; the collective opinion of your peers determines whether it’s right or wrong to do something not covered under law. If you took a poll and 51% of Urban Explorers agree it’s wrong to take artifacts from buildings then it becomes wrong take artifacts from buildings. Or maybe it’s only 1% – maybe it’s a very influential person that says it’s wrong to take artifacts from buildings. Or maybe you don’t care and based on your life experience you decide it’s absolutely necessary to remove artifacts from buildings regardless of who says what and why.

It is what it is, but what is it? That’s the question and an area open to interpretation of its usefulness or lack-of. As people, we want to define everything. What good is it if it’s just what it is, it can’t just be, it can’t just exist, there must be a reason, we must classify it, it must fit into our realm of society, because we don’t like things that make us uncomfortable. If culture fails to define, classify and find value and usefulness in things, they become weird and unusual. So, for this moment in time, we are the weird and unusual people who do the weird and unusual things.

I met up with my friends on Easter weekend at a former state hospital for the chronically insane in central New York. It may have been Spring, but there were flurries falling from the sky.

The hospital opened with the intent to permanently remove county almshouses of their insane persons. In order to do so, Legislature appointed Dr. Sylvester D. Willard to investigate conditions of almshouses and jails in the state of New York, which were found to be deplorable and led to the passage of the act of 1865 for the construction of the hospital.

^{archival image}

In 1896, the first patient, Mary Rote, “deformed” and “demented”, was led off a steamboat on the hospital’s lakeside dock from her previous ten-year stint in Columbia County Almshouse, where she was habitually chained to her cell. Under the supervision of Dr. John B. Chapin, the New York State Asylum for the Chronically Insane quickly outgrew it’s two-hundred-and-fifty patient capacity.

By 1877, there were over one-thousand-five-hundred patients in admittance, designating it the largest asylum in the United States at two dollars and twenty cents a week per. head for the care of its patients. In 1890, acute patients were admitted among the chronic, raising the patient population to two-thousand – the peak population was in 1955 at four-thousand-seventy-six patients.

Male patients were required to partake in heavy labor such as gardening and farming while female patients produced clothing and bedding made of straw tick and feather pillows.

^{archival image}

Early moral treatment was primarily custodial care and although patients partook in amusements such as concerts, stereoscopic views, lectures and plays in Hadley Hall, a patient’s daily routine consisted of decent meals, proper clothing, exercise and protection from the outside world.

The hospital closed in 1995 leaving behind four-hundred-and-twenty-seven patient suitcases in an attic, which have been featured in an exhibit entitled, ‘The Lives They Left Behind.’

After we left the hospital, we went to a defunct Army Depot and gazed at a peaceful herd of rare white deer within the serene boundary of the barbed wire fence and watched the Space Station pass overhead, lying on the dark overgrown road with our backpacks under our heads, breathing into our gloves to stay warm.

^{ward 006 and an air traffic control tower}

The next morning, we had Easter breakfast at McBride’s Diner, a 1939 Sterling Streamliner manufactured by the J.B. Judkins coach company. Diner manufacturing halted in 1942 at the beginning of World War II. We also learned that an episode of General Hospital was filmed here.

We drove a few hours and checked into our hotel, had dinner on the river, got locked out of our hotel, drank Canadian beer we bought from WalMart in plastic lawn chairs by the river outside of our hotel (in drizzling thirty degree weather) until we made it back into our room. The following morning, we went to the next hospital.

^{archival image}

Opening in 1890 on nine-hundred-and-forty-eight acres, these two-story blue limestone and potsdam red sandstone cottage-planned buildings served the mentally ill in the northern part of the state of New York who were seeking or forced to seek treatment.

In the year 1910 patient population reached two-thousand-one-hundred-fifty-eight. From 1916 to 1918 leisure activities were replaced with war-time efforts such as knitting socks and rolling bandages.

The complex was designed to fit the Richardson Romanesque style of architecture, which includes broad round arches and deeply set windows.

Since patients were often grouped according to their disorder, there were three groups of buildings to serve this segregation. The buildings were two-stories in height with sleeping-rooms upstairs and day-time rooms downstairs.

In 1928, a beauty salon was incorporated, which was a large therapeutic boost to patient morale and the first of its kind in American institutions.

Entertainment for the patients included stereophonic shows, musical and comedy productions, sleigh rides, popcorn parties, phonographic entertainments, dancing, camping, skating, sledding and steam boating to arouse previously unreachable patients from apathy.

Dr. Wise, the hospital’s first Superintendent, believed music was, “the most potent of all the factors of moral treatment.” The patients also weaved, knitted, sewed and practiced woodworking.

This is an open ward filled with echos:

Patients were removed from the original buildings in the 1980s, many of which sought community placement. Today, the city occupies the more newly constructed buildings for substance-abuse programs, adult corrections and adolescent psychiatry.

^{archival image}

^{myself and seneca lake}

…continued in Part II.

Hello, hello, baby, you called? I can’t hear a thing. I have got no service in the tunnel, you see, you see.

Old keys for a ‘Building 37′.

Check me out on Glossom, a platform for creative professionals from fashion, design, photography, illustration, to videomaking.

This Sanatorium was constructed in central Pennsylvania for the treatment of tuberculosis. The facility originated in 1901 with a series of small cottages within the forest, later gaining State funding and growing in size as well as patient population until the mid nineteen-fifties, when the fight against tuberculosis was successful.

Since the closing of the tuberculosis units, the buildings on this campus have seen many shades of color and served the community in various forms, including mentally disabled women. Among the abandoned buildings scattered within the campus, those currently in use are for geriatric patients and repeat offender youths.

Main lobby of the Children’s Preventorium:

Inside one of the Unit’s patient rooms. The wall is almost entirely a door, large enough to open outward onto the pavilion allowing the patient access to fresh air:

Mattress covered in dust:

Inside another one of the Unit’s patient rooms with a dirty mattress curled up on the floor:

Dark activity room littered with tables and chairs, facing the autumn forest: