Athens, OhioAthens Lunatic Asylum (The Ridges)A small Ohio town gets a palace on a hill. Why so big, so soon after the Civil War?A Kirkbride hospital run from 1874 to 1993. The main building had room for 572 patients, almost double Kirkbride's own recommendation.Asylums · Morris Plains, New Jersey, United States
Greystone Park
The open question
Over 670,000 square feet for 350 patients. Who builds that big for so few, and where did 7,700 people come from?
On the record
Opened 1876. Built for 350 patients, all 673,700 sq ft of it; at its peak it held more than 7,700 people.
Sources
More from Asylums
Athens, OhioAthens Lunatic Asylum (The Ridges)A small Ohio town gets a palace on a hill. Why so big, so soon after the Civil War?A Kirkbride hospital run from 1874 to 1993. The main building had room for 572 patients, almost double Kirkbride's own recommendation.
Virginia Water, Surrey, EnglandHolloway SanatoriumYou don't build a Gothic palace to house the ill. Why build it like a cathedral?Paid for by the patent-medicine millionaire Thomas Holloway and built 1873–85 in an elaborate Franco-Gothic style by W. H. Crossland. Pevsner called it and its sister college the 'summit of High Victorian design'.
Willard, New YorkWillard AsylumFour hundred suitcases never collected. Who were these people, and why did no one come for them?Opened 1869 for low-cost long-term care. In 1995 about 400 suitcases brought in by patients were found in an attic.
Poughkeepsie, New YorkHudson River State HospitalForty patients on opening day, in a landmark Gothic building. Why so grand?Opened 18 October 1871 with its first 40 patients. Its Kirkbride is a National Historic Landmark, the first High Victorian Gothic institutional building in America; Vaux and Olmsted laid out the grounds.