Morris Plains, New JerseyGreystone ParkOver 670,000 square feet for 350 patients. Who builds that big for so few, and where did 7,700 people come from?Opened 1876. Built for 350 patients, all 673,700 sq ft of it; at its peak it held more than 7,700 people.
Photo: Jonathan Thacker · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Asylums · Ballinasloe, Ireland
St. Brigid's Hospital
The open question
A hospital for 1,200 next to a town of 4,615. Who was it really built for?
On the record
The hospital, which was designed by William Murray, opened as the Connacht District Lunatic Asylum in 1833. As it expanded conditions became very overcrowded with nearly 1,200 patients by the early 1900s and, having been renamed Ballinasloe Mental Hospital in the late 1920s, it accommodated some 2,000 patients by the 1950s.
Sources
More from Asylums
Morris Plains, New JerseyGreystone ParkOver 670,000 square feet for 350 patients. Who builds that big for so few, and where did 7,700 people come from?Opened 1876. Built for 350 patients, all 673,700 sq ft of it; at its peak it held more than 7,700 people.
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.