The collapse in the female wings of Hudson River State Hospital is extensive. When the hospital shut down, no efforts were made to cover the roof of the wings and the weather eventually began to take it's toll on this beautiful Kirkbride Building.
This image shows a storage closet on the second floor with a collapsed ceiling and floor, which allows us to see the identical storage closet on the first floor and possibly a patient or nurses room on the 3rd floor with a beautiful armoire.
I'm heading out of town for the holidays today, but I experienced a burst of photographic inspiration and dug into the albums from my May 2013 trip to the South this morning.
Here's a shot from inside the Polk building at the former West Tennessee Hospital, designed for psychopathic use and constructed in 1932 to aid in overcrowding. These tubs were part of a hydrotherapy program for patients, which involved covering the tubs with heavy fabric (you can see the securing points on the side of the tubs) to trap steam, only allowing the person's head to be outside the tub.
(Print - http://smu.gs/1jtXi1R)
Greystone Park Psychiatric, in Morris Plains, New Jersey was constructed in 1877, following the Kirkbride plan, to relieve overcrowding at nearby Trenton State Hospital and was known as the largest contiguous foundation in the United States, from it's opening until the Pentagon was built in 1943.
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Hallway inside the main building at Weston State Hospital.
Weston State Hospital was opened to patients in 1864. Originally designed to house 250 patients in solitude, Weston State reached 717 patients by 1880.
Inside the isolation cells at Weston State Hospital.
In 1858, when plans to construct a mental hospital in West Virginia began, the state called upon two experts in the treatment of the mentally ill: Francis T. Striblin of Eastern Virginia and Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. They designed a plan for a hospital that would house 250 patients and architect R. Snowden Andrews executed the concept. The proposal, based on the Kirkbride Plan, was estimated to cost $395,000.
The first patients were admitted to Weston State Hospital in 1864. This Kirkbride was the first West Virginia state funded building and deemed the largest hand cut stone masonry building in North America.
Trenton Psychiatric Hospital was established in 1848 by health activist Dorthea Dix and was the first state run mental hospital in New Jersey and the first public mental hospital designed on the Kirkbride plan.
