Danvers State Hospital

Template:ImageStackRight Danvers State Hospital, officially known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, was a psychiatric hospital located in Danvers, Massachusetts.

It was built in 1878 and opened in the spring of that year under the supervision of prominent Boston architect Nathaniel Jeremiah Bradlee, on an isolated site in rural Massachusetts. It was a multi-acre, self-contained psychiatric hospital designed and built according to the Kirkbride Plan.

History

Constructed at a cost of $1.5 million, with the estimated yearly per capita cost of patients being $3,000 the hospital originally consisted of two main center buildings, housing the administration, with four radiating wings. The administration building measured 90 by 60 feet, with a tower 130 feet in height. Connected in the rear was a building 180 by 60 feet, in which the kitchens, laundries, chapel, and dormitories for the attendants. In the rear is the boiler house of 70 feet square, with boilers of 450 horsepower, used for heating and ventilation. Water was pumped from Middleton Pond. On each side of the main building are the wings, for male and female patients respectively, connected by small square towers, with the exception of the last ones on each side, which are joined by octagonal towers. The former measured 10 feet square, and were used to separate the buildings. The original plan was designed to house 500 patients, with 100 more possible to accommodate in the attic. However, by the late 1930s and 1940s, over 2,000 patients were being housed, and overcrowding was severe.

While the hospital was originally established to provide residential treatment and care to the mentally ill, its functions expanded to include a training program for nurses in 1889 and a pathological research laboratory in 1895. In the 1890s, Dr. Charles Page, the superintendent, declared mechanical restraint unnecessary and harmful in cases of mental illness. By the 1920s the hospital was operating school clinics to help determine mental deficiency in children. During the 1960s as a result of increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment, deinstitutionalization, and community-based mental health care, the inpatient population started to decrease.

Due to budget cuts within the mental health system the hospital was closed in June 1992. The area itself is completely closed and monitored closely by campus security.

Demolition

In December of 2005, the property was sold to Avalon Bay Development. Demolition of most of the buildings began in January of 2006, with the intent to build 497 apartments and condominiums on the 77 acre site. By June 2006, all of the Danvers State Hospital buildings that were marked for demolition had been torn down, including all of the buildings on the lower grounds and all of the buildings on the hill except for the center-most sections of the Kirkbride buildings. Avalon Bay predicted that they would have properties available for rent/sale by Fall 2007.

However, on April 7, 2007, four of the new apartment complex buildings and four of Avalon bay's construction trailers burned down in a large fire visible from Boston, some seventeen miles away. The fire was confined mostly to the buildings under construction on the eastern end, and the damage to the remaining Kirkbride structures was minimal, with only one of the spires slightly catching fire due to excessive heat. An investigation is underway concerning the cause of the fire. Avalon Bay provided a live webcam of the construction at the old site of the hospital at their website; however, the pictures cut out at approximately 2:03 AM the night of the fire, and the webcam was disabled, possibly due to the fire.

In popular culture

• The hospital was the setting for the 2001 horror film Session 9 and 1958's Home Before Dark.
• The Danvers State Insane Asylum may have been the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's Arkham Sanitarium, which in turn was the inspiration for Arkham Asylum in the Batman comic book series. Danvers also appears in H. P. Lovecraft's short stories "Pickman's Model" , "Herbert West Reanimator" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".
• In the game Painkiller, one of the levels, called Asylum, is based on the central administration section. While the outside is a faithful reproduction, the inside is not.
• In the book Project 17 by Laurie Faria Stolarz, the plot theme is 6 teens breaking into Danvers, to investigate the allegedly haunted asylum.

Trivia

• Danvers State Hospital was almost located in Winthrop, Massachusetts under the name "Massachusetts State Hospital", however it was decided that the Danvers location was better suited for the needs of the state.
• The land the asylum sat on once was the site of the home of John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. (Danvers was known as Salem Village at the time, and it was the site of the trials.)
• Danvers is not the only Massachusetts state mental hospital to be struck by fire. The Taunton State Hospital also caught fire on March 19, 2006, damaging many of the long-vacant buildings. Worcester State Hospital, a Kirkbride Plan asylum in Worcester, MA, suffered a catastrophic fire in 1991 that obliterated significant portions of the historic main building.

See also

• Mental health
• Psychiatric hospital

References

• Tracy, Cyrus M. (1878) History of Essex County, Mass.
• The American Historical Society Inc. (1935) The Story of Essex County
• "Four-alarm fire ravages former state mental hospital," Boston Globe, 7 April 2007.
• Citro, Joseph A. Weird New England: Your Travel Guide to New England's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2005, pp. 240-243.

External links

• Danvers State Insane Asylum — information, news and preservation efforts