Photo's taken in 2004 and 2006 Music : I'll miss you / Mike Turcotte ( Copyright MTM 2023 )
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Hudson River State Hospital was a New York state psychiatric hospital that operated from 1873 until its closure in the early 2000s. The campus is notable for its main building, known as a "Kirkbride", which has been designated a National Historic Landmark due to its exemplary High Victorian Gothic architecture, the first use of that style for an American institutional building. It is located on US 9 on the Poughkeepsie-Hyde Park town line.
Frederick Clarke Withers designed the hospital's buildings in 1867. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted designed the grounds. It was intended to be completed quickly, but went far over its original schedule and budget. The hospital opened on October 18, 1871, as the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane[5] and admitted its first 40 patients. Construction, however, was far from over and would continue for another 25 years. A century later, it was slowly closed down as psychiatric treatment had changed enough that large hospitals were no longer needed, and its services had been served by the nearby Hudson River Psychiatric Center until that facility's closure in January 2012.
The campus was closed and abandoned in 2003 and fell into a state of disrepair. The sprawling male bedding ward, south of the main building, was critically damaged in a 2007 fire caused by lightning. Authorities struggled with the risk of arson and vandals, with the Fairview Fire District responding to 11 such incidents between 2011 and 2019.
A nine-member Board of Managers was created and appointed to initiate and oversee construction of the actual building. They chose architect Frederick Clarke Withers to design a building according to the Kirkbride Plan, then a popular theory for the design of mental institutions. Withers planned a building 1,500 feet (457 m) in length and over 500,000 square feet (45,000 m2) in area, most of it two wings that would house patients.[15] It was the first institutional building in the U.S. designed in the High Victorian Gothic style. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, designers of New York's Central Park, laid out the surrounding landscape.[15] Like Withers, they had been influenced by landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing in nearby Newburgh.
Construction began in 1868, with the cost estimated at $800,000. Cost-saving measures included the construction of a new dock on the Hudson so that building materials could be shipped more directly to the site, quarrying and cutting the foundation stones on site, mixing concrete from local materials and hiring local craftsmen instead of a general contractor.[15] The board also deviated from the plan it had sent the state, in particular by building a shorter female wing when it came to believe that fewer patients of that sex would be admitted. As a re
