Saturday Photo Series #1: American Asylums

Straightjacket, Logansport State Hospital, Indiana

Patient Toothbrushes, Hudson River State Hospital, New York

Typical Ward, Buffalo State Hospital, New York

Autopsy Theater, St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC

Mead Buliding Lobby, Yankton State Hospital, South Dakota

Matteawan State Hospital, Beacon, New York

Creepy.

Christopher Payne, the photographer, visited over seventy abandoned and neglected institutions for the insane, over a period of six years.  These photos are from a collection entitled Asylum:Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals.

"Few Americans realize these institutions were once monuments of civic pride, built with noble intentions by leading architects and physicians, who envisioned the asylums as places of refuge, therapy, and healing. 

For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, more than 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948 they housed over half a million patients."