Morning Asylum Gate by sunliner500 on Flickr.
Traverse City State Hospital. This gate stands between the old asylum and the commuter parking lot for my job.
For the OWA group — The Traverse City State Hospital was built around 1880, and served as a mental hospital for the entire state of Michigan until it closed somewhere in the late 1980’s. There’s a Flickr group for the State Hospital (check the link on the right sidebar)
This is a gate leading to the back of Building 50 — one of the largest buildings I have ever seen, bar none — it’s got to be a quarter-mile long, and was the main building for the entire campus. In its heyday, the State Hospital was a self-sufficient community…it had a farm that grew its own livestock, and crops, and food; its own power plant, and repair shops, and a captive (pun intended) labor force to run it all.
I even remember growing up, “being sent to Traverse City” was the same as being called crazy.
