A Gothic asylum, now apartments
Building 1 occupies Danvers State Hospital's former Kirkbride building on Hathorne Hill in Danvers, Massachusetts, a brick Gothic asylum opened in 1878 that once held thousands of patients. Closed in 1992 and partly demolished in 2006, its preserved facade now wraps the Avalon at Danvers apartment complex, built by AvalonBay Communities and sold in 2014 for $108.5 million.
A hospital palace rises on the Dodge farm
Danvers State Hospital was once one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in Massachusetts. Today its brick shell holds luxury apartments called Avalon at Danvers. The land was called the Dodge farm before the state bought it in 1873, 197 acres centered on a steep hill called Hathorne Hill, 240 feet above sea level. The price was $39,542.
Construction began in 1874. The architect was Nathaniel Jeremiah Bradlee, a prominent Boston designer who built the hospital on the Kirkbride Plan, a layout meant to calm the mind through light, air, and order. Two central buildings held the administration offices. Long wings reached out on each side, stepping back from the center like open wings. Women were housed on one side, men on the other. The farthest wards, at the tips of the wings, held the most disturbed patients.
The building cost $1.5 million, a huge sum at the time. State senators argued over the cost. One senator, Sanborn, called it the "Hospital Palace at Danvers," and said it looked grander than many a royal palace. Bradlee called his own style "Domestic Gothic." Bradlee built it from red Danvers brick with gray granite trim and slate roofs, covered in towers, iron cresting, and patterned stonework.
The hospital opened on May 13, 1878. Its first superintendent, Dr. Calvin S. May, had come from a hospital in Connecticut. The building was meant to hold 450 patients, with attic space for a thousand more in an emergency. Within two decades that limit was already a fiction. By 1899, the hospital had treated nearly 9,500 people and employed 125 staff. It offered hydrotherapy, a water-based treatment considered advanced for its time.
Thousands crowd into a building built for hundreds
In 1909, the hospital's name was officially changed to Danvers State Hospital. By the late 1930s and into the 1940s, more than 2,000 patients crowded a building meant for 450. People slept in attics and basements. In 1939 alone, the population reached 2,360, and 278 of them died that year.
Around this same era, the hospital gained a grim nickname among doctors: some called it the birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy. How many such operations happened there, and exactly when they began, is disputed. Visitors at the time reported seeing lobotomized patients wandering the halls in a daze. After 1920, reports describe shock treatments, heavy drugging, and straitjackets used to control the crowded wards.
Local legend ties the hill itself to that darker history. The story goes that John Hathorne, a judge who condemned people to death during the Salem witch trials of 1692, once lived on this same land, centuries before the hospital rose on it. That tale has fed ghost stories about the site ever since.
The hospital's brooding towers and grim reputation also fed fiction. Historians credit Danvers as H. P. Lovecraft's model for the Arkham Sanatorium, a setting in his story "The Thing on the Doorstep." That invented asylum, in turn, helped inspire Arkham Asylum in the Batman comics.
Community care drains the wards until closure
Through the 1960s, a shift in psychiatric care began to drain the hospital out. Doctors and the state pushed for smaller, community-based treatment. Danvers started closing its original wings in 1969. By 1985, most of the old wards stood empty. The Administration Block, the heart of the Kirkbride building, shut its doors in 1989. What was left of the hospital limped on from the Bonner Medical Building nearby.
In 1984, with the building already fading, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The honor didn't save it. Budget cuts under Governor William Weld forced the final closure on June 24, 1992, ending 114 years of continuous operation.
Demolition and fire follow the asylum's emptying
The Kirkbride building sat empty for thirteen years, broken into and picked apart by vandals and weather. Former patients and volunteers worked in 1997 to restore the hospital's cemeteries. The state had buried many of its dead there under numbered stones instead of names.
In 2005, the state sold the 77-acre property to AvalonBay Communities, a residential developer. A local preservation group sued to stop the Kirkbride building from coming down, arguing its place on the National Register should protect it. The lawsuit failed. Demolition began in January 2006, and by that June, nearly everything but the outer brick shell of the administration block and two wings was gone.
In April 2007, a fire tore through four of the new apartment buildings and construction trailers, visible from Boston 17 miles away. The flames reached the surviving Kirkbride spires and scorched them before crews put it out. A replica steeple went up afterward, copying a tower that had been removed around 1970 for structural reasons.
Apartments now fill the old brick walls
AvalonBay sold the finished property in 2014 to the DSF Group for $108.5 million. The complex, now called Avalon at Danvers, wraps its apartments inside the old brick walls of the Kirkbride building. Two cemeteries on the grounds still hold more than 770 bodies, many marked only by numbers.
The old asylum's brick towers still rise over Hathorne Hill, now framing apartment windows instead of hospital wards.
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