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Photo Project Takes Viewers Inside Old Athens Asylum
< < Back to photo-project-takes-viewers-inside-old-athens-asylumWOUB to hold YouTube Premiere of asylum documentary on Friday
ATHENS, OH – The Old Athens State Mental Hospital, now known as The Ridges, is a place that fascinates many. In 2013, WOUB Public Media produced a documentary, which is being released for free on YouTube this Friday, on the cemeteries located at the Asylum to tell the stories of patients who were buried on the asylum grounds under numbered tombstones. Many Ohio University offices are currently located in the buildings, but a large portion of the facility remains empty and has been closed to the public. But, there’s a new way to get inside and see what those historic buildings look like.
Michigan Photographer Christian VanAntwerpen is the creator of a photography series called Project Kirkbride. The project captures detailed images of old asylums built under the Kirkbride architecture style for historic preservation. The Kirkbride Plan was created by Philadelphia psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride in the mid-19th century. Kirkbride believed in a concept called moral treatment which meant he believed that with the right environment and lifestyle mental illness could be cured.
“Project Kirkbride started in 2013 when the old asylum in Fergus Falls, Minnesota was at risk of demolition, and I suggested the idea of photographing every square inch,” said VanAntwerpen.
The project then grew to other asylums across the United States.
“The ultimate goal with Project Kirkbride is to have a definitive collection of buildings that have been completely documented for the sake of history as a preservation tool to show people what these buildings were like as we get further and further from that concept of the Kirkbride plan and the moral treatment of the mentally ill. I think of it as a reminder that we had this period where we cared this much about mental health, and we built these giant castles of care.”
The old Athens mental hospital was built under the Kirkbride plan and opened in January of 1874. The state-of-the-art psychiatric facility featured grandiose buildings surrounded by elaborate landscaping with ponds, fountains, and parks. VanAntwerpen was granted access in 2018 to the entire facility for his project.
“It was quite an experience. The thing that is amazing about the Athens buildings is that you turn a corner, and the light is completely different,” said VanAntwerpen. “The pictures don’t do it justice because of scale but literally you could drive a car through those hallways. It was that large. From the outside the building doesn’t look that big. When you go on the inside it felt huge. That’s what stood out to me the most.”
VanAntwerpen started a Project Kirkbride Facebook page to share the photos with those who are interested. He is also now president of an organization named Preservation Works which is an advocacy network committed to the restoration and adaptive reuse of the few remaining Kirkbride asylum buildings across the United States.
“Preservation and restoration are a great exercise of the human spirit to be able to switch these buildings around and turn them into something fantastic rather than tear them down,” said VanAntwerpen. “If we knock down the physical reminders of our past, we are most likely to repeat the mistakes that were made in the process.”
You can view all of VanAntwerpen’s photos of the Athens asylum at https://christianvanantwerpen.com/athensstatehospital
You can watch WOUB’s live YouTube Premiere of The 1900: Voices from the Athens Asylum on Friday, April 24 at 8 p.m. here: https://bit.ly/The1900