Having reached midlife, I feel the fragility of the situation. Certainly, feelings of darkness and death have permeated my thoughts for years, as well as my drawings of Danvers State. Like everyone, I have experienced the feelings of loss associated with the death of persons close to me, and this has contributed to my study of this building. I have never worked at Danvers nor been a patient there. I was raised some three hundred miles away in Connecticut and have not had any family or close friends hospitalized there. Yet, the Castle is far and away the most influential building in my life. The words from the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, come to mind from his classic, "The Masque of the Red Death": "And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock" (Poe 1975, 271). The building at Danvers is a constant reminder of "the striking of the clock." My imagination has fed on the texture and pattern of Danvers--its time-stained brick, rusted mesh screens, decaying vents and turrets, and its tar-stained roofs with their green copper valleys, their elaborately designed brick eaves. Its distinctive architecture, now far along the road of decay, marks "the Castle" as a special place--almost a perverted holy place.

My obsession with "the Castle" began that evening in 1986. I had been an innocent drawn up the hill to be confronted with the terrible beauty that lay waiting at the top, and now I had entered another world, a world purposefully separated from the community below. Since that first encounter, I have tramped the grounds, drawn Danvers's buildings from every angle, explored its labyrinthian depths, pored over its records, and interviewed former employees and patients. This is a very brief look at its story.

Danvers Lunatic Hospital was built between 1874 and 1878, and to some was considered an architectural masterpiece of its era (Cini, Jenkins, and Trask 1983, item 8, 2). A state-of-the-art facility for its time, it was constructed with "red Danvers brick" in a Domestic Gothic style. Its designer, the noted Boston architect, Nathaniel Bradlee, used as his models the lunatic asylums in Worcester, Massachusetts; Poughkeepsie, New York; Concord, New Hampshire; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Trenton and Morristown, New Jersey. When it opened in 1878, the Castle was expected to hold 450 patients, with a maximum capacity of six hundred if the attics were full (Commissioners 1876, 31-32). It is one of ten former lunatic hospitals on the National Historic Register.

Danvers was built at the conclusion of the era of moral treatment--a time of deep social commitment to the mentally ill. While it was constructed under Bradlee's watchful eye, its essential design was the product of the mind of psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride, M.D., L.L.D. (1809-1883). Kirkbride was the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, as well as secretary-treasurer of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (the forerunner of the American Psychiatric Association). He was considered the "guiding spirit of model-hospital building" in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Stone 1997, 126). He had created a specific institutional design known as the Kirkbride Plan, which he described in his book, On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane. Kirkbride thought the optimal number of patients should be approximately 250, with a maximum of six hundred. He was confident that his system would lead to an 80 percent cure rate (Kirkbride 1873, 23).

In A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-Keeping 1840-1883, Nancy Tomes writes of Kirkbride's stipulations: The asylum should be located "in a secluded area to ensure complete privacy"; the soil should be conducive to having both a productive farm and gardens; the asylum windows should be placed so as to offer pleasant views and good light, along with a satisfactory ventilation system (141). A crucial aspect of the Kirkbride Plan was its linear orientation. "It had wings radiating off the center section, so that each ward had proper ventilation and an unobstructed view of the grounds. By leaving open spaces at the end of each wing, "the darkest, most cheerless and worst ventilated parts" of the hospital could be eliminated, Kirkbride explained" (142). Genders were separated, and the best-behaved patients were kept in those wards nearest the central administration building. In Kirkbride's words, "The least excited--what is commonly called the best class of patients--should occupy the upper stories and be nearest the centre building, while the noisy should be at a distance, and the feeble in the lower stories" (Kirkbride 1873, 236).

The reflection of psychiatry's authority and power in asylum design was clearly vital to Kirkbride, who modeled himself on the moral treatment movement's most famous European advocates--Tuke in York, England, and Pinel in Paris (Tomes 1984, 21). In addition, he had a powerful ally in Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887), the famous American advocate for the mentally ill who personally lobbied for the funding of numerous public institutions in the United States such as Danvers. Kirkbride pressed for the creation of the best conditions possible to flourish within his institutions, believing that "it is obvious that every State hospital should be made good enough for the highest class of its citizens, for it should not be forgotten that what is good enough for them, . . . is none too good for the humblest of the unfortunates"(Kirkbride 1873, 31).

Danvers opened its doors to the public in 1878, following the completion of the massive brick structure that eventually totaled 700,000 square feet of floor area and 325,000 square feet of roof surface (Trustees 1937, 9). Among its building materials were Danvers brick, Massachusetts granite, . . . Copper flashed, Maine slate roof with decorative iron cresting and finials. Interior: smooth, round cornered plaster walls, oak or mahogany woodwork, narrow strips of hardwood flooring. Decorative brass hardware and pressed metal ceiling tiles. . . .Some etched (and stained) glass, especially in door panels. a White marble mantels in ward public rooms (Cini 1981b, 12). In her 1981 application to the National Historical Register, architectural historian Marcia Cini wrote, "The plans. . . . reflected the most timely contemporary developments in the heating and ventilation of public health institutions" (Cini 1981a, n.p.). The complexity of design was reflected in the observation that in the entire length of the (foundation) wall (which is nearly a mile) . . .there (were) over 240 angles, with some walls built as thick as three and one-half feet (Commissioners 1876, 14). Approximately fifteen hundred tons of stone went into the making of the monstrous foundation walls.

Kirkbride was a strong proponent of order and regimentation. His buildings were laid out as follows: the central administration building with the tallest spire was placed in the middle, then two wings, each 150 feet in length radiated out, east and west, and receded into another angle with ventilation towers. From there, another set of wings extended out, and this process was repeated a third time, so that there were six individual wings, which culminated in a curving fashion with the wings that housed the most violent patients. An important aspect of Kirkbride's linear design was that "each ward was enough out of line so that fresh air could reach it from all four sides and it was not under observation from other wards" (Bond 1947, 99). Danvers's sections were identified in alphabetical order so that the eastern side was designated the "A" building, with its complement on the west, the "J" building 1200 feet away on a straight line. An elliptical pathway around the institution measured approximately one mile in length.

The exorbitant construction cost of just under $1.5 million created a firestorm of public criticism. "People in the town called it 'The Castle' not just because of its architecture, but out of a certain amount of envy and bitterness. The patients--those 'crazy people'--were being coddled and given such an easy life, and they [the townspeople] were down there at the bottom of the hill struggling" (WGBH 1995).

When compared with the sordid conditions found in the almshouses and prisons, lunatic hospitals such as Danvers provided a vastly superior form of confinement (Gamwell and Tomes 1995, 39). Patients at the turn of the century were provided with elaborate exercise schedules derived from moral treatment's philosophies regarding the healing of body as well as mind. They assisted in the creation of elaborate gardens that drew the public during weekend visits to the point where these visits had to be curtailed because they had become too intrusive to the patients. The patient-run farm produced û large harvests that kept the institution's kitchen busy. A sampling from the 1892 harvest shows that 230 bushels of carrots, 16,775 heads of cabbage, 1,141 bushels of potatoes, 3,735 dozen ears of sweet corn, 150 barrels of apples, and 14,620 pounds of pork made their way to the dinner tables (Trustees 1893, 16).