Looking Out at What's Left

I used to look out these windows to the laundry down at the bottom of the hill but it was one of the first out buildings to be torn down. Not long after that, two of the four alphabet buildings of the Memorial Complex were torn down, leaving the middle two buildings still standing, bricked up holes at the end of hallways the only signs that the buildings once continued. The last two buildings are for sale but somehow I believe they too will fall to the wrecking ball.

Irony

Every locked door, now open. Doors that once kept people in were one day unlocked to let all of them out into a world they had never seen before except on day trips to downtown Northampton. It feels like a building full of irony.

End of Days

This frame somehow got lost in the shuffle of the final set taken of the Kirkbride. Looking back and re-editing some of these photos to send to Forbes Library in Northampton made me regret the fact that I didn't spend nearly enough time photographing one of the most amazing buidlings I have ever seen.

In the Rolling Fog

The corner of the Kirkbride held the fog in a pocket and wisps of white air drifted in and out of the empty windows. With a little help from a friend, I resurrected this shot and managed to make the fog in this photo move, the way it did when I took this shot in January of 2006.

Through the Fence, Darkly

This was one of the first views I had ever seen of Northampton State Hospital. The first time I took this shot, I took it in color without the interference of the fence. Seeing the gated porches and gaping windows without their regulation red plywood boards, the fog rolling over the buildings, created the impression of Northampton State that I will never forget.

The Store House

One of my first trips to Northampton after the snow melted I parked at the Community Gardens and walked the paths that led to the back of the hospital. The first building on the outermost edge of the campus was the old store house where food and supplies were delivered. Taken in color, this shot demonstrates the rich red of the brick used to build some of the oldest parts of the hospital. Only the first floor was boarded up with the typical Massachusetts red plywood, the upper windows still with their original glass with bars over each pane.

Old Main

I originally took this shot in color but always felt that the character of Northampton's Old Main shone through better in black and white. I also considered editing out the solar flare above the roof line but somehow it just felt right to leave it in. Northampton began my obsession with exploration and this hospital shows a true timeline of how my photography has changed drastically over the last two years. While Old Main is no longer there, I will always remember my first trip to the Hospital on the Hill overlooking Smith College where I did my graduate work and where Sylvia Plath once sat, writing her suicidal missives that would eventually land her in Northampton's richer, classier older sister, McLean in Belmont.

I can remember the smell of the nurse's ward, the cold, damp feel of the tunnels we snaked through to get to the Kirkbride. I can still see the massive collapse in the basement of all four upper floors of Old Main. NoHo is the spark that lit the fire of exploration for me, both in my photography and in my writing. She has been sorely missed.

One Final Look

New Year's of 2008 saw my final set of Northampton State Hospital's Kirkbride. Old Main had already been taken down in spite of best efforts to prevent the destruction of a historic landmark. Abatement had begun on the rest of the Kirkbride, leaving the wards with open, gaping, windowless eyes out onto a foggy landscape that we knew would soon be barren. It was difficult to see her like that, ready for the wrecking ball, already with her center missing as if her soul had been removed. A few weeks later I stood outside the chainlink fence and watched her ripped apart by the jaws of giant machines and Northampton State Hospital finally fell.

Green Room Redux

The door to Building 17 was literally open for a matter of hours. It was the last building on the campus of Northampton State Hospital that I had yet to see the inside of. The building was largely unremarkable, save for this particular room with its beautiful archways and banks of windows on two walls. The lighting that day was low because of rain and fog, a typical setting on the top of Hospital Hill, but in Photoshop that lighting led to this finished photo, looking like a room that had contracted a bad case of toxic mold. Similar to how the patients who lived behind these walls were once viewed.