From Booklist, September 01, 2009
From the 1870s to the 1930s, huge, flattened V’s of interconnected buildings following a plan developed by mental-hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride rose across the U.S. Called asylums, they were intended to extend to all classes of mental patients the so-called moral treatment of the insane pioneered by Quaker reformers (see Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America, 2002). Individually designed by major architects, they were built with the finest materials and craftsmanship to be monuments of American optimism. But too many became the overcrowded, understaffed, eventually neglectful human warehouses exposed by angry 1950s crusaders. Nearly all are now boarded up, awaiting razing. Payne’s careful 2002-08 photos catch them at the last minute; indeed, a sequence late in the book traces the demolition of one of the largest. Their exteriors remain grand, their corridors imposing, while images of sneakers and bowling shoes, of practical rooms and outbuildings (barns, shops, lounges, gyms, theaters, a TV studio) poignantly recall the dream that these places would be self-sustaining, working communities as well as safe havens for their endangered, sometimes endangering inhabitants. – Olson, Ray
