Building 50: A Granddaughter's View

This 1920s photograph of the old Center Building of the State Hospital shows the dignity and beauty of the Gothic architecture. Part of this structure, now known as Building 50, still stands at the end of W. Eleventh St.

 By: Marla Kay Houghteling

 

            When I visit the site of the old Traverse City State Hospital, the stories of my aunts and mother swirl around me. Their father, my grandfather, died there in 1946, after several months as a patient. I was born the year he died.

            When I was a child in Oceana County, the taunt you belong in Traverse City, accompanied by the gesture of twirling the index finger at the temple, was directed at anyone who acted out of the ordinary.  It meant you were crazy, though not really crazy, just weird or zany.

            In 1998 I saw Heidi Johnson's photographic exhibit "Angels in the Architecture" and was unexpectedly comforted by her images of disintegrating interiors and exteriors of the hospital buildings and of everyday items like butter knives and coathangers. Comforted because the physicality of the pictures gave me a connection to my grandfather.  Perhaps because like her "architectural" photos, all the family pictures of my grandfather are in black and white.

            Building 50 has been voted the "Best Haunted Building" and has achieved a camp status.  But when I stand in front of the looming, vast edifice, or fall into Heidi Johnson's photos, it is never spooky or frightening.  The place for me is a repository of memory and sadness.  I see angels rather than ghosts at the many-paned windows.

            My grandfather died  when he was 56.  Just before leaving on a trip to Minnesota with his wife, he was checked by his physician and declared to be in fine health.  But family members had noticed a growing anxiety and paranoia in their hometown's leading citizen, and while visiting relatives in Minnesota, his behavior grew erratic.

            Dan Cole was a banker, credited with keeping the Walkerville bank solvent during the Depression, one of the few banks that remained so.  A dynamo in civic affairs, he organized the community band, playing several instruments himself and promoting music.  He served for years on the board of education and as mayor of the village, volunteered with the fire department, conducted farm auctions, and was active in the Methodist church .  His obituary portrayed him as

one of those rare personalities who made a friend of every acquaintance and his friends were legion.  A man of the highest integrity, he combined his upright character with a sunny disposition and winning smile to become one of Oceana's most esteemed citizens.

 

  Which made his "illness" all the more incongruous.    He began sleeping with a gun under his pillow, and shooting it into the air when he was out in a boat.  The "sunny disposition and winning smile" disappeared, replaced by growing paranoia.  He was committed to the Fergus Falls Hospital while in Minnesota when his behavior frightened and alarmed his relatives.  He was transferred to Traverse City in the fall of 1945.  

            My mother, newly pregnant with me, was advised to not visit her father, advice she regrets she listened to.  Her mother and sisters reported of their visits with Dan.  Her mother said he was often hoarse; the staff reported that he played the piano and sang at the top of his lungs in the activity room, disrupting other patients.  When his wife visited, he begged to come home.  He died on January 21, 1946, while pulling a shirt over his head.  The cause of death was coronary thrombosis. 

            One cousin who works in the mental health field has speculated that Grandpa Cole most likely had an undiagnosed heart problem that led to his mental condition.  Perhaps he suffered from atherosclerosis and vascular dementia.  I have known people with heart conditions who experienced depression and anxiety before having a heart attack.  He lived in a time when family members were committed to mental institutions for reasons inconceivable today.  The oneness of the body/mind was not a concept that was valued in the psychiatric diagnoses of the 1940s.  In fact the treatment of patients in the 1900s had left behind the original "landscape as therapy" concept of the 1880s, on which the Traverse City State Hospital was founded. 

This 1930s photograph of the men's quarters at the State Hospital captures the peace and tranquility that was a part of life on the hospital grounds.

During college I studied psychology and volunteered at Chicago State Hospital, a sprawling complex housing 5,000 patients, and I worked one summer at Pine Rest in Grand Rapids, no doubt influenced by my family history. But by my junior year, I veered towards an education degree; it felt safer.

When I moved back to Michigan as a middle-aged woman, I was pulled to the grounds of the hospital. I was curious and felt a connection, an empathy with my grandparents: I was in my fifties; they both died in their fifties. Things had changed since Dan Cole's residence. Old Center had been demolished, as had the towered entryways to some of the cottages. I walked around the back of Building 50, noting the sprawling wings, each section with different window styles. I found myself counting the panes in a wall of arched windows: each window had 30 panes; each floor had 5 windows, and there were 3 floors. I saw my grandfather sitting in the dayroom counting the panes of glass. If I concentrated I could hear piano playing and a man singing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" for all the world to hear.

Long porches were penned in with meshed wire, rusty diamond-shapes. Some of the sections had circles of concertina wire along the top between the mesh and the roof. I wondered if the wire had been there in 1945, when Dan Cole, an avid outdoorsman, was admitted. If so, it must have been unbearable for him to be separated from nature.

After seeing the photographic exhibit, I read the book version of Angels in the Architecture, and later Earle Steele's reminiscences in Beauty is Therapy. The design of the Northern Michigan Asylum was based on Thomas Story Kirkbride's vision of buildings and landscaping as a therapeutic tool. The asylum had a park-like atmosphere, with patients working at growing food and flowers, having access to the "outside," although that outside was monitored.

By the time Dan Cole was admitted, the institution was known as Traverse City State Hospital, as it is referred to in his obituary. The emphasis on the natural world as a healing agent had all but disappeared from psychiatric treatment, although in the 1940s, the greenhouses still supplied the wards with flowers and farming activities were still going on.

Two of Heidi Johnson's photos most strongly evoke the image of Dan Cole for me. In "Yellow Room, men's ward, Building 50," he is standing under the archway, facing the door. He wears a white shirt and suspenders holding up dark trousers. He is not allowed to smoke on the ward, so there is no cigar-smoking small-town banker presence. The sunlight coming through a window in the front of the room, where the door hangs open, has a smoky texture. The door seems small for the height of the room, almost like a door that Alice might open in her Wonderland. The light is the dominant sensation, not the peeling paint, the fallen plaster on bare floorboards.

In the other photo, "Nine Windows, men's ward 8, Building 50," I see my grandfather in motion, either pacing in front of the tall windows or playing an upright piano with desperate exuberance. The sunlight in this photo is more defined, brighter, projecting elongated shadows of the windows' paned divisions on the bare floor.

When I heard that plans to demolish Building 50 were underway, I felt panic that a part of my family history, although a painful part, would be erased. With no Building 50, what would stand as a witness to the effects, good and bad, the institution had on so many lives? And I felt a painful twinge when I saw the newspaper photos in 1998 of the auction of the hospital contents, as if the family farm was being sold bit by bit and I was powerless to stop it.

I'm grateful Building 50 has been saved, that the cottages have been renovated and are being used. But I hope some portion is left unpainted, undecorated. Not all the starkness and sadness should be covered up. The simple truth of despair should be evident. It's how we learn. Perhaps that's where Heidi Johnson's art, as well as archival photographs, will help us. I began a half-hearted attempt to research my grandfather's mental health records after seeing the exhibit. I was directed to the state archives, but got as far as getting phone numbers and printing out information on the internet.

Just recently, I've begun to see that learning more about my grandfather's illness is a way of honoring him, so I've renewed my research mission. I called the Department of Community Health, now in charge of mental health records, and was referred to a legal compliance officer, who told me about section 330.1748 of Michigan's mental health code. The information on my grandfather's treatment in 1945 and 1946 is confidential. I can try to obtain his records by going through the courts. If I pursue this, am I doing an honorable thing? I only know that much is said about removing the stigma of mental illness. But isn't that stigma, wrapped in an atmosphere of shame, perpetuated when all traces of former mental institutions are removed and records forever sealed?

 

Marla Kay Houghteling, a member of Michigan Writers, Inc., resides in Harbor Springs.