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Seeking asylum
By Alex Beam, 8/9/2001
Well before ''Session 9,'' the Danvers campus inspired many a harrowing
tale. It is believed to be the ''Arkham Hospital'' in the writings of New
England horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Historian Michael Ramseur has
published an interesting history of Danvers State, including the
ex-patients' successful efforts to restore its cemetery, on the Web at
darkspire.org/asylums/index.html#tourist.
Danvers is not the only Massachusetts asylum attracting Hollywood's
eye. McLean Hospital in Belmont, the setting for the movie version of
Susanna Kaysen's memoir ''Girl, Interrupted,'' will soon be featured in
''A Beautiful Mind,'' with Australian buffasaurus Russell Crowe improbably
cast as John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning game theorist who
sojourned at McLean in the 1950s. That movie is due out at Christmas.
Another Nash project, in which the 73-year-old scholar will probably
appear, is also underway at WGBH's ''American Experience'' history and
biography series.
Hollywood isn't all that welcome at the privately owned McLean.
''Girl'' was shot in Pennsylvania, and ''Mind'' used locations there and
in New Jersey. (The Web site www.maximumcrowe.com has some excellent
pictures of Crowe playing Nash.) WGBH has done exterior filming at the
hospital and may shoot inside some of the unoccupied wards.
Yet another Bay State asylum - the shuttered Northampton State Hospital
- has also had a second life in the arts. Last November, artist Anna Schuleit staged an
ambitious son et lumiere presentation of Bach's Magnificat piped through
the rooms and corridors of the ''Old Main,'' the hospital's gigantic
administration building. ''This was a mass event that was also intimately
personal,'' wrote Tim Page of The Washington Post. ''When the sun burst
through in the chorus ... the effect was so perfect that it might have
been dismissed as a Hollywood touch, if it hadn't been so wonderfully,
palpably real.''
Two documentary films on the Northampton event are due out this fall.
You can learn more about the concert at Schuleit's Web site, www.1856.org.
Why the fascination with these antique asylums? Many of the elegant,
campuslike hospitals in the Northeast bear the imprint of the
psychiatrist/designer Thomas Story Kirkbride (Danvers, Northampton) or of
Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who chose the site for
McLean and laid out the magnificent Hartford Retreat and the Bloomingdale
Asylum north of New York City. ''Within the next decade, almost all of the
old 19th-century asylums will disappear from the face of our society,'' Schuleit wrote on her
Web site.
Not only are they not making hospitals like these anymore, but most of
them are being chopped up and sold off. The state will decide on Danvers'
fate this fall; most likely a developer will rehabilitate the old
buildings for use as condos, elderly housing, and office space. A similar
mixed-use plan is already underway in Northampton. (Trivia note: In 1997,
the Massachusetts Film Office pitched the hospital grounds as a possible
East Coast headquarters for moviemakers DreamWorks SKG, which said no.)
McLean is awaiting the go-ahead to sell off about half its site for
housing and office use. The vast campus of Metropolitan State Hospital,
closed since 1992, will be divvied among the three towns it straddles.
Lexington plans to build affordable housing, and Belmont will leave its
portion open and undeveloped. Waltham plans to build a golf course.
Follow-up
Former ABC newsman George Strait will not be the next head of Boston
University's journalism school, after all. After being selected by the
search commitee, the Cambridge native learned that the J-school boss has
no budgetary authority; that rests with College of Communication dean
Brent Baker. Instead of turning to the two other finalists, BU has
appointed Strait's former colleague at ABC, professor Bob Zelnick, as
acting head of the school.
Alex Beam's e-dress is beam@globe.com
This story ran on page 1 of the Boston Globe on
8/9/2001.
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f you have watched the spooky trailer for Brad Anderson's
forthcoming psychiatric horror film, ''Session 9,'' then you have seen one
of its stars: the hulking, gothic '' witch's castle,'' the main building
of the decommissioned Danvers State Hospital. The former Lunatic Asylum
has been unoccupied since 1992, but Anderson spent several weeks last fall
filming on the sprawling, 500-acre site.