Preserving Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie, NY

At the Olmsted Network’s 2024 Annual Conference, Poughkeepsie’s Hudson River State Hospital (HRSH) was featured in a panel discussion, Preservation and Mental Health: Adapting Olmsted Designs to Modern Needs, about how communities are using and adapting state institutions and their landscapes. A site of national significance, HRSH’s remarkable structure and its grounds are currently at risk due to uncertainty about next steps in its redevelopment. 

History

Established in 1868, Hudson River State Hospital is a former psychiatric hospital designated a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in 1989 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 2007. Designed by Frederick Clarke Withers in the High Victorian Gothic style, with landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, HRSH is a remarkable example of the Kirkbride Plan, an integrated approach to architecture and landscape design advocated by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride to promote respectful care for the mentally ill. 

As an NHL, HRSH represents an irreplaceable piece of architecture, landscape design and mental health history. Only 3% of the 90,000 sites listed on the NRHP are recognized as NHL, totaling about 2,500 sites across the nation. 

78 Kirkbride Hospitals were built across North America and Australia between 1848 and 1913. Of the 35 that continue to exist in various states of use, reuse and disuse, 22 are listed on the NRHP. HRSH is one of five Kirkbride Plan Hospitals that have been declared NHL. Of those five, three have been or are in the process of being successfully restored and adaptively reused (Buffalo, NY; Weston, WV; and Washington, D.C.) and a fourth (West Philadelphia, PA) is still in use as a mental health facility. 

Of the five Kirkbride Plan hospitals declared NHLs, only HRSH is abandoned, its future uncertain.  

HRSH occupies 200 acres of land purchased in 1867 from James Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s father, by Dutchess County for the state to establish a “rightly equipped and constructed hospital for the mentally ill.” As part of New York State’s ambitious 19^th century efforts to support the mentally ill, HRSH is kindred to the sprawling facilities at Utica (1843), Willard (1869) and Buffalo (1872). 

The generous size of the HRSH site and its stunning location along the Hudson River reflect Dr. Kirkbride’s assertion that “every hospital for the insane should possess at least one hundred acres of land, to enable it to have the proper amount for farming and gardening purposes, to give the desired degree of privacy and to secure adequate and appropriate means of exercise, labor and occupation to the patients, for all these are now recognized as among the most valuable means of treatment.” 

In his influential 1854 treatise on psychiatric hospital design and management, Dr. Kirkbride detailed a unique architectural arrangement of symmetrical, residential wings— one for female patients, the other for males— which step back from a central administration building, in echelon, or “batwing” formation. Tall, operable windows admitted plentiful sunlight and prevailing breezes for natural ventilation, with ample views to the landscaped grounds as part of beauty-as-therapy.

Akin to Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of a park as the lungs of the city, Dr. Kirkbride imagined the ideal hospital from a physiological perspective, with an imperative to provide fresh air and ample sunlight through generously proportioned buildings situated in soothing, picturesque settings for recuperative walks, relaxation and occupational therapy. The publication of Kirkbride’s treatise converged with the rise of landscape design in the popular imagination through the writings and projects of Andrew Jackson Downing, who designed the grounds for the first psychiatric hospital in New York State at Utica (1843) and the first Kirkbride Plan hospital at Trenton, NJ (1848). Following Downing’s untimely death in 1852, Olmsted and Vaux advanced the legacy of their friend and associate while expanding the influence (and scale) of landscaping on mental health through their designs for the mammoth hospitals at Poughkeepsie (1868) and Buffalo (1873). 

With its architecture, site and material cultural history, combined with its extraordinary location, HRSH warrants appropriate stewardship and revitalization. 

Current site challenges 

In 2014, HRSH’s current developer, EFG Saber, LLC, committed to the preservation of Olmsted and Vaux’s Great Lawn and the adaptive reuse of significant portions of the original hospital. Since that time, only the southern portion of the site has been redeveloped, with no clear path forward for the north campus, which includes the abandoned Kirkbride and a small village of support buildings. All of these structures continue to weather the elements with nominal protection. Now, ten years later, the developer has yet to put forth a clear plan for the landmark, which leaves the site exposed to the elements and potential vandalism and uncertainty about its future.

Preservation and Memorialization Efforts & Desired Outcomes 

In its current state, HRSH offers a ripe opportunity to recognize and transform New York State’s legacy of public mental health by supporting public access to the Olmsted-Vaux landscape and the potential for mixed income housing. It also offers a poignant opportunity to memorialize the legacy of the site, its patients and staff, as achieved at other Kirkbride hospitals across the country. 

In 2021, a Memorial Committee of former hospital employees, artists, architects and historians, was convened by Yvonne Laube to generate strategies to commemorate the patients and staff and offer an attraction to local residents and nationwide enthusiasts, recognizing that thousands of guests visit the Kirkbride hospital at Weston, WV, each year. The group met regularly for two years, generating schematic designs that would incorporate materials from the original building. Unfortunately, these efforts have not yet been met with genuine interest from the developer. Additional proposals for memorials and adaptive reuse schemes for the site and its structures have been generated by students in Dr. Robert Kirkbride’s architecture studio at Parsons School of Design, several of which were shared at the conference panel discussion.

For the past century and a half, public access to the HRSH site has been highly restricted, although partial access to Olmsted and Vaux’s Great Lawn was enabled in 1939, when a nine-hole golf course used by patients became public. It is our hope to restore and reactivate the Great Lawn as an amenity for local residents, alongside the revitalization of the Kirkbride and the six contracted buildings (and potentially others) for mixed income residential use and possible small businesses. Several structures, including the North Wing’s facade and Tower, have been evaluated as structurally sound for preservation and reuse by an independent structural engineer. 

Recent adaptive reuse projects at other previously abandoned Kirkbride Plan hospitals— at Tuscaloosa, AL; Columbia, SC; Athens, OH; Buffalo, NY; and St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C.— offer successful examples to transform HRSH and its grounds— acknowledged as a national treasure— into a source of local and regional pride. Following the conference panel, the Olmsted Network expressed support for the efforts to preserve and thoughtfully adapt Hudson River State Hospital and its site. The Town of Poughkeepsie’s Historical Commission and PreservationWorks welcome imaginative and innovative ideas for its future. 

Please contact Yvonne Laube at yvonnelaubepok@gmail.com.

Yvonne Laube has been a member of the Town of Poughkeepsie Historic Preservation Commission since 2016. In 2015, Laube began advocating for HRSH’s preservation and reuse as a volunteer for PreservationWorks. She graduated from the State University of New York with a B.A. in Design. 

Dr. Robert Kirkbride, a distant relative of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, is Professor of Architecture and Product Design at Parsons School of Design in New York City and Spokesperson and a founding trustee for PreservationWorks, a non-profit organization committed to the preservation and adaptive reuse of the remaining Kirkbride Plan hospitals. A new partner of the Olmsted Network, PreservationWorks was formed in 2015 in the wake of the highly contested and unnecessary demolition of Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, NJ, ranked as one of the top five architectural losses in the United States that year by the National Trust of Historic Places. PreservationWorks’ mission is to share knowledge and resources to support local efforts to reactivate and memorialize these structures and those who lived and worked in them through comprehensive photographic tours, events and interactive research media. For more about PreservationWorks, visit our website and follow us on Facebook. For updates on the HRSH project, follow PreservationWorks: Hudson on Facebook. For more on the history of the Kirkbride Plan, see Dr. Robert Kirkbride’s recent article, Phantoms of the Kirkbride Hospitals, at Places Journal.