NOTE TO VISITORS: After beginning to compile archival materials here several years ago, my research - and the materials I turned up - got totally out of control. At that point, it became unclear where I was headed and what I should do with my expanding trove and increasingly granular knowledge of the asylum/hospital and its history. I haven't answered that question yet, so this site has not expanded. Nonetheless, it remains the single most extensive collection of high quality historical photographs of the hospital on the web, and I hope you find what you are looking for.
This website is a collection of photographs of the main campus of The Michigan Asylum for the Insane, located in Kalamazoo, opened in 1859.
The facility was renamed the “Kalamazoo State Hospital” in 1911; the “Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital” in 1978; and the “Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital” in 1995.
(This site does not address the farm complex on Asylum Lake or the outlying building further north, across town.)
The photographs (and maps and satellite images) posted here document the buildings and grounds of a major U.S. asylum that never closed and never fell into ruin, but instead steadily shrank.
One result of this slow erasure is that the Michigan Asylum for the Insane in Kalamazoo is poorly documented on the Web. I grew up a block away from the place and knew it well. This site is my attempt to gather up the pieces and put them together again.