Hundred year old wooden beams creak with agony as a steady winter wind tests their strength while whipping through shattered stain glass windows all the while spurring up miniature dust tornadoes across the ancient asylum's floor boards; torn patient records and flakes of lead paint spin tremulously within the short lived whirlwinds, dying out as fast as they formed. A blustery draft snakes through the collapsing hallways, nipping at the back of my neck and reddening my exposed nose before creeping up to ward doors and loose window frames and like an invisible ghost lingering within the forsaken institution's ruinous remains, slamming anything loose closed with a thunderous boom. Outside a fresh layer of snow, white and powdery as a bag of flour is kicked up by the wind, blown into and trapped within the numerous overgrown courtyards formed by the zig-zagging bat-like wings of the monolithic Kirkbride Building which seems to extend for infinity into a decaying vortex of crumbling brick and charred wooden beams.
Without warning, a sudden violent gust of wind bursts open a long closed door, the sound of the screeching hinges reverberates down the vacant hallways becoming further distorted and ghastly in tone with each narrowing ward the sound slips past. The ajar door can be identified by a series of hand painted letters and numbers just barely discernible under a thick layer of dust and grime, as written are the words, "Ward 32". A curious peak into the open door frame reveals that Ward 32 remains as an entirely collapsed wing, long ago swallowed up into the basement three stores below. Like a black hole, the basement seems to suck everything down into its void, ripping the wooden floors out from the inside of the hospital, like a deer carcass de-gutted from the inside out by a butcher, before spitting the remains into another dimension. However, a handful of splintered beams still loosely cling on for life to the internal brick walls of the old asylum and are the only support appearing to keep from collapsing the last segment of the floor, which now jets out like a high-dive board overlooking the pool of splinters below.
Bulky State issued, suicide resistant patient chairs molded from a single blob of hardened brightly colored plastic await their final fate as they teeter closer and closer to the edge of a collapse. The colorful chairs remain just mere inches away from free falling three stories into the darkened basement abyss. The plastic furniture seemingly teases the hungry basement, begging to be devoured and digested within the pit of ill-fated fallen furniture which has long since assumed its fate within the stomach full of splintered wooden beams and antiquated filing cabinets weighted down by useless papers detailing long forgotten diagnosis's of long deceased patients.
And so, still barely remains, the wonderfully gothic skeleton of the Hudson River State Hospital Kirkbride Building, a ruin that has long since stood the test of time, but for which time is now quickly taking its final toll, naturally demolishing the structure faster and with more ease with each passing year of neglect. It's always fascinating to return to the asylum every couple of years during various seasons to experience and photograph what has changed. Floors I once cautiously tip-toed across years prior have since been devoured by the ever hungry basement and so wandering around always exists as a new mental and physical puzzle to solve. Massive fires seems to engulf the campus on a yearly bases now for charged piles of buildings past dot the overgrown campus roads like road kill left to rot alongside the highway gutter. Most recent, the entirety of the Administration Building has even been scorched by the flames, yet it still stands stronger than any structure which may ultimately one day replace it.
Talk continues to speculate about renovation of the campus, however nothing ever seems to be set in stone. Since my last visit, excavators have worked tirelessly to demolish many of the more modern buildings on the property over the course of the past couple years. Whether or not their hydraulic powered jaws and heavy-duty steel tracks ever pulverize the Kirkbride Building, remains to be seen; however greedy developers and lined pockets tend to create vast brown fields as opposed to glorifying the history already present. One thing is for certain though, if man does not pummel Hudson into extinction, the forces of nature are certainly not far behind, as more has collapsed and burned than I can ever recall. Yet despite all the carnage, the ornate gothic edifice that is Hudson River State Hospital still stands tall and proud despite numerous war wounds and gentrification jabs from greedy land developers. Hudson is a truly mind-blowing and beautiful American sight to behold, it is the Grand Canyon of architecture, ever eroded by a river of historical grandeur and scarred by decades of continuous stories and memories, yet completely laid to waste. A state funded public institution once built as a beautiful castle to benefit the less mentally fortunate is now entirely abandoned, neglected, and wrecked, standing as a true testament to what it was designed to prevent; a mental health crisis which continues to degrade and divide the United States. Is it possible we have forgotten what we once had and have failed to learn from our mistakes, now forever haunted by their ruinous shadows which we are quickly trying to hide?
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