Speaker 0: Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Whatever the case may be. This is Mike, and this is Mike Dells world number three no.

Is it 434? That was a hard number for some reason. But, anyway, 434. This is, 11/28/2025. Yeah.

I always had to think about that date. This is, was it Panic Friday? No. Black Friday. Well, yeah, I'm not gonna be out shopping.

Believe me. I got enough other things to do. Actually, I've got some website work to do for a client slash friend of mine. Not work related, but separate from work. But, today, we're gonna talk about the Traverse City State Hospital, otherwise known as the Northern Michigan Asylum or and the Traverse City Regional Psychiatric Hospital.

And this complex and I and I I won't call it a building because it's several buildings. It's a huge campus, kind of on the West Side of town, you know, near our medical hospital and a big nursing home. So it's kinda that side of town's always been medically related. The state hospital was established in Traverse City in 1881. That's a long time ago.

That was established by James Decker Munson, who is also the the namesake for the, Munson Healthcare System, which is our main medical hospital system around here, and also Perry Hanna. Perry Hanna is well known as the the, father of Traverse City, and he had a big store downtown, the Hannah Lay Mercantile store, and, he built a really cool mansion who's it's which is owned by a friend of mine now. It's a funeral home, but a huge, you know, mansion, the, Perry Hanna House on 6th Street, now, the Zhongkoff Funeral Home. But a beautiful old building. When we were kids, used to used to stay in that building once in a while.

They had the living quarters upstairs from the funeral home, which is on the Main Floor and used to stay over there and explore that house and now they give kind of tours of it. Nobody lives there anymore, but and they're still running the business out of there for sure. It's like one of the largest funeral home in the area. So but anyway, then I digress. The State Hospital, like I said, was established in 1881 It opened up, in 1885, and it was a self sustaining, community.

The the people that ran that, you know, was, you know, psychiatric care, with beauty, you know, involved because the buildings are just beautiful Victorian buildings. The main building, Building 50, everybody calls it. And that's still standing and it's been reused for various things, but I'll get to that. But back in the day, that was, you know, one of the big regional psychiatric hospitals, state hospitals, mental hospitals. I don't know.

They had a whole bunch of of, you know, euphemisms for it, but it was a place where people with psychiatric problems could could go, and and they had a pretty good record of of healing people, you know, at least in the early part of it in the in, you know, the middle in the sixties, fifties, forties, whatever. My grandparents, both my dad's folks, were employees out there. My grandmother was an RN, registered nurse, and my grandfather was, I guess, called an orderly, but, you know, he would he was in charge of whatever ward he was on and, you know, it became like a big family in a lot of cases. I mean, they did a lot of crazy stuff too, like, you know, like, mental hospitals do, but these were one of the more humane ones. And it's an old Kubrick building.

Kubrick. Am I saying that properly? But, yeah, the whole thing, was predicated on, you know, kindness, comfort, pleasure with beautiful flowers provided year round by their own greenhouses. They had, you know, the beautiful wooded grounds. They had a farm.

You know, there's a part of the state hospital complex was, what's now called the historic Barnes Park, and there's a couple of big old barns there. And, one of them, they got all fixed up to, you know, be like a wedding venue and, you know, or a party venue and all that. In fact, they went to a reception, in the barns a couple summers ago, and it's, it's, you know, really nice, you know, in that whole area. They had farmers. One of our neighbors when he was a kid, he was a farmer at the state hospital and, you know, and he had all the the patients and or, you know, my my cousin also worked there and he always called them clients.

But, you know, they had a lot of the patients, you know, helping with the farm. They grew their own food. They had, you know, cattle. They had pigs and chickens and eggs and, you know, plus crops and everything. So a lot of what the state hospital residents ate came right off of that property, and it was definitely, you know, pretty self sustaining.

They had their own power plant. That building is still there. All the windows are knocked out of it, but the building's still there. And they are still renovating some of the what they call cottages, but these were, like, three story barracks buildings, but kind of Victorian style. They're really neat.

Big porches and all that. But, they've reused a lot of Building 50. The whole bottom floor is kind of this winding, you know, almost like a maze of of corridors, and they have little stores down there, kinda like a mall sort of thing. They have a couple restaurants down there. They call it the grotto.

And, you know, a lot of, little small shops are set up in there. And, you know, it's it's really, you know, it's not fixed up to modern specs. It's fixed up, to, you know, 1900 early nineteen hundred specs, you know. Of course, they have lights and everything, but still it's it's pretty cool. The upper Floors of Building 50 have been turned into condos and apartments and a lot of the outlying areas on the on the 1st And 2nd Floor, not the Bottom Floor, which was more of a basement y type thing, are, office space.

So a lot of people rent, you know, one office or a little suite of offices for various business endeavors and and all that. So, you know, it's just a lot of stuff going on there, and they've, you know, really maintained that building pretty well. And some of the cottages as well, they've maintained pretty well, and then some of them, not so much. But they're still standing, they're still solid and we'll get to them eventually. But the the whole place now is called the the village at Grand Traverse Con, Grand Traverse Commons And, yeah, Kirkbride.

That's, that's the word I was looking for, not Kirkby. Kirkbride. And that's, there was four of those Kirkbride, buildings in Michigan. Traverse City was just one of them, but but it was the actually, I think it's the newest one, and I think it's the only one still in use. Not as a psychiatric hospital, but as a, you know, as anything.

You know? I don't know. There was I think there was one in Kalamazoo. Where yeah. Here.

Let me look here. I'm kinda flipping through my data sheet here. But there was, yeah, there was four of them, in Michigan, and I don't remember. I can't find in here where it where it says where the other ones are. But I know there was one in Kalamazoo.

I'm guessing there was one somewhere in the Detroit area. But, again, it's kind of the the last of those buildings that's still kind of, in its original form. They did remodel the main entrance a little bit and modernized it a little bit, all that. And, you know, I got a, a listener. I know Chris is probably listening to this with in writing notes to, to tell me, how wrong I am or to tell me more or more information.

I keep meaning to get him on the microphone here to, tell all about the state hospital. He was he's, pretty into the history of it and does a lot of photography around it. They do still give tours of, the state hospital and, you know, in some of the areas that haven't been restored. There's I guess it's not rumors. There's tunnels that kinda go between some of the buildings.

And, again, you know, when I get Chris on here, I'll, I'll let him talk about, in much more detail, but it's a neat old place. Used to, for a little while when my wife was running a bagel shop, I used to deliver bagels over there to a coffee shop at the Grotto called Cup O Joe. There's a couple of local coffee shops called Cup O Joe, but, that that's one of them in the in the state hospital grotto. And I used to deliver deliver bagels there and always got a cup of coffee because they had good coffee. And, it I'd be there about 05:30 in the morning.

Hey. Gotta get there early. But, anyway, it's, it's it's pretty pretty impressive building. As you drive into Traverse City, you know, Traverse City is down in a bowl, and if you're coming in from the South, which most people do, they come in on M 37 US 31, and as you come over the hill, as you start into town, if you look a little to your left over in the trees, you'll see all the spires sticking up from Building 50 and other buildings around the State Hospital Grounds or Grand Traverse Commons. Anyway, so that gives you kind of a little overview.

I'll, I'll throw a picture of the Building 50 in the in the show notes over at mikedell.com. And, hey, we got a couple more episodes to go. Tomorrow, I'm gonna talk about why podcasting is so special. And, then I got a special last episode for Napod Pomo coming on the thirtieth, which I believe is Sunday. So catch me tomorrow.