By Mark Roessler

In many ways, to demolish the Northampton State Hospital out of a loathing and disgust for what happened there is to repeat the same mistakes the hospital made by locking away patients deemed too unwell to live in society.

While the need to forget is completely understandable for those who have suffered there, the greater need is for those who have not been confined behind those walls to understand what happened there and why. Closing the hospital did not create an understanding for mental illness, it did not ease the stigma attached to those who suffer from it, and we are still a world that believes incarceration is more important than rehabilitation. As every student of history is taught, forgetting evils only leads to repeating them.

Even as this decade is declared the "Decade of the Brain" by the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, there is currently no museum in the world devoted to mental illness and how it's been treated. Recently, our museum committee visited the former Tewksbury State Hospital, where in their main building they've established the Museum of Public Health. While there are displays featuring old dental instruments, an antique hospital bed, and other equipment, the machines that inflicted shock therapy upon their patients were in storage, kept out of sight.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people visit museums devoted to the horrors of the Salem witch trials, the indignities of Ellis Island, and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Fewer and fewer of these visitors actually experienced the events that these museums portray, and yet the museums' importance and popularity are undiminished. Everyone has been affected by mental illness at some point in their lives. Throughout our entire history, we've ostracized, tortured and killed those whose suffering we didn't understand. It's time we made an effort to understand, rather than forget.

The Save Old Main museum committee believes the Northampton State Hospital doors must be opened wide. The world needs to be invited inside. As a town, we grew into a place called Paradise thanks in great part due to the industry generated by the hospital. Currently, as a diverse community with a concentration of artists, activists, historians and scholars, we see it as our duty to embrace this building and our past. We need to shed light on what happened on the hill and explain it to others. As a part of a mixed-use plan to make the building financially viable, a portion of the building needs to be set aside and developed as a museum.

Walls That Talk

Even without the museum exhibits we hope to install, a walk along one wing of Old Main tells much of what happened there in a way that a newer building could never hope to convey. While there is a deep sense of the misery inflicted and experienced, when I recently went inside, I found that the very architecture told a rich and layered story. Each wing is made up of three stretches of hallway, each different from the others.

The building was designed so that the halls closest to the center were where patients with the most freedom lived. Those who behaved themselves and were the closest to recovery were given the privilege of living nearest to the administration. Even in its current, decayed state, the first halls I walked through almost felt like a hotel - benign and welcoming. Each patient's door is wood framed and adorned with detail. The corners where walls meet are smooth and curved. It is an ideal place to introduce museum visitors to the early history of the hospital and its benign intentions.

The second stretch of hallway housed the more serious cases where wandering outside wasn't an option. You need to pass through a tight security gauntlet to reach it, and once you do, everything changes. Here, you get the sense of a hospital. Comfort is at a minimum, and it's darker. The sharp way the floors meet the walls, and the depth of the windows all remind you how locked up they were. Here, we can tell the story of how a place of healing began to turn into a warehouse for the nation's misunderstood.

In the final stretch of hall at the end of the wings, where the most serious and disturbed cases lived, all pretense of humanity disappears. Cages and gates cover every opening. The hard floors shine with a thousand scrubbings. It's modern and sterile. You feel as if you're in a morgue, there to stay. Here we can explain the difference between treatment and therapy. How a world enamored with the perfection of science forgot about the soul.

The Museum Already Exists

For several months, we have been in discussion with museum professionals and experts on Old Main, considering how to best tell the story of the hospital. Besides visiting the Tewksbury Museum of Public Health, we've met with the curators and creators of other exhibits on Northampton's hospital. Every one of them either still has their materials from their exhibits in storage, or know where there are stashes of uncategorized records, antiques and ephemera locked away in closets.

Many of Michael Moore's 40 or so interviews with former hospital employees remain unheard and the transcripts unread. The modern portraits taken by Stan Sherer and archival photos of the hospital used in an Historic Northampton exhibition are all still framed and in pristine condition, but they're hidden by bubble wrap and in storage. Hospital hill has already been stripped of much of its history by vandals who assume no one cares. Should the building be demolished, these unseen resources we've been told about are sure to disappear as quickly as the lamp posts around the building have. If we allow these relics to return home, however, we will quickly have a well-stocked museum.

Besides museum experts, we've also spoken with former patients from different eras of the hospital's history. While objects from the hospital's past are clearly important to telling its story, no one does it better than those people who have actually endured time there. Each tale is fascinating, and not all of them are bleak. Our committee would like future visitors to the hospital to be able to hear recordings of these stories told in the rooms and halls where they happened. Step inside a cell, shut the door, and as you turn in the tight space (small enough to touch both walls with outstretched arms) a former patient explains what it was like.

Funding

We understand a museum of the kind we envision will cost a great deal. While there is still much work to be done on how to finance our vision, we feel the universality of the story represented here can inspire donations and grants from a wide variety of sources not directly affiliated with this hospital. We are eager to stop advocating for the building's survival and to start reaching out and researching the opportunities for its future. We need the CAC's support to continue.

A museum of this kind is bound to happen somewhere soon. Some community capable of compassion, understanding and expression will ask the rest of us to brave our darkest fears and start to heal. We feel if the enthusiasm that our petition signers and un-paid consultants have felt for this mission is harnessed, it can happen here. Instead of a dark secret buried under deluxe mansions on a hill, we can offer the world a place where the one infirmity that affects us all is discussed and explored openly and with dignity. Should we accomplish even a small part of this goal, no sum is too great