Formerly-abandoned asylum was once a state run hospital focusing on ‘moral treatment,’ Michigan’s The Village at Grand Traverse Commons is now a sprawling adaptive use project
Written content by Sarah Bence via Road Trippers (From October 30th 2020)
Catherine Goodwin and I are walking the grounds of The Village at Grand Traverse Commons, a sprawling complex of pale yellow buildings with red spires in Traverse City, Michigan. Dusk is closing in, and the air is brisk. I pull my sweater tighter, expecting a chill not due to the weather, but to the history of the place where we’re walking.
“This was the last morgue,” Goodwin says as she points to a bustling Italian restaurant.
While The Commons is now a thriving community of apartments, shops, and restaurants, it was originally a state run asylum.
Once as ubiquitous as regular hospitals, asylums are now a well-known horror trope. So, when I booked an evening tour of The Commons, including its still-abandoned men’s ward, I expected chilling ghost stories.
So far, though, I’m having quite the opposite experience. Couples stroll the grounds hand in hand. A woman walking her poodle stops for me to pet it. And Goodwin, my guide, is cheerful and chatty. But with the mention of the morgue, the asynchrony with the calm evening around us becomes jarring.
Beauty is therapy
The Northern Michigan Asylum, later called the Traverse City State Hospital, opened in 1885, six decades before psychiatric drugs were first used. It provided mental healthcare for 104 years before it closed in 1989.
Asylums of that era abound with eeriness, but it’s arguably less due to ghosts and more to the very real horrific history of mental health care during the time. It was not unusual for mentally ill patients in the turn of the 20th century to be tortured in the name of “treatment.”
The Northern Michigan Asylum was different, though, and perhaps that’s why I don’t feel any chills as I walk the grounds of its present day iteration as The Commons. Read more from Road Trippers.
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