Can an Institution With a Horrific Past Be Rebuilt for a Promising Future?

New York Times

17-04-2025

The Crownsville State Hospital in Maryland, once the state's most crowded psychiatric institution, has sat in decay for decades, a relic from the area's painful history during segregation.
The hospital, originally called the Hospital for the Negro Insane, opened in 1911 in a rural part of Anne Arundel County, between the coastal charm of Annapolis and the suburbs of Washington. It was a time when lawmakers and health care officials claimed to see a rise in mental illness among Black Americans, which they blamed on their freedom from slavery. Treatment there was often neglect or outright abuse, said Antonia Hylton, author of the book 'Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum.'
The hospital began to be desegregated in 1948, but the process was slow and it never lost its bleak reputation. In her book, Ms. Hylton, citing a Baltimore Sun article from 1949, wrote that 'men and women were sleeping in basement storage rooms and in sweltering attics without fire escapes,' and that children were sometimes housed in the same area as 'men who had been labeled as sex offenders.'
At its peak in the 1950s, the hospital had 2,700 patients. That number drastically declined in the second half of the 20th century as news of how they were treated became widely known and public funding for mental health treatment withered during Ronald Reagan's presidency.
Since the hospital closed more than 20 years ago, it has been an eyesore to the surrounding community, mostly Black and middle class, a reminder of the site's horrific past. A former pornographic movie actress, Traci Lords, shot a horror film there. Urban explorers and vandals also left their mark.
Local residents, government officials and community organizations spent countless hours trying to decide what to do with the property. Spread across 500 acres studded with 76 aging buildings with about one million square feet combined, the site is both an immense opportunity and a huge challenge. Such redevelopments, when done correctly, can help acknowledge painful elements of the nation's history and rebuild communities while also competing for the hundreds of millions of dollars that historical tourism can contribute to local businesses and governments.
'Preservation creates revitalized communities,' said Brent Leggs, the executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. But that work, he added, can't happen until local governments lay out a vision to attract private developers.
That vision for rebuilding is finally inching forward in Maryland. In February, Anne Arundel County, which took control of the property from the state for $1 in 2022, released a plan for a complex including mental health facilities, artist studios, a museum about the site's history, housing for older people and youths, a farm, and community gardens. Bowie State, a historically Black university in neighboring Prince George's County, signed on to provide education services for health care students.
Getting here hasn't been easy. Community members have turned down proposals including a horse park, a solar farm, and a stadium with 10,000 seats, a restaurant and a hotel. They said they didn't want the hospital turned into condominiums or a retail complex, which they say would erase its history. No matter how painful that history is, it still belongs to them, they added.
'We don't want things like pickleball, dog parks,' said Faye Belt, who grew up near the hospital.
Many residents also said they wanted to preserve the artwork that patients had painted on the walls and windowpanes. There were also questions about how to handle the 1,700 graves of patients on the site, each marked with a number but no name.
For the county's plans to become reality, the project needs an enormous amount of funding as well as a developer who is willing to take on the risks of a project with multiple stakeholder interests and decrepit buildings and structures.
Although the Maryland legislature approved a plan to devote about $30 million to begin rehabilitating Crownsville, that is less than half the $67 million planners hired by Anne Arundel County estimated it would cost to add sidewalks, benches, a playground, athletic fields and trails to the property. They also estimated it would cost an additional $140 million to restore nine of Crownsville's main buildings.
About $4.6 million in federal funds has also been committed to the redevelopment. But in a Trump administration that has frozen — and sometimes rescinded — trillions of dollars of federal grants and loans, programs that help fund redevelopments like Crownsville could be cast aside.
Steuart Pittman Jr., the chief executive of Anne Arundel County, who is overseeing the rebuilding, said he wasn't worried. 'It's not a partisan sort of project,' he said, adding that while there are 'new decision makers in Washington, this is local and state.'
Rebuilding will require repairing badly damaged sewer and water lines, restoring electrical service and clearing asbestos from building walls. The grounds are overgrown, the roadways' asphalt is cracked and some buildings have collapsed.
'You have to find a private developer with deep pockets and long vision who can do it — and that's hard,' said Jean Carroon, an adaptive reuse expert at Goody Clancy, a Boston architecture firm. She estimated that rebuilding Crownsville could easily cost $1,000 a square foot. County planners have a more conservative estimate of $250 to $650 a square foot.
During one recent visit, the property had the feeling of a neglected college campus. Buildings were littered with glass shards and paint was peeling from walls. Old signage like 'Medical Records' and 'Restraint/Seclusion Template' were still visible. At the sound of feet approaching, a raccoon scrambled into the undergrowth.
There was 'lots of vandalism and lots of deterioration,' Mr. Pittman said.
Seri Worden, a senior director of preservation programs at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said bringing the site back to life would be 'a monumental undertaking.'
Efforts to preserve sites that are integral to Black Americans' past are sensitive undertakings. At a town-hall meeting last year about the Crownsville project, Candace Grant, a member of the American Descendants of Slavery Advocacy Foundation, said real estate had often been used to efface Black history, according to an article by The Capital Gazette, an Annapolis newspaper. Ms. Grant pointed to slum clearance in the 1930s and urban redevelopment in the 1960s, the article said, when Black neighborhoods made way for high-rises, freeways and cultural landmarks like Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
'We turn unmarked gravesites into city parks and bike trails,' she said. 'We turn empty lots into retail shopping centers and office space no matter what bones lie underneath.'
Across the country, other projects intending to preserve the physical testaments to Black history are advancing. Accelerate Memphis, a City Hall initiative backed by a $200 million municipal bond issue, aims to invest in projects across that city, including the restoration of Melrose High School, a 1938 complex in the historically Black neighborhood of Orange Mound. In other examples, Philadelphia's Odin Properties turned the nation's first Black-owned department store into 47 apartments, and a building in Turkey Creek, a community in Gulfport, Miss., settled by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, was renovated for $450,000.
The complex in Maryland trumps these projects in size and scope. But by the time Mr. Pittman leaves office next year, he said, 'people will start to see the park come to life.'