Research Notes: Place in the Institutional Setting: Patient-Constructed Buildings on the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center Campus

I can’t say for certain when I visited the St. Peter State Hospital for the first time. I was very young, probably four or five years old, and many trips to the Minnesota campus have filled my memory with a variety of broken images and associations. I remember, though, that the trees along the road were very beautiful, throwing shadows onto the asphalt. People wandered here and there, both patients and staff, going about regular hospital business. The buildings were more beautiful than any to be seen in the rest of the small town of St. Peter, and I looked on them with awe and wonder. I was particularly drawn to Old Main (Figure 1). At the time I didn’t know it had once been the center of a linear-plan hospital, designed by Samuel Sloan in the Kirkbride style, which dominated the arrangement of hospitals for the insane at the time the building was constructed in 1877 (Figure 2).¹

I was at the St. Peter State Hospital at such a young age because my mother worked on the campus for the state of Minnesota’s Cooperative Vocational Rehabilitation Program (CVRP). I would be there again, many times, to visit her at work, but I’d also go, along with my entire sixth-grade class, to play Frisbee golf on the hospital’s course. There would be birthday parties where we went to Gleuck Park, an idyllic pond amid oaks and birches set back on the hospital campus’s northwest side.

Figure 1.

Old Main building, St. Peter Regional Treatment Center, 100 Freeman Drive, St. Peter, Minnesota.

Photograph by the author, 2008.

Almost everyone who grew up in St. Peter could tell similar stories. Our interaction with the hospital (it has since been renamed the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center, or SPRTC, but townies almost always refer to it as “the hospital”) was open and flowing. The sense that the hospital was a separate institution, with boundaries of its own, was only marginal and no different from the townspeople’s engagement with Gustavus Adolphus College, which sits just to the north of it. While the hospital may have seemed strange in some ways (Gustavus and those who worked there were, perhaps, viewed as no less strange, given their differences from the rest of the community), it hardly seemed like the locale of horror that mental hospitals were, and are, so often presented to be. This, it has turned out, is because that particular analytical narrative has a history … and one that is so highly politicized that its engagement with actual places is often null.

Figure 2.

The St. Peter Hospital for the Insane, c. 1877.

Courtesy of the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center Museum.

When I was a child in the 1980s, I was hardly aware that I was living through the deinstitutionalization movement, let alone that my mother’s program, the CVRP, was a part of it. As Gerald Grob outlines in From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America, the move to deinstitutionalize resulted from a number of social and political factors, but the focus was to end institutionalization in favor of in-community care.² Although made possible starting in the early 1960s by the invention of psychotropic medications and the development of new therapy methods, the movement peaked in the 1980s. It fed on and bred the mental-hospital-as-location-of-horror narrative, presenting the institution as a noncommunity that could never offer the therapeutic effects that a real community could. At St. Peter it also resulted in the destruction of the grand wings of the linear-plan hospital in 1967, when these nineteenth-century architectural attempts at community design were no longer considered legitimate or humane. The subtraction left only the Old Main standing.

It wasn’t until recently, when I began studying the built environment of institutions and mental hospitals in particular, that I questioned my perception of the SPRTC...