Following up on my previous Found & Chosen post, I found these letters over the course of several days’ walking. I’ve deducted that these were thrown away by contractors renovating an old house, and they must have blown out of a dumpster. I’ve obscured the corresponder’s names.
These scraps stirred my imagination, and I toyed with scripting them into an animation – both, literally read, and loosely based upon the content of these papers. I didn’t get anywhere interesting, so I’ll shelve the idea for now. The actual papers went into a time capsule my girlfriend made to archive the pandemic time in our life.
I find the following letters very intriguing!
Water based ink from a fountain pen, inspirational quotes, and a lost tobacco pouch. Love AND Joy.
I learned this about the Hudson River State Hospital.
The Hudson River State Hospital, is a former New York state psychiatric hospital which operated from 1873 until its closure in the early 2000s. The campus is notable for its main building, known as a “Kirkbride,” which has been designated a National Historic Landmark due to its exemplary High Victorian Gothic architecture, the first use of that style for an American institutional building. It is located on US 9 on the Poughkeepsie-Hyde Park town line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_State_Hospital
The entire facility was built over the last three decades of the 19th century, at great cost. Once complete, it would be used as intended for much of the first half of the next century. As psychiatry moved away from inpatient treatments, it began to decline in use until its closure at century’s end. Today, it is slowly deteriorating out of public view as it awaits reuse.
There are fantastic photos of the hospital in various states of ruin – I’m not going to link to any sites, but a Google search will show wonderful photos.