Today where Central Market, North and Gables Central Park Austin , as well as Austin heart Hospital are all on the location that used to be the Texas State Hospital. They are very haunted locations.
Once refered to as the State Lunatyci Assylum has as complicated a history as does mental health awareness. The one remaining original building still has in the basement the solitary confinment rooms with only three holes drilled through the solid steel door.
This is an article that was written in 1970 about the destruction of the buildings that would pave the way for these future structures.
Old Hospital Buildings to fall by Gail Reeves.
Three of the oldest buildings in the Austin State Hospital grounds are due to be torn down this month, but there’s no move on to save them.
Along with some 20 odd other buildings which have gotten the ax over the past seven years, these aren’t the type many people will miss.
Demolition of the ”Old Ward K”, built in 1889, the ”Barber Shop”, built in 1925, and another small hut at the hospital will mark the completion of a long needed phase of the hospital’s master plan. The three buildings are the last currently slated for destruction, leaving only the main administration building. And one completely renovated ward building built before 1940. ”This will put all the buildings well within the modern range”, said state hospital official Dave Mccormick.
Removal of the structures will allow hospitals to open up the center of the campus to pedestrian traffic and walkways, and to close the grounds to all but peripheral vehicular traffic, Mccormick said. The move will allow the grounds to recapture some of the Park like atmosphere, which used to surround the hospital before structures proliferated to fill most of the land.
The main administration building, authorized by the Legislature in 1857 and completed in 1860., was the first structure built when the state founded its first mental hospital. At a time when such hospitals were regarded with some trepidation by communities, the hospital was built in what was then the countryside, far from town, on grounds that included a small lake and a sizable deer population.
More from the Original Austin Ghost Tours
Among the buildings which have been demolished in the past decade are several which provided apartments for the hospital workers.
As late as the 1950s, some employees still lived on the grounds, and many individual houses of different hospital officials have been torn down through the years to make way for new construction. As with ward K, some of the oldest were the last to go, including the Wing Wards, built before the onset of electricity, which were demolished in 1974. The wing wards, as the name suggests, were built as wings to the main administration building, connected to it by RAMPS. Word K and other now gone buildings included porches where, in crowded times, patients slept even in the winter.
New, buildings have replaced the old wards,
of course, the newest being four new ward buildings built in 1973, and there is a new Chapel. We were so glad to see some of those old monsters go, said Paula Womack, State Hospital public information officer. ”There was no way you could have good programs in some of the old buildings. The new ones are much more cheerful and easier to adapt”.
