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.
19th century New York had opened what has since become
Utica Psychiatric Center in 1843, the first state-run institution for the
mentally ill. By the
Civil War it was reaching its capacity, so in 1866 then
Governor Reuben Fenton appointed a five-member state commission to look for a site for a second hospital in the
Hudson Valley between
New York and
Albany, to serve New York City and the counties of Eastern New York. In January of the following year the members reported to the governor that they had temporarily secured a tract of land overlooking the
Hudson River north of Poughkeepsie, formerly part of the
estates of
James Roosevelt and William A. Davis. It would cost nothing as the citizens of
Dutchess County would be offering it to the state as a gift. Two months later, the state accepted. A nine-member Board of Managers was created and appointed to initiate and oversee construction of the actual building. They chose architect
Frederick Clarke Withers to design a building according to the
Kirkbride Plan, then a popular theory for the design of mental institutions. Withers planned a building 1,500 feet (457 m) in length and over 500,000 square feet (45,000 m2) in area, most of it two wings that would house patients. The two wings, designed to hold 300 patients of either sex, were divided by a
chapel placed between them in the yard behind the administration building so that patients could not see into the rooms of the opposite sex. The building and landscape plan were meant to aid in patients' recovery, by giving them adequate space and privacy and imbuing their healing with a sense of grandeur. Construction began in 1868, with the cost estimated at $800,000. Cost-saving measures included the construction of a new dock on the Hudson so that building materials could be shipped more directly to the site,
quarrying and cutting the
foundation stones on site, mixing
concrete from local materials and hiring local craftsmen instead of a
general contractor.
Spending controversies and delays Despite the efforts to save money, the board was slightly over the $100,000 it had expected to spend that year, according to its first
annual report. Buildings continued to be opened and reopened in the 20th century, and as late as 1952 the institution was treating as many as 6,000 patients. The state offices of Mental Health and
Historic Preservation clashed over a plan to demolish the wings, even after the
National Historic Landmark designation in 1989. In the 1990s, more and more of the hospital site would be abandoned as its services were needed less and less. It was consolidated with another Dutchess County mental hospital,
Hudson River Psychiatric Center, in 1994 and closed in 2003. The center moved operations into a much smaller building nearby, Ross Pavilion, located on a hilltop on the east side of Rt 9G. ==2000s==