The Artful Engineer

One of the more interesting places I visited in Traverse City, Michigan, is the site of the old Traverse City State Hospital (originally known as the Northern Michigan Asylum) which operated for over a century from 1885 until 1989. After sitting abandoned for over a decade, the site began to be redeveloped into the Village at Grand Traverse Commons. (The link is worth clicking to see nice aerial views of the beautiful complex.) When I went to photograph it, I was intending to photograph all the spectacular buildings with the pretty red spires, like the one visible above, but quickly got distracted by the buildings that were still waiting their turn to be renovated, like the one below. In the end, I barely photographed the nicer buildings at all. Something to backfill next time.

1989 isn’t really that long ago, so some of these buildings must have been in really bad shape when the hospital closed. They have obviously made an attempt to keep water damage inside from getting any worse on this next building. I’m not sure who has the harder job here, the future roofer or the future gardener:

I was pretty surprised by how badly the brick and concrete is crumbling away on this next building. Perhaps freeze-thaw cycles of water intruding into cracks is doing all this damage. It does make for nice textures, although a little more direct light would bring that out better. As it is, I had to push it in post-processing and I fear I may have gone a little far with the grungy look:

In addition to the primary buildings, what I assume was the old central steam plant for the complex was still standing. Indoor graffiti notwithstanding, it was pretty clear they didn’t want you inside:

The building was next to a steep grass-covered slope, so I was able to stand even with the following upper floor window. There were lots of interesting things inside this and other windows, but I think this is the view I am happiest with. It’s a three-image focus merge: I took one image focused on the window itself and two others focused inside. The lower right area, being the brightest and the most colorful, is the main draw for the eye, but there are other bits visible inside, too.

This next image exploits the blue sky to highlight the broken glass. The result is a very different take on broken windows than the previous image; here the subject is the windows, not what’s inside.

I also liked these old chimneys and vents protruding above the edge of the roof. They have nice textures and graphic shapes. The resulting image is very unlike the others in this set, so I included it for variety.

Despite the fact that I primarily photographed the not-yet-renovated areas, the ones that have been renovated are wonderful and next time I visit the area I will definitely make an effort to photograph them. I have also learned that they offer tours inside some of the buildings (and steam tunnels!) that I will definitely take advantage of. It is really nice when neat buildings like this don’t get bulldozed, so kudos to the people with the vision and wherewithal to give this place a new life.

I hope you enjoyed looking at these images. Next week I plan to wrap up Michigan before moving on to Colorado for a few weeks.

If you would like to get these weekly posts as an email every Saturday evening (Colorado time) please subscribe below. And if you know anyone who would appreciate my photography and commentary, please let them know about my blog. Thanks!