Traverse City State Hospital

In this episode, Mike dives into the deep and fascinating history of one of Traverse City’s most iconic landmarks: the Traverse City State Hospital, also known historically as the Northern Michigan Asylum and the Traverse City Regional Psychiatric Hospital.

Recorded on November 28, 2025 (yes, Black Friday—no, he’s not out shopping), Mike shares personal stories, local history, and some memories connected to the vast and beautiful grounds of what is now called the Village at Grand Traverse Commons.

What Mike Covers in This Episode

🏥 A Brief History of the State Hospital

• Established in 1881 and opened in 1885.

• Founded by Dr. James Decker Munson, namesake of Munson Healthcare, alongside Traverse City’s “father,” Perry Hanna.

• Built as a Kirkbride Plan psychiatric hospital—one of four in Michigan and the only one still standing and in active use today (though no longer as a hospital).

🏛️ Architecture & Design

• Beautiful Victorian-style buildings with spires, long wings, wide porches, and landscaped grounds.

• Built on the idea of beauty, light, and nature aiding psychiatric healing.

• Gorgeous gardens supported by on-site greenhouses that provided year-round flowers.

🌳 A Self-Sustaining Community

• The hospital operated as its own little world:

  • Farms with cattle, pigs, chickens, crops, and orchards

  • Their own power plant

  • Workshops and barns (now part of Historic Barns Park)

• Many patients (or “clients,” as some staff called them) worked on the grounds as part of daily life.

👨‍⚕️ Mike’s Personal Connections

• Both of Mike’s paternal grandparents worked there—his grandmother as an RN and his grandfather as an orderly.

• He shares memories of neighbors and relatives who worked on the hospital farm and grounds.

• He also reminisces about staying as a kid in the Perry Hanna House (now a funeral home)—a mansion connected to the founders of the hospital.

🏚️ Abandonment and Renewal

• After closing in the late 20th century, some buildings fell into disrepair.

• Today, Building 50 has been reborn with:

  • Condos and apartments

  • Offices

  • Shops, galleries, and restaurants in the lower level, known as The Grotto

• Other “cottages” are slowly being restored, while tours still visit the untouched and eerie sections.

🚶 Ghost Stories, Tunnels & Tours

• The site is rich with lore—including tunnels connecting buildings.

• Mike mentions wanting to have his friend Chris (a local historian and photographer) on the podcast to go deeper into the legends, stories, and details.

☕ Coffee Deliveries at Sunrise

Mike also shares a personal memory of delivering bagels to Cup of Joe in Building 50’s grotto back when his wife ran a bagel shop—always grabbing a cup of coffee around 5:30 a.m.

🌄 A Landmark on the Hill

• As you drive into Traverse City from the south (US-31 / M-37), the spires of Building 50 rise out of the trees—a recognizable introduction to town.

Ἱ

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Whatever the
case may be. This is Mike, and this
is Mike Dells world number
three no. Is it 434?
That was a hard number for some reason.
But, anyway, 434.
This is, 11/28/2025.

(00:22):
Yeah. I always had to think about that
date.
This is,
was it Panic Friday? No. Black Friday.
Well, yeah, I'm not gonna be out shopping.
Believe me.
I got enough other things to do.
Actually, I've got some website work to do
for
a client slash friend of mine.

(00:43):
Not work related, but
separate from work. But, today, we're gonna talk
about the Traverse City State Hospital, otherwise known
as the Northern Michigan Asylum
or and the Traverse City Regional Psychiatric Hospital.
And this
complex and I and I I won't call

(01:03):
it a building because it's several buildings. It's
a huge campus,
kind of on the West Side of town,
you know, near our medical hospital
and a big nursing home. So it's kinda
that side of town's always been medically
related.
The state hospital was established

(01:25):
in Traverse City in 1881.
That's a long time ago.
That was established by
James Decker Munson, who is also the
the
namesake for the, Munson Healthcare
System, which is our main medical hospital system
around here,

(01:45):
and also Perry Hanna. Perry Hanna is well
known as the
the,
father of Traverse City, and he had a
big store downtown,
the Hannah Lay
Mercantile
store, and, he built a really cool mansion
who's it's which is owned by a friend

(02:06):
of mine now. It's a funeral home, but
a huge,
you know, mansion, the, Perry Hanna House on
6th Street, now, the Zhongkoff
Funeral Home.
But a beautiful old building.
When we were kids,
used to used to stay in that building
once in a while. They had the living

(02:27):
quarters upstairs from the funeral home, which is
on the Main Floor
and
used to
stay over there and explore that house and
now they give kind of tours of it.
Nobody lives there anymore, but
and they're still running the business out of
there for sure.
It's like one of the largest funeral home
in the area.

(02:48):
So but anyway, then I digress. The State
Hospital,
like I said, was established in 1881
It opened up, in 1885,
and it was
a self sustaining,
community.
The
the people that ran that,
you know, was,

(03:09):
you know, psychiatric
care,
with beauty, you know, involved because the buildings
are just
beautiful Victorian
buildings. The main building, Building 50,
everybody calls it. And that's still standing and
it's been
reused
for various things, but

(03:29):
I'll get to that.
But back in the day, that was, you
know, one of the big regional
psychiatric
hospitals, state hospitals,
mental hospitals. I don't know. They had a
whole bunch of
of, you know, euphemisms
for it, but it was a place where
people with psychiatric problems could could go, and

(03:49):
and they had a pretty good record of
of healing people,
you know, at least in the early
part of it in the in, you know,
the middle in the sixties,
fifties, forties,
whatever.
My grandparents, both my dad's folks,
were
employees out there. My grandmother was an RN,

(04:10):
registered nurse, and my grandfather was, I guess,
called an orderly, but,
you know, he would
he was in charge of whatever ward he
was on and, you know, it became like
a big family in a lot of cases.
I mean, they did a lot of crazy
stuff too, like,
you know, like, mental hospitals do, but
these were one of the more humane ones.

(04:33):
And it's an old Kubrick building.
Kubrick. Am I
saying that properly?
But,
yeah, the whole
thing,
was predicated on, you know, kindness, comfort, pleasure
with beautiful
flowers provided year round
by their own greenhouses.

(04:54):
They had,
you know, the beautiful wooded grounds. They had
a farm. You know, there's
a part of the state hospital complex was,
what's now called the historic Barnes Park, and
there's a couple of big old barns there.
And, one of them, they got all fixed
up to,
you know, be like a wedding venue and,
you know, or a party venue

(05:16):
and all that. In fact, they went to
a reception,
in the barns
a couple summers ago,
and it's, it's, you know, really nice, you
know, in that whole area.
They had farmers.
One of our neighbors when he was a
kid,
he was a farmer at the state hospital
and, you know, and he had all the

(05:36):
the patients and or, you know, my my
cousin also worked there and he always called
them clients.
But, you know, they had a lot of
the patients,
you know, helping with the farm. They grew
their own food. They had, you know, cattle.
They had
pigs and chickens and eggs and, you know,
plus crops and everything. So a lot of
what the

(05:57):
state hospital residents
ate came right off of that property,
and it was definitely,
you know,
pretty self sustaining. They had their own power
plant.
That building is still there. All the windows
are knocked out of it, but the building's
still there. And they are still renovating some
of the what they call cottages, but these

(06:18):
were, like, three story
barracks buildings, but kind of Victorian style. They're
really neat. Big porches
and all that.
But, they've reused a lot of Building 50.
The whole bottom floor
is kind of this winding,
you know,
almost like a maze of

(06:40):
of corridors,
and they have little stores down there, kinda
like a mall sort of thing. They have
a couple restaurants down there. They call it
the grotto.
And, you know, a lot of, little small
shops are set up in there. And, you
know, it's it's really, you know, it's not
fixed up to modern specs. It's fixed up,
to,

(07:01):
you know, 1900 early nineteen hundred specs, you
know. Of course, they have lights and everything,
but
still it's it's pretty cool.
The upper Floors of Building 50 have been
turned into condos and apartments
and a lot of the outlying areas on
the on the 1st And 2nd Floor, not
the Bottom Floor, which was more of a

(07:22):
basement y type thing,
are, office space. So a lot of
people rent, you know, one office or a
little suite of offices for various business endeavors
and
and all that.
So, you know, it's just a lot of
stuff going on there, and they've, you know,
really maintained that building pretty well.
And some of the cottages as well, they've

(07:44):
maintained pretty well, and then some of them,
not so much.
But they're still standing, they're still solid and
we'll get to them eventually.
But the the whole place now is called
the the village at Grand Traverse Con,
Grand Traverse Commons
And, yeah, Kirkbride.
That's, that's the word I was looking for,

(08:06):
not Kirkby. Kirkbride.
And
that's, there was four of those Kirkbride,
buildings in Michigan.
Traverse City was just one of them, but
but it was the
actually, I think it's the newest one, and
I think it's the only one still
in use.
Not as a psychiatric

(08:26):
hospital, but as a,
you know,
as anything. You know? I don't know. There
was I think there was one in Kalamazoo.
Where yeah. Here. Let me look here. I'm
kinda flipping through my data sheet here.
But there was, yeah, there was four of
them,

(08:49):
in Michigan,
and I don't remember.
I can't find in here where it where
it says where the other ones are. But
I know there was one in Kalamazoo.
I'm guessing there was one somewhere in the
Detroit area.
But, again, it's kind of the
the last of those buildings that's still kind

(09:12):
of, in its original form.
They did remodel the main entrance a little
bit and modernized it a little bit,
all that. And, you know, I got a,
a listener. I know
Chris is probably listening to this with
in writing notes to, to tell me, how
wrong I am or to tell me more

(09:33):
or more information.
I keep meaning to get him on the
microphone here to, tell all about the state
hospital. He was he's, pretty into the history
of it and does a lot of photography
around it. They do still give tours
of,
the state hospital and, you know, in some
of the areas that haven't been restored.

(09:55):
There's
I guess it's not rumors. There's tunnels that
kinda go between some of the buildings. And,
again, you know, when I get Chris on
here, I'll, I'll let him
talk about,
in much more detail,
but it's a neat old place.
Used to, for a little while when my

(10:16):
wife was running a bagel shop, I used
to deliver bagels over there to a coffee
shop at the Grotto
called Cup O Joe. There's a couple of
local coffee shops called Cup O Joe,
but, that that's one of them in the
in the state hospital
grotto.
And I used to deliver deliver bagels there
and always got a cup of coffee because

(10:37):
they had good coffee.
And,
it I'd be there about 05:30 in the
morning.
Hey. Gotta get there early.
But,
anyway, it's,
it's it's pretty
pretty impressive building. As you drive into Traverse
City, you know, Traverse City is down in

(10:58):
a bowl,
and if you're coming in from the South,
which most people do, they come in
on M 37
US 31,
and as you come over the hill, as
you start into town,
if you look a little to your left
over in the trees, you'll see all the
spires
sticking up from Building 50 and other buildings

(11:19):
around the State Hospital Grounds or Grand Traverse
Commons.
Anyway,
so that gives you kind of a little
overview. I'll, I'll throw a picture of the
Building 50 in the in the show notes
over at mikedell.com.
And, hey, we got a couple more episodes
to go.
Tomorrow,
I'm gonna talk about why podcasting is so

(11:41):
special.
And, then I got a special
last episode for Napod Pomo coming
on the thirtieth, which I believe is Sunday.
So
catch me tomorrow.