For our history of Morningside Heights, I have chosen to concentrate on the Bloomingdale Asylum, which is interesting for a number of reasons. From its establishment in the Heights until well into the 19th century, it was the single most prominent landmark in the area, occupying the high ground that is today Columbia’s campus.
For a number of years, buildings of the Bloomingdale remained alongside the University’s, and one of them, now known as Buell Hall, is still standing today. The Bloomingdale was also an important and interesting institution in its own right. It was one of the best known mental hospitals in America, and its name served as an emblem for all mental hospitals, much the way the terms “Bedlam,” “Charenton,” or “Bellevue” have functioned in other times and places.
Like all such institutions, its history was a checkered one: on the one hand, some literature hails its humane modern methods, while other writers point to the inevitable abuses that were likely to occur in and around such a facility. Modern and postmodern scholarship has become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which institutions of involuntary incarceration and definitions of mental illness have functioned as expressions of deeper societal and cultural issues, and so it is surprising, perhaps, that the Bloomingdale has not yet been the subject of a contemporary monograph. I hope in this project to bring together the materials that some researcher might want to use for just such a study.
