Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital
- Architect
- Samuel Sloan
- Style
- Neoclassical
- City
- Philadelphia, PA
The Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, better known as Kirkbride's Hospital, was a psychiatric hospital at 48th and Haverford Streets designed by Samuel Sloan and operating from its 1841 founding until 1997. Its first superintendent, Thomas Story Kirkbride, developed a more humane method of treating the mentally ill there, and the hospital's plan became a prototype copied by asylums nationwide. The surviving 1859 building, now the Kirkbride Center, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
the building
A campus, not just a building. Two large hospital structures and an elaborate pleasure ground once stretched along the north side of Market Street from 45th to 49th Streets, replacing the hospital's original crowded insane wards at 8th and Spruce Streets.
The Kirkbride plan. Thomas Story Kirkbride, the hospital's physician-in-chief, used the institution to develop and prove out a treatment method that became a prototype for asylums built across the country afterward.
the style
The surviving building is Neoclassical, though the record doesn't detail specific ornament or massing beyond that style label.
More on Neoclassicalthe architect
Samuel Sloan designed the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital; he was also the architect behind the twin mansions of Woodland Terrace elsewhere in Philadelphia, though further biographical detail isn't documented here.
significance
The surviving 1859 building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It operated as a psychiatric hospital from 1841 to 1997 and today survives as the Kirkbride Center, part of the Blackwell Human Services Campus.
nearby
- Paul Robeson House
- St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church
- Protestant Episcopal Church of the Saviour
- Woodland Terrace
- St. Anthony Hall House
- Richards Medical Research Laboratories