This has been one of my favorite places over the years. For a while it seemed like a lot of people were getting in trouble coming here and then something changed and after that it became very popular. I've heard it is going to be demolished soon so I've been paying it a visit every now and then to see if its still there.
1. A modern high rise towers over the tangles of bitter sweet
2. The building I find the most interesting is at the back of the property. It is also the oldest building. It was built with large, glass enclosed porches (now gone) that cut into the front slope of the roof almost all the way up to the peak. An early manual for the design of sanatoria describes this style of building, but I can't think of any intact examples beside this one.
3. A glazed terracotta relief is built into the front entry. The building was built to house children, but I still find this thing quite odd. Like its referencing a fairy tale I never heard of.
4. Here is one of the porches, but the glass is all gone and I think it has been for a long time
5. A very unusual machine waits inside the central pavilion. I've heard it worked like an artificial solarium. Strings of ultraviolet lamps hung from the middle hoping to isolate the tuberculosis fighting properties of natural light. For reference:
https://opacity.us/image2654_alien.htm 6. A series of tubes, which were part of some kind of ventilation system, runs along the edge of the disk.
7. The tubes correspond to a ring-shaped duct in the attic
8. Hallway
9. The only part of the building that looked like it had been used at all in the past sixty years was at the very back. There were a few rooms that look like they were used as a lab for researching mosquitoes and mosquito born pathogens
10. Forms for surveying mosquito populations
11. A smaller ward, which may have been for the very sick
12. I remember reading an article a while back about an old woman in town recounting her time at the sanatorium. She said her window looked out a short distance toward the morgue and at night, when the lights were turned on inside, she saw horrible things. The morgue is gone, but I looked it up on a site plan and it must have been one of these windows she used to look out of
13. Bathroom
14. Open ward
15. Nurses station
16. Last look
This next set of pictures are from the 1950's era medical building standing at the front of the property. Some years back, all the iron lungs inside disappeared and the morgue has gone down hill too, so I thought I would take the opportunity to post some older photos of the place.
17. The world famous 'bone stretcher'
18. Its for x-rays, but I don't know the name for it
19. X-ray
20. Here are the iron lungs. They seem rare now, but up until a few years ago there were still some people who used these old Emerson models
21.
22.
23. If the power went out, they had to be manually operated
24. Inside
25. Windows
26. Morgue coolers. Two double-stack, side by side
27. Slab
28. Basin, with elbow controls
Thanks for looking!
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