Commemorating a History of Violence

On the former site of a brutal insane asylum, the city of Lakewood commissions a striking memorial.

Photography by Mike Kane for City Arts

Recently I visited the public art installation constructed on the ruins of Western State Hospital’s Hill Ward. From 1871 to 1915, Western State was termed an “insane asylum”; after that it was renamed a “hospital.” Despite its shifting names, it became known for its terrifying, unsanitary conditions, inhumane lockup rooms and doctors determined to perfect the art of lobotomy primarily on female patients. Perhaps the hospital’s most famous inhabitant was the 1940s film star Frances Farmer, and questions about her tragic story are part of its mystery and power (see “Always in Her Shadow,” also in the July 2009 issue of Tacoma City Arts).

The Hill Ward site is in Steilacoom Park, a half mile from the main grounds of Western State. After the ward was closed in 1965, Hill Ward stood empty for decades. In the late 1980s, it was given over to local search-and-rescue-mission practice, and much of the structure was detonated by military troops simulating urban battlegrounds. In more recent years, the torn-away, crumbling walls were left alone, a cluster of eerie, half-exploded hospital rooms surrounded by fields and open to the sky.

Locals called the place “The Ruins.” For years it was the destination for unconventional explorers who found it a special, spooky place, as well as teens looking for private, moldering niches away from adult eyes. Taggers had a field day with the collapsing walls. Frances Farmer obsessives made pilgrimages to the area.

Some locals wanted the Ruins to remain as they were, but in early 2009, the City of Lakewood dismantled them, and in May they unveiled the Hill Ward Memorial.

So the Ruins have been wiped away. But the memorial itself is a resonant and important piece of public art, and one that does not shy away from the place’s dark history.

During its early years, Hill Ward residents worked at an on-site bakery, dairy and farm as part of occupational therapy. Red dairy barns, now boarded up, still stand; there’s also an off-leash dog area, playfields and a burial yard of thirty-two hundred graves. These are marked only by numbered stones — a sign of the stigma that surrounded mental illness. If you died here, you disappeared. Now a community group is working to assign names to the anonymous graves.

It is not surprising that the Ruins have been widely regarded as haunted. Members of the surrounding community have heard the terrible stories many times, stories that predate the place’s status as an insane asylum. In the mid-1800s it was a military fort; white settlers sheltered here, seeking protection from tribes that had been cheated out of their land. Tales of ambush and murder abound from that time. After the site was converted into an insane asylum, documents from the early 1900s show awful living conditions and a comparable level of murderous violence: lobotomies and the injudicious administering of experimental drugs and electroshock treatments.

The tribal wars, the embattled frontier fort, the mental hospital — clearly this is a site of deep pain and distress. So how do you “commemorate” it?

The City commissioned the Larson Casteel firm of Kingston to face this dilemma. A landscape architecture group dedicated to sustainable design, they articulated their goals on their Web site:

Remove the Hill Ward building while retaining the building’s history.

Recognize the historical significance that the building, park lands and Western State Hospital staff and patients played in the use and development of this area.

The architects retained the old, graffiti-laden stairs, half-walls, slabs and other relics from the original building. The memorial site, atop the hill, is encased by a cement rim, like a basement foundation — a plain and utilitarian look. But at the top of the old, crumbling stairs, there’s a platform where brick patterns spread out before visitors in a way that carries the eye to the horizon, as if inviting a calm, reflective gaze. There’s a lovely 360-degree view of oaks and prairie grass.

Whether the Ruins are haunted or not, talk of ghosts is always in some sense metaphoric, a way of addressing the fact that living people are disturbed and moved by a land’s strife-laden history. As one visitor described the experience several years ago: “You do feel the hairs going up on the back of your neck as you walk away. We always felt watched. Terrible things went on in that place, and you feel it! A heaviness or oppressiveness.” One chilling entry was posted online by a middle-aged man who frequented the Ruins during his high school years and remembered seeing old cane-backed wheelchairs still standing in the wreckage of the rooms.

At this time of year, blue wildflowers between the bricks shake their heads in the breeze. People come to the park to walk, jog and relax. Waughop Lake (named for a head of the insane asylum, circa 1880) is a short distance away. Lakewood resident Annie Wengeler has been to the memorial many times and has pondered it. She says, “We here in Lakewood are really aware of mental illness, because of Western State Hospital. Our mentally ill must have a safe, clean place to live. But it must be done well. I’m sure there was a lot of ignorance in the past.”

Toward the west side of the memorial is a labyrinth of paving stones in gray and pink — an ancient design concept said to suggest a journey and engender healing. On the east side a dozen old stone slabs retained from the original Ruins building lie flat, engraved with abbreviated history: “Puyallup, Nisqually, and Steilacoom Peoples lived, traveled, and traded in our area,” the first block’s engraving reads. “1776 — James Cook explored the region, looking for the Northwest Passage,” reads the second. The engraved history progresses as you move through the labyrinth. “1849 — Fort Steilacoom, first official U.S. presence north of the Columbia River, was built on this land to protect American interests,” reads the fifth stone. A small plaque at the labyrinth’s center reads: “Dedicated to all the people who lived and worked here and to future generations who will visit here.”

The history is flatly factual, yet the lines are sad. The final sentence is deceptively simple and the phrase “all the people” carries great weight. The tribal people and settlers who died in violence, the patients who could not stay at home for the prejudice and impossibility of it, most of these stories remain unwritten. In a bucolic setting, this work of public art asks us to think about the shortsighted, violent acts people and cultures commit. But the presence of the art also tells us we can learn, grow aware, progress and heal. The Hill Ward Memorial is exceptional for its understanding of the past. The art is installed upon sensitive ground. The hilltop catches the wind brilliantly. •