Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane was established in 1885 out of demand for a third psychiatric hospital in Michigan. Under the supervision of prominent architect Gordon W. Lloyd, the first building, known as Building 50, was constructed in Victorian-Italianate style according to the Kirkbride Plan.

The site chosen for the hospital included a mix of farmland and high-rolling hills of forest overlooking the city to the east. The famous spires of Building 50 can be seen poking through trees from far away.

Under Dr. James Decker Munson, the first superintendent from 1885 to 1924, the institution expanded. Twelve housing cottages and two infirmaries were built between 1887 and 1903 to meet the specific needs of male and female patients. All of the cottages except the northernmost are still standing.

Long before the advent of drug therapy in the 1950s, the asylum practiced a “beauty is therapy” philosophy. Patients were treated through kindness, comfort, pleasure, and beauty. Indoors, patients enjoyed flowers provided year-round by the asylum’s own greenhouses. Outdoors, less acute patients were able to walk among the variety of trees Munson planted on the grounds. Restraints, such as the straitjacket, were forbidden.

The Kirkbride Plan made use of efficient natural lighting, which allowed healthy amounts of daylight to pour into spaces within the asylum. Even in the 1880s, doctors knew the importance of sunlight, using it as a therapeutic tool.

The therapeutic nature of colors were understood and used since the early days of asylums. Rooms were painted soothing greens and blues to calm patients and staff, while yellows and oranges were used to encourage excitement and revitalization.

Art was freely used to help patients channel and express their feelings and frustrations. Positive feelings were celebrated and shared through the painting of murals.

With the increasing success of drug therapies in the 1970s, many mental patients improved sufficiently that by the latter half of the decade the Kirkbride and the other Victorian buildings were vacant. This, in addition to changes in mental health care philosophy, the decline of institutionalization, and cuts in funding, forced the closure of the Traverse City Regional Psychiatric Hospital in 1989, with a loss of over 200 jobs to the local economy.