I work at the VA. For the past year I’ve parked in the shadow of the old Larue D. Carter Memorial Hospital. It has been abandoned for many years but parking remained available for all who had an IUPUI sticker on their car.
I always managed to find a spot in the back corner, near the delivery entrance.
Destruction began after the first of the year to make way for the new Wishard facility. For now, I park my car in a lot that over looks the demolition.
As the bulldozers have slowly crumbled the old building, rooms have been exposed. Tile shatters. Pipes bend and break. Concrete turns to dust and blows across the parking lot, settling on the roof of my car.
Each morning, as I walk past the thinning building to my job and then each evening as I make my way back to my car, I’ve wondered about the number of patients who spent days, weeks, even month within the now crumbled walls.
Built in the 1940’s, this structure was designed to house and help the chronic and severely mentally ill patients. It served as a state asylum for nearly 60 years. Now care is provided to the patients at a rehabbed VA facility across the river.
Over time, methods of care have changed from barbaric tactics like whips and chains to new forms of medication, from the tranquilizing chair and ice baths to cognitive therapies. More people are helped today than at any time in history.
But I can’t help but wonder about the hundreds and thousands of people who suffered behind the walls of this once prominent building, as it is reduced to rubble.
