Bull Street: A Century Inside the Asylum

In eighteen twenty-one, South Carolina opened one of the first public mental hospitals established in the United States. They called it the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, and they placed it on Bull Street, northeast of the city's commercial center.

The first building, now called the Mills Building, was designed by Robert Mills, the same architect who designed the Maxcy Monument on the Horseshoe and later the Washington Monument in Washington. It is a National Historic Landmark. By the late eighteen fifties, the facility had grown beyond that first structure, and a second massive building was constructed. The Babcock Building, a sprawling Renaissance Revival structure begun in eighteen fifty-eight and expanded into the early twentieth century, became the face of the institution.

At its peak, the South Carolina State Hospital, as it was later renamed, housed more than five thousand patients. It operated nursing programs, farms, and workshops. It was a self-contained world on one hundred and eighty-one acres inside a city.

What also happened there, throughout those decades, was the confinement of people under conditions that modern psychiatric understanding would consider harmful. Patients with limited civil rights were held, sometimes for life, in circumstances that varied greatly depending on race, economic status, and era.

The hospital began a long decline in the second half of the twentieth century as the national deinstitutionalization movement shifted mental health care to community settings. It closed in the late nineteen nineties.

The campus sat largely vacant for more than a decade. Then in twenty fifteen, a redevelopment project called BullStreet District broke ground. A professional baseball stadium went up first. Apartments, restaurants, offices, and eventually a new University of South Carolina medical school followed. The Babcock Building, damaged by a fire in twenty twenty, is being converted into apartments.

One hundred and eighty-one acres of institutional history, slowly becoming something else.