It Looked Familiar: The Zeitgeist

First up, a fictitious hospital in upstate New York from a graphic novel called Seance in the Asylum:

It doesn’t particularly look like any of the mid-nineteenth-century hospitals I could find in Rochester. What it did remind me of is a project from 18 years ago, the Inebriate Asylum in Binghamton NY:

Obviously not the same building. So what triggered the association other than an upstate location? The Inebriate Asylum may be the creepiest building I have ever entered. Long abandoned when I saw it, the interiors were dark, and most of the building consists of tiny cells where the inmates patients were locked up. The gothic exterior doesn’t make it, to my taste, any cheerier. The artist for Seance, Leonardo Marcello Grassi, was going for creepy, and so that’s the connection. In broader terms, a lot of public buildings from that era were designed in a gothic revival style, were poorly lit when new, and are now at or near the end of their useful lives. It’s not that hard to find a creepy gothic building from the 1860s if you go looking for one.