Night at the Asylum

That’s because before it was a hotel, it was the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, opened in 1880 on 203 acres of farmland (now trimmed to 42). The building was the work of architect Henry Hobson Richardson, working alongside landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, essentially the Avengers of 19th century American design. Olmsted and Vaux had already designed Central Park before turning their attention to Buffalo, and Richardson would go on to be named part of “the recognized trinity of American architecture,” alongside Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The design wasn’t just handsome, it was meant to heal. Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, whose namesake plan shaped the asylum’s layout, believed the building itself could have a curative effect on the people inside it, calling it “a special apparatus for the care of lunacy.” His staggered “bat wing” wards were angled to maximize sunlight and airflow through the corridors, on the theory that light and ventilation aided in treating mental illness. It was a radical idea for its time. Kirkbride was among the first to treat mental illness as something curable, rather than something to simply lock away.

The asylum operated for nearly a century, its patient population peaking at 2,766 in 1950, before the last patients moved out in 1974. Its twin towers, capped in copper since a 1918 re-roofing that replaced the original clay tile, have loomed over the property (and occasionally over Hollywood productions, including 1984’s “The Natural” with Robert Redford) ever since.

After decades of dormancy, and a stint as Hotel Henry from 2017 to 2021, the building reopened in March 2023 as the Richardson Hotel, its 88 rooms tucked into the central administration building and two adjacent wards, still dwarfed by those verdigris-roofed towers. The floors still don’t always connect. The Richardson was built to treat the mind. These days, it settles for treating guests to a good night’s sleep, so long as they remember which wing they’re staying in.