A new meeting hall opens in Traverse City this week, one that’s nearly 130 years old. The new room at the Village at Grand Traverse Commons was once the chapel for the Northern Michigan Asylum.
For asylums built in the late 1800s, the chapel was a focal point for community life. In Traverse City, the chapel is connected to the center of the largest building on the campus, Building 50, where many patients once lived.
The hospital closed in 1989. The Minervini Group has been renovating these buildings since 2000, filling them with homes, offices and shops.
Raymond Minervini says the chapel was a social crossroads at the heart of the hospital.
“We have photographs of them having costume parties and different activities, integrating the patients and the staff in different events,” he says.
Those events would take place under a vaulted ceiling that reaches higher than 30 feet, making room for stained glass windows that extend much of that distance.
All that was covered up when the chapel was turned into a library in the middle of the last century. A drop ceiling was installed, and Raymond Minervini says many of the ornate details in the ceiling were destroyed in the process.
“Once the hospital was closed and they stopped maintaining it, then the water did it’s own damage on top of that,” he says. “This building was really quite a mess.”
The Minervini Group has been restoring the space to look basically like it did when it was built. The stain glass windows were largely intact, and there is enough historic information to approximate all the trim and plaster detail.
These ornate features are reminders of what was once the most elegant portion of the asylum: the central administration building. To get to the chapel, visitors would pass through that space, the most impressive on the campus.
“There was a grand staircase that brought you to this floor from a grand reception lobby at the front door of the administration building,” says Minervini.
The administration building was torn down in the '60s and replaced with a short, square office building that makes little if, any, impression.
Raymond’s father Ray Minervini says there just wasn’t much interest in old buildings in those days, and the officials in charge of the state hospital wanted a new modern office building.
“Their claim was that it wasn’t a safe building from a fire code perspective,” he says.
The Minervinis are grateful that the chapel was left standing. Now that it has been restored, the space will have a new name, Kirkbride Hall, in honor of Thomas Kirkbride. He was a physician from Pennsylvania whose ideas about caring for people with mental illnesses led to the construction of asylums like the one in Traverse City.
The Minervinis hope to keep the hall busy with events like weddings, concerts and community meetings. They hope Kirkbride Hall will have an impact like the State Theatre has had on downtown Traverse City, bringing people who will visit the merchants on the lower level of Building 50.
