"We no longer have 'magic mountains,'" says Dr. Roger Christenfeld, seated on a couch in his modest office at Hudson River Psychiatric Center.  As the Center's Director of Research, Christenfeld has studied its history over the course of 10 years.  Perched on a rise where breathtaking river views foreground the Shawangunk Range, the 133 year-old institution in its Victorian heyday did partly resemble Thomas Mann's fictive International Sanatorium Berghof, a tubercular community cloistered in the Swiss Alps before the Great War that was run like a cosmopolitan resort in his novel Magic Mountain.

"The Victorian ideal was to make patients as comfortable as possible because it was a one-way ticket; they lived here and lost contact with the outside world," says Christenfeld.  "Our goal now is to return people to some semblance of normal community life as quickly as possible, and we've learned to determine how to predict and prevent the need for restraint."  Memorabilia now on display at the Hudson River Psychiatric History Museum, dedicated on May 19, 2004, illustrates the Poughkeepsie facility's evolution from cloistered "asylum" to "State Hospital for the Insane" to mental healthcare unit.

"The artifacts tell an interesting story about how public psychiatry has changed," says Christenfeld.  One of the few repositories of its kind in the United States, it encapsulates a rich history spanning three centuries.

Founded during the mid-nineteenth century - when reformers sought to separate the mentally ill from criminals and paupers - and spearheaded by Dorothea Dix, the hospital at one time served 38 counties, including New York City.  It was constructed on land acquired piecemeal by Dutchess County, including the former Hope Farm that was sold by James Roosevelt (father of Franklin Delano).  The location was selected in 1867 by a governor's commission, who distinguished it for "geographic centrality" coupled with "commanding beauty" - a formula for "salubriousness."  The grounds, which once spread over 900 acres, were designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

Until three years ago, patients were housed in a great Gothic complex of buildings, presently known as the Main Building, North Wing, and South Wing.  Designed in 1868 by Vaux, Withers, and Company, a leading architectural firm of the period, the three-part structure held a central administration office flanked by two extensive wings, each broken into male and female wards with no sightlines between them.  The population peaked in 1950 with 6,000 patients.  With the advent of biomedical treatment and a civil liberties era-inspired sense of humanity - based in the belief that patients not remain separated from communities - occupancy trends reversed, as did the need for so much residential space.  Added to the National Landmarks Registry in 1989 (and currently slated for mixed-use redevelopment), the Gothic behemoth today still towers over Route 9W across from Marist College.

Coed inpatient quarters were reestablished in 2001 on another part of the Psychiatric Center campus in the newly remodeled Ross Pavilion (opened in 1954 to house psychiatric patients with tuberculosis), also the site of Christenfeld's office.  "Visitors are surprised when they see this facility - a kind of combination of an ordinary hospital and a budget motel," the Research Director says.  Today inpatient occupancy stands at 130 with an average per-person stay of 70 days.  "Our patients are engaged hours a day in activities and psychotherapy and take appropriate medication.  When the museum opened we had a tour for our inpatients, who agreed it's a good thing - if they have to be treated - that it's now rather than 'back then.'"