Their very names—Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Alabama Insane Hospital—conjure images of dark, dank psychiatric snake pits. The buildings, long abandoned, litter the American suburbs as enormous, dilapidated and graffitied relics of a failed 19th-century mental health system that the country is eager to forget. So why would people clamor to save…
