Disclaimer: Don’t go to Glenn Dale. Aside from the obvious dangers – structural integrity, squatters, etc. – it’s also illegal. The grounds are patrolled regularly by police, and they will issue you a citation for criminal trespassing without hesitation. Seriously: don’t go.
I first heard of Glenn Dale – a massive, abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium – when I moved to D.C. in 2007.
I heard about “The Goatman,” a half human, half goat lab-experiment-gone-wrong, said to have emerged from a hellmouth in Bowie. He roams the woods around the hospital. Right.
And wasn’t the hospital converted into an insane asylum in the ’70s, with the patients murdering the entire staff and taking over the building? No.
And there was the massive TB outbreak in the ’60s that caused the staff to lock all the doors and leave the patients to die, wasn’t there?
Only recently did I find the time to visit, to wander through the campus and its history.
In 1930, when TB was often fatal and D.C. was particularly hard-hit, the District built Glenn Dale Sanatorium, one of the largest TB hospitals anywhere in the country. Its location – 15 miles from the Capitol – seemed a perfect balance between isolation and accessibility (both the Defense Highway and the railway – the Washington, Baltimore & Annapolis – were nearby.)
Local architectural legend Nathan C. Wyeth designed many of the buildings in a mix of Colonial Revival and Georgian. Wyeth had also done the Key Bridge, The Oval Office, and a number of other municipal and federal buildings in the area.
First to become operational (1933) were the nurses’ quarters and children’s building. In fact the first patients were children, mostly from poor D.C. families. Paying cases were accepted, but only after the indigent were taken care of. It was a progressive mode of thought for the racially and economically segregated D.C. of the 1930s, but one forced upon its residents by the danger of a spreading disease.
The hospital took in an initial 150 patients – more, when Congress authorized funds to expand the children’s ward. Adults, too, began to be admitted, and by 1936 there was a new building for them, the largest one on the compound.
Quarantine and exposure to sunlight and fresh air were two preferred treatments for TB, and you can see that in the design of both of the hospital wards at Glenn Dale. Nearly every floor has an open air breeze-way or solarium.
On the roof of the adult building were areas for sunbathing, also known as heliotherapy: sunlight boosted levels of Vitamin D and helped fight off the disease. There was also a playground on the roof of the children’s facility, so that the kids, too, could reap the sunlight’s bactericidal benefits. And ultraviolet lamps for cloudy days: “Children will glow and tingle with the soothing substitute for Mr. Sun,” read one pamphlet.
Glenn Dale looked more like a country resort than a medical facility. Landscapers dotted the grounds with a special batch of “Glenn Dale Azaleas,” hybridized at the USDA’s nearby facility (the flowers were relocated to the National Arboretum and Brighton Dam Azalea Garden when the hospital closed.)
It also played an important role in the District’s race-relations struggle: despite protests by the white staff, Bessie Crocker became the first African-American nurse to work at any D.C. municipal hospital in 1939.
A decade or so later, the entire hospital was integrated. Glenn Dale continued as a TB-only facility through most of the ’50s, until a combination of antibiotics drastically changed the treatment of tuberculosis. From the ’60s through 1982 when it closed, the hospital admitted patients with other chronic illnesses.
The place closed because renovations were more expensive than new construction. Then-mayor Marion Barry tossed around some ideas – one was to convert some of the buildings into a spa and wellness facility for city employees – but none of them came to fruition. A hospital the Surgeon General had once called the “most up-to-date and complete institution of its kind in the United States” began to slip quietly into oblivion. It was even used for military and training exercises, with local residents bemoaning the explosions and gunshots that emanated from the area.
In 1994, the District sold the campus for $4.1 million to the Maryland-National Capitol Park and Planning Commission, which still owns the grounds. Later that year, the Maryland state legislature passed a bill stipulating that any future use of the 61 acres occupied by the hospital buildings is limited to a continuing care facility or retirement home. The children’s and adult hospitals must be rehabilitated, and the nurses dorms must also be re-used.The remaining 15 or so buildings will eventually be demolished. The bill also stipulates that the remaining 150 acres of the complex should be used as a park.
Over the years, the MNCPPC has accepted bids on the property, but developers have largely stayed away. The legislation has been a double-edged sword, getting the campus onto the National Register of Historic Places but creating restrictions that have helped create “demolition by inaction.”
It’s a fairly peaceful place at this time of year. All you hear is the winter wind whipping through the magnolias and holly trees and the occasional groans of buildings falling to final ruin. There don’t seem to be any lost souls here, only a beautiful blend of nature and urban decay.
In the adult building, there’s a creepy basement morgue with nine once-refrigerated cells, shorn of the doors. Their long stainless steel gurneys are strewn about the room. Ceiling beams sag dangerously, in a slow shower of twisted, rusty flakes of metal. A stairway leads to an underground pathway, used to move patients about the grounds during the cold of winter.
Frozen pools of water are everywhere, and as the ice cracks beneath beneath my feet, I look down and meet the gaze of a dead rat.
Basement anxiety quickly disappears on the upper floors of the adult building. Sunlight pours in from every direction. The solariums and their porches are stunning. The ivy that covers the outside of many of the buildings has made itself at home in the breezeways, weaving through open window frames and guard rails. Rows of patient rooms line the porchways, each with two doors: one that opens into the building’s interior, and the other toward the fresh air and sunlight of the solarium.
Glenn Dale’s big auditorium has become more beautiful with age. Ceiling tiles are scattered about the floor, and the walls shed white lead paint like birch bark. A projection booth teeters on the brink of collapse.
In the children’s hospital across the way, rows of lockers have parted with their rusty doors. Light fixtures dangle precariously from conduits and wires.
Graffiti is everywhere – swastikas, satanic pentagrams and countless ominous messages: “Please go back.” “Who goes there?” “Welcome to hell.” Vandals have dragged an oven from the lower-level kitchen into the children’s morgue, an attempt to inspire fear in the horror-movie-tinted minds of visitors. In a laundry house on the eastern end of the campus, beside the massive dryers and steam presses, are remnants of police training drills: splotches of spent paintballs, pallets emblazoned with military police insignias and Secret Service seals.
Time to leave. Walking across the campus, back toward Glenn Dale Road, are doctors’ and nurses’ residences too dilapidated and dangerous to explore. I doubt even the Goatman would want to enter.
Note: Much of the information from this piece was gathered from the archives of the Washington Post; a special thanks to Caitlin Ann Chamberlain and Leah Latimer: her thoughtful 2006 article about her family’s experience at Glenn Dale can be found here.
