In the late 1800s, you could land in a mental institution due to your religious excitement, syphilis, moral insanity, addiction, or for many other reasons. So when I heard that I could stay in a former asylum as a hotel guest—the same asylum I might have been thrown in 130 years ago as a drunk—I was eager to visit. That’s how I ended up at Buffalo’s Richardson Hotel for three nights in September. From there, I discovered many fun things for sober folks to do in New York’s second-largest city.
Buffalo’s rise and fall and rise again
Buffalo has a fall-from-grace story that many addicts will relate to, even if we didn’t start out so well off. Its location on the Erie Canal made Buffalo a vital port city where many people amassed fortunes in the 1800s and early 1900s. But like many so-called Rust Belt cities in the Northeast US, Buffalo started losing its manufacturing jobs in the 1950s. Since then, its population has shrunk in half.
Over dinner with local author, standup comic, tour guide, and entrepreneur Joel Dombrowski, he explained Buffalo’s psyche. “We went from being an important city—we got two presidents that come from Buffalo, we hosted the world’s fair in 1901, we had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States in 1901. All that went away. And we were very depressed and sad about who we are.”
But in the last ten years, local people started to turn things around. “We stopped relying on Albany (the New York capital) and Washington to solve our problems,” Dombrowski said. The city might have lost a lot of population, but it still had a fabulous architectural collection. Residents invested in rehabbing buildings and changing derelict places into vibrant spaces. “People started to have pride again,” Dombrowski said. “We realized we don’t have to be ashamed of who we are.”
Repurposing silos
One of the striking things about Buffalo is its fantastic array of ginormous grain elevators, most of which are no longer used. These silos once transferred great loads of Midwestern grain from big ships to smaller ones. My first up-close look at them was with Jason Mendola of Elevator Alley Kayak. They are staggeringly large when you paddle up next to one.
Buffalo entrepreneurs have found intriguing ways to repurpose silos. At RiverWorks, you can climb a rock wall on a silo or zipline off one. My September visit was too early to catch Dombrowski’s Halloween event at RiverWorks, Evil Buffalo. “I’ve taken the seven most evil moments in Buffalo’s history, and I have paid for an artist to make seven eight-foot murals of those moments,” he explained. “I take you around in costume with a lantern, and I tell you the stories in an abandoned grain silo.
Silo City takes a more artsy and eco approach to silo use. I was especially excited about touring this 27-acre property with a collection of old silos. “We’ve had ballerinas rappelling down the silos,” ecological director Josh Smith told me as he showed me around in a golf cart. “Lots of movies have been filmed here, albums have been recorded.” He let me check out the acoustics by putting my head into a giant grain funnel inside the silo and trying out some singing and meowing. Smith grows many types of aquatic plants in Silo City’s greenhouse to help restore the wetlands. Bird, insect, and plant life is returning to what was long an industrial wasteland.
Some of Smith’s most memorable tales from our tour center on one cavernous industrial building, which was last used as a place where expired baked goods were ground up and fed to livestock—with the wrappers still on. Yep, if you’re not vegetarian yet, you might want to reconsider that Ding-Dong-fed pork. After that operation shut down, some of the world’s largest rats stuck around for a while, eating treat remnants. Now, herds of deer shelter inside during winter, avoiding the brutal winds coming across Lake Erie.
Stained glass and sobriety
Trinity Episcopal Church is one of Buffalo’s treasures. Built between 1869 and 1886, it houses one of the country’s most amazing collections of stained glass windows. Most people have heard of Tiffany glass, produced by Louis Comfort Tiffany and his design team starting in the late 1870s. But Trinity also has works by the lesser-known but just as talented glass artist John La Farge. He developed a technique of using layers of opalescent glass for a painted effect.
Matt Lincoln gave me a tour of Trinity, where he has been rector for nine years. “The best gig in the Episcopal Church,” he calls it. When I planned the tour, I expected to be blown away by the glass, which I was. But what I didn’t expect was to learn that Trinity hosts a special weekly recovery meeting, 12 Steps at Trinity. Lincoln inherited the group, which started about 20 years ago. Lincoln points out that the open-ended interpretation of a higher power can be both a strength and weakness of 12-step groups. So, an earlier parishioner decided to start an overtly Christian group that used the steps.
Over the years, group participation has ebbed and flowed, ranging from 10 to 100 people at the meetings. Now, people can join in on Zoom from anywhere in the world. But if you go in person, you can take part in a ritual at a special ash-filled altar. “When we’ve done all of our reading and reflecting and had some silent meditation time, people are then invited to write down stuff on a sticky note that they’d like to offer or offload or whatever and come light it,” Lincoln explains. “And so we have the only burnt offering altar in the Episcopal Church.”
Sober fun with Andy Krumm
After you get your fill of Buffalo’s history and churches, Andy Krumm will help you go out on the town, sober style. Krumm’s events management company Sober One Six (a play on Buffalo’s 716 area code), puts on sober socials, drag shows, and other events for both the sober and queer communities.
Sober One Six’s “Enjoy every moment” tagline sums up Krumm’s attitude toward life. He gave up drinking to make life better, not boring. Want to go to a sober rave, drag show, or comedy night? Krumm has you covered.
He also advocates for more interesting zero-proof drink options in Buffalo’s bars—and is getting good results. “The businesses are really onboard with being inclusive,” he said.
A couple of my favorite places for wholesome fun in Buffalo were Buckminster’s Cat Café, where you can eat delicious treats and get to know resident cats, and admiring the refurbished animals on Buffalo’s solar-powered carousel.
Richardson hard hat tour
The Richardson Hotel, which now occupies part of the old Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, was everything I could have hoped for. I was a bit worried ahead of time about ghosts. You can find plenty of ghost tales online, not that the hotel markets that angle.
This is one truly giant and looming building, bedazzled with gothic doodads. When my Uber pulled up, one of its tires burst spectacularly. I dragged my suitcase into the lobby of the Richardson Hotel as the hobbled car rolled out of the way of traffic.
I checked in and took the elevator to my room, peering at the historic Buffalo photos hanging everywhere. The halls were super quiet. As I opened the door to my room, I tried my usual preemptive strike against ectoplasmic entities: talking aloud. “Hello,” I said gently, “I’m visiting for a few days. Thanks for having me. I come in peace.” I didn’t get any farther before the fire alarm blasted throughout the hotel. I grabbed my backpack and key and found the nearest stairwell. Halfway down, the alarm stopped, and all was quiet. I tentatively returned to my room, wondering what would happen next. Nothing, it turned out. Except for one other weird incident when an Uber picked me up in front of the hotel, and the driver’s Uber app and his separate maps app on his phone both utterly failed, leaving me to direct from the backseat. Coincidence? I don’t know. I didn’t see any spirits, but these events were all a little weird.
Patrick Ryan, cultural curator for the Richardson Olmsted Campus, later tells me he doesn’t find the property creepy at all. Ryan gave me a hardhat tour of the unimproved part of the asylum—which is most of it. The V-shaped complex has a central administrative tower with two huge wings emanating from it. One wing originally housed men, the other was for women, and each had five separate wards. The most severe cases were placed at the far ends of the V. The idea was that as they improved with treatment, the patients would graduate to a higher-functioning ward until, eventually, they were able to leave out the front door of the middle building.
We wore hard hats as Ryan walked me through some of the old wards, empty now except for a scattering of abandoned old-fashioned wheelchairs. The peeling paint in institutional pastel green, pink, and yellow was sort of beautiful. Chunks of plaster crunched under our feet as we checked out the small patient rooms, large common rooms, and high ceilings.
Ryan explained to me about the post-Civil War focus on mental healthcare. At the time, the closest asylum was in Utica, 200 miles away. And remember, those are 19th-century miles. Buffalo was one of the towns that vied for a new asylum. Unlike today, people yearned for a new mental health facility in their backyard. “Buffalo, at this point, we were, like, really on the rise,” Ryan said. “By 1900, we’re the eighth largest city in the United States. We have the most millionaires anywhere in the United States, too. And this was supposed to be like a big addition, like a big gold star on the city, like, look at our beautiful mental health treatment.”
The building was designed in line with the Kirkbride plan. Thomas Story Kirkbride, a surgeon and mental health expert, believed that sunlight, air circulation, and pastoral views helped restore people to health. Like the Buffalo asylum, more than 200 institutions built following his guidelines featured separate wards with small bedrooms and big comfortable parlors to encourage socializing. Architect Henry Hobson Richardson designed the building, and famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted planned the grounds.
While it’s easy to get hung up on archaic therapies, most mental health professionals of the late 1800s were doing their best with what they knew at the time—just like now. What started out as a jewel of Buffalo built for 600 patients went downhill in the 20th century. By 1940, 4,000 patients were crammed into the institution. In 1963, patients started moving into a new psychiatric hospital. From the 1970s until the 2010s, the once grand building fell into abandoned decrepitude. I’m sure a couple of generations of Buffalo residents considered it a mighty creepy place before it reopened as the attractive boutique hotel it is today.
If you visit Buffalo, you should wander through the free museum in the Richardson’s basement, even if you don’t stay here. Or take a popular tour of the interior or grounds. Ryan assures me that there’s a certain type of person who loves to visit old asylums. “People travel all over the country to see these places,” he says.
“Yeah, I guess I do a little bit of that,” I say tentatively, embarrassed to admit what a freaky enthusiast I am.
“I mean, yeah, you’re doing it right now,” he points out.
Busted. If you share my passion for the history of mental health, weird old industrial landscapes, and restored buildings, add Buffalo to your must-visit list.
About Teresa Bergen
Teresa Bergen had the great good fortune to quit drinking very young and has enjoyed long-term sobriety. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and travels all over the world as a travel writer. She also works in the oral history field, helping to document and preserve history. Learn more HERE.
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