Taylor Manor Hospital

Over the years, I've presented a lecture entitled "Historic Hospitals of Baltimore." It features many of the hospitals that made Baltimore the medical mecca that it is now. However, all of the hospitals that I've featured are from before or just after 1900. 

But there is a hospital that's always been along the edge of my radar, and I had a chance to visit it last week. The property has been a hospital since the early 1900s and most recently, it was part of the Sheppard Pratt system. You can read its history in great detail here.

In the 1950s or so, Taylor Manor was purchased by a family who ran a jewelry store in the near-by village of Ellicott City. It was one of only a dozen or so private psychiatric hospitals in the country. 

Sadly, all of the original buildings are gone now, but vestiges of the 1966 Mid-Century Modern buildings, which are quite amazing, remain. 

The buildings were designed by the modernist, Mark Beck of Potter & Beck, Architects, later Mark Beck Associates. 

We have several old advertisements for Taylor Manor in our Maryland Medical Journals which certainly made it look like a  swinging place! The illustrations were done by local sketch artist, Aaron Sopher, who frequently provided illustrations for our Medical Journal. 

Among the issues the hospital treated was gambling, but not alcohol. It was one of the first places to prescribe Thorazine, a neuroleptic, in 1953, and started the first psychiatric hospital for children in 1966. 

Here are some images I took at Taylor Manor over the weekend. I thought they looked more dramatic in black and white! The family has been wanting to develop the land but the zoning is tricky because of the Ellicott City floods, the fact that the property is at the top of a 400' high hill, and that there would be a lot of impervious surfaces in the development.

This is an image from when the new part of the hospital opened. 

I love exploring, so take a look at some other hospitals I've visited!