Portal:Featured Image Of The Week
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Featured Image Of The Week
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Frederick Clarke Withers designed the Kirkbride style Main Building in 1867. It was intended to be completed quickly, but went far over its original schedule and budget and remained under construction for almost a quarter century after it first opened. A nine-member Board of Managers was created and appointed to initiate and oversee construction of the actual building. Withers planned a building 1,500 feet (457 m) in length and over 500,000 square feet (45,000 m²) in area, most of its two wings that would house patients. It was the first institutional building in the U.S. designed in the High Victorian Gothic style. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead, designers of New York's Central Park, laid out the surrounding landscape. Like Withers, they had been mentored by the influential Andrew Jackson Downing in nearby Newburgh.
