Paul Davis: Bryce Hospital decision at crossroads

After months of often testy discussion and debate and with negotiations going on at the highest levels of state government, the University of Alabama, under heavy pressure from preservationists and mental health advocates, has backed away from its tough stand in opposition to placing Tuscaloosa’s Bryce Hospital on the highest level of national historic recognition.

Some background:

Bryce Hospital for more than a century was the primary facility in Alabama designed for the care and treatment of the mentally ill.

It adjoins the campus of the land-locked University of Alabama. The university desperately needs the 208 acres for future growth.

The department of Mental Health has agreed to sell the property to the university – provided the most historic building and sites on the Bryce campus are preserved and further that the university pay a fair and just price for the land.

The university has indicated that it will pay the appraised price of the land. But a state appraisal came in at $40 million, a pittance for some of the most valuable land in the city. Mental health officials are to use proceeds for the land sale to build a new hospital on state owned land in Tuscaloosa County. Estimates of the cost of a new hospital range up to $150 million.

The university has also been fighting efforts to obtain national recognition for the old Bryce Hospital building, maintaining that any kind of direct federal over sight might hinder their use and development of the property.

Dr. Tom Hobbs chairs the committee on Bryce preservation, which is trying to achieve national recognition for Bryce Hospital.

Hobbs said the university has now agreed to join in the committee’s plan to submit an application to the Alabama National Register Review Board to change Bryce Hospital’s significance level on the National Register of Historic Places from “state” to “national.”

Bryce Hospital’s main building is a majestic, four-story structure built in 1853. Beyond that façade, however, were acres of wards that at one time housed more than 5,000 patients, often in less-than-humane conditions. I serve on the State Mental Health Board and also the Bryce preservation committee.

While a reporter and later as associate editor of the Tuscaloosa News, I covered activities of the Mental Health board and also documented the horrid conditions under which those patients lived and died.

I hope that one day that domed structure can be turned into a national museum, a display of man’s inhumanity to man.

The university has done the right thing, apparently under pressure from Gov. Bob Riley, in giving up its fight against national recognition of Bryce.

I have talked with the famed and highly respected civil rights attorney Fred Gray about this.

He said he will join me in this effort if the university will not do right. Dr. Gray was the attorney for Dr. Martin Luther King and Mrs. Rosa Parks when civil rights issues were blazing in Montgomery.

But why should a fight be necessary? Why not just do the right thing for the mentally ill today, and for the thousands who were neglected, and often abused under the old system?

Paul Davis writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News. You may contact him at pauldavis@bellsouth.net