Creech....When was the last time you drove to and THROUGH the State Hospital Grounds? Have you ever worked there? I was just there recently to see what you had said above about the main entry of the Dept. of Mental Health and/or City of Columbia making the property look Sell-Able (proper spelling is sale-able). Your concern was making the city look welcoming as they try to sell it. It was sold a long time ago for housing and a small village look to the usual type of buyers from up in Greenville.This area of town isn't even considered an entrance to the city.

The "S.C. Department of Mental Health", whenever they took it over (many decades ago it was the "S.C. Lunatic Asylum"), was built as a quiet area hidden from the public with trees well over 100 years old now. It has a forestry look from Bull Street and around most of Colonial Drive. These grounds were always and still are kept up as well as the shrubbery, planted flowers, and a park-like setting with squirrels and various birds around. It still has HISTORICAL VALUE! A well known winning national movie was filmed there! It's too bad that such a pleasant place outside those walls, where many clients from all over the state came, had been decided to be broken up, and let the roads and buildings fall into disrepair. Their idea was to build small out-patient centers "to be closer to the clients and their family homes." Such places have yet to come near any such goal. Instead, the Columbia area psycho-therapists send them to Bryant Center. The grounds look like they are very nice, surrounded by trees, landscaped, lodges or cottages, and a large pond with a driveway away from.....a 2 lane road...Highway 277!!! The inside is another story. Clients do not care for it. They are too close to the traffic of the interstate, new schools, subdivisions, and Crafts Farrow buildings. This experiment isn't working out, either. Sex offenders were finally sent to William S. Hall after the SCDMH basically emptied the grounds and tried to help them with their situation.

I did not see what you are referring to when it comes to Bull and Elmwood Streets. The red brick used for the entrance signage and walls are very well in place. Those red brick walls, after the Civil War, built the chapel. The grounds were once used for the war. The land, just looking from Elmwood and Bull Streets, are well landscaped with grass cut even as one drives past the grounds or enters inside. If one should drive past the other buildings and having to make a turn at the "T," turning left they will see other structures as follows: the library, a small grocery store, chapel, Williams Building, Byrnes Nursing Home (once Byrnes Hospital), forensics, and Hall Institute. The USC Medical School had rotations there working on their medical degree and perhaps becoming psychiatrists. Also there was a neurology research area on the same location. Other buildings for clients were not in good condition or suitable for mixing of clients according to male/female or neurosis to psychosis.

William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute had a school on the property (listed as an education site for students under Richland Public School District #1); others utilized tennis courts, canteen, gym, classrooms for all clients who were well enough to learn about treating their illnesses and handling life's situations, a soothing water fountain inside the entrance of the building was a welcome sight for new clients to calm them, a game room, and a private larger light blue fountain pond was a place clients wanted to sit and talk to their guests or another client in a corridor outside. When smoking wasn't banned, clients and their guests would light up at built in wall lighters. Males and females were separated as well as how they would eventually function or never be able to. How can anyone not see this as still an HISTORICAL VALUE and try to make it a housing subdivision out of it?!

Drive onto Gregg Street starting from Colonial Drive (goes right through the lower end of the Dept. of Mental Health State Hospital to Calhoun Street). Near the beginning of Colonial and Gregg, you will notice on the right a beautiful memorial called "Star of Hope" built in the early 1990's behind William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute; notice the cottages on your right on the side of Hall private rooms with private baths. Across the street on Gregg on your left is Friendship Drive with a lovely park setting and Smith Branch Creek, a bike riding path as one of their recreational areas for more well clients only needing short term care, a baseball field, a greenhouse nursery for patients growing vegetables in the middle 1990's, the old food service building, vehicle service area, and extra SCDMH service vehicles once sitting there. Whoever was in charge with this idea of houses and big dreams of shopping, eating, and imagine the prices, never took the HISTORICAL VALUE into consideration. Look how long it has stood there! Its history holds decades of life on the inside of a once great institution where even a war had a part of it. This was a greater value for clients who never had to worry about treatment if they had no insurance, under the best trained medical students of USCMS and psychiatrists, top notch psychiatric nurses, psychiatric aides, social workers, re-hab center, psychologists, chapel and clergy, a medical hospital on site, and peaceful property to enjoy for those becoming better to leave for home. Those who couldn't leave had a safe and scenic place to stay. It seems that STIGMA still lives on not just all over the country, not the North or South, but in the capital city of Columbia, South Carolina. They ARE still in the CLOSET!