Bloomingdale Insane Asylum
Coordinates: 40°48′31″N 73°57′41″W / 40.80861°N 73.96139°W
The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was a private hospital for the care of the mentally ill that was founded by New York Hospital. It occupied the land in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan where Columbia University is now located.
The road leading from the thriving city of New York in lower Manhattan to the asylum was called Bloomingdale Road in the nineteenth century, and is now called Broadway. The term 'Bloomingdale' dates back to the era of Dutch rule in New Amsterdam, and is possibly a reference to "Bloemendael," the name of a small village in the flower-growing region near Haarlem in the Netherlands.
The Bloomingdale Asylum was proposed in an address by Dr. Peter Middleton, of Columbia (then King’s) College, on November 3, 1769: "The necessity and usefulness of a public Infirmary has been so warmly and pathetically set forth in a discourse delivered by Dr. Samuel Bard, at the college commencement, in May last, that his Excellency, Sir Henry Moore immediately set on foot a subscription for that purpose to which himself and most of the gentlemen present liberally contributed." Subscriptions to this fund were continued, and in 1770 Doctors Peter Middleton, John Jones and Samuel Bard presented to the Colonial Government a petition for the incorporation of a public Hospital. The petition was granted by a charter bearing the date of June 13, 1771 incorporating the "Society of the Hospital in the city of New York, in America", later termed the "Society of the New York Hospital". Between 1816 and 1818 the Society of the New York Hospital purchased 26 acres (11 ha) of land on which to build an asylum in a part of upper Manhattan, then largely farmland and referred to as Bloomingdale Asylum. According to Andrew Dolkart, the large, "elegantly detailed Federal style brownstone building" was ready for occupancy in 1821.
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