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Coming up next a local landmark that is nation ill cult status in a special on Pew report. We'll explore the history of six month plus rises in the insane asylum to its eventual break to the wrecking ball goes all the way to get a last look at Dick's mother right now. You welcome. On Q magazine I'm Stacey Smith. When people hear the word many images come to mind. For some it is a gloomy old mental hospital tucked away just outside of Pittsburgh. For others though it is a historical landmark one of the most prestigious hospitals of its time. But now Dick's MOT is in ruins and it's going to be torn down within months. Filmmakers and photographers are scrambling to capture the final images before a Wal-Mart goes up. There is controversy. But our story

this evening is not about that. You are about to meet some of the people who knew best the archaeologist hired to document its final days. A man who grew up in a shadow and a woman who went to work there every day on cue contributor and he makes sick reports. I worked here 19 years and I took four children every day. Helen will the Baden used to make this drive all the time. This time will be her last. These grounds were soon at one time I had around here the summer circle was filled with flowers. We had a gardener here and we had a greenhouse and it was it was very beautiful. But behind the walls of this country club setting. We're mental patients who couldn't leave and disturbing medical procedures at one time they were there.

The bottom isn't there. That shock treatment that's building every Monday morning and every Thursday morning and he has come back to Dick's mind it was once the Grand-Am of mental hospitals. This is the first time she's seen it in years. Oh my goodness it could get us even in white balconies calling it. The buildings have crumbled. There's shattered glass and graffiti everywhere. It was always groomed that the grounds are very well groomed. Literally it's the breakdown of a mental hospital.

I want to look at this building I'm so very sad. Helen was a secretary at Dick's Mont starting in the 1960s and despite most perceptions she remembers friendly patients as I drive past these buildings and look up into the windows I can almost say some of the faces of some of the patients I knew and some of the elderly ladies up on the second third floor waving and just wanting to be noticed. She remembers a caring staff. Down here over where the parking lot is is where we had our annual carnivals for the patients plows would come various entertainment groups and everything was free to the patients. This is the first time I've been in this building since about 1982.

Now the place Helen remembers so fondly where she walked through the doors every morning before 8:00 and the whole area was very neatly kept will be torn down and there are plans to build a Wal-Mart. How am I doing. How many feet over here. Thirty. Thirty one point six meters. There's no question Dix Mont is in historic site but it's too far gone. He saved the cornerstone. Christine Davis is an archaeologist hired to survey measure and photograph the property. Strange to still see a pillow in one of these little rooms before the old hospital is bulldozed into history. Federal law requires that it be carefully documented for posterity. It is a possibility to take some paint samples and through here. That there is a culture resource manager I look at everything I don't just look at the wonderful architectural building here but I look at everything the staircases the foundations the reservoirs the power system all of that's important to us to really understand this property.

Do you personally think that this is an important historical site. Oh absolutely. It's listed on the national register. It's a highly significant property for a lot of reasons. It was among the first hospitals designed to help patients get better. It had wide hallways plenty of windows and a serene setting before Dick's Mon people were locked in their rooms. They were sometimes placed in very cold dank dark a MS jail like institutions and of course most of them died many committed suicide. It was a very tragic situation and a wonderful reformer named Dorothy addicts for whom this place was named. Dix Mont. She was one of the first people to really recognize that the treating the mentally ill in a more humane way providing light beauty garden attractive area would be a very important to their health. In the 1840s Dorothea Dix of Massachusetts began a crusade for the

mentally ill and helped improve conditions at institutions across the country. Dix personally selected the site for a state of the art mental hospital outside Pittsburgh. Construction began in 1859 on a wooded hillside overlooking the Ohio River and Neville Island. She was thrilled about it and she visited here a number of times. This was the crown jewel of Pittsburgh pulling out their pay of the time the first patients moved in during the Civil War. It wasn't long before Dick's mind was a self-sustaining city. The hospital had its own power and heating supply. Patients grew vegetables made their own clothing. There was a greenhouse a sawmill a slaughterhouse even its own Morgan cemetery. We have one hundred and seventy seven structures buildings and objects to look at and that's how many we found. And that's how many we documented. We're trying to get a point exactly on that cornerstone location and get a g P.S. on that too. So our typical day would be just you can imagine documenting individually each one of these

properties. So we have a lot of work to do. This is a permanent document that will be in the History Center in Pittsburgh 200 years from now I'll be long gone my children will be long gone. But this document of this work will still remain. And that's the objective. And that's why we're here. Nobody can stop me from covering my face. I remember seeing a movie called The Snake Pit at one time. I think that was in 1946. I don't think it's traumatized I think it I think it's really true. When the patients were here without their medications it was probably similar to what it would have been they are going to the closed ward. You'd hear the screaming and the yelling and maybe some of a come at you and they were going to do what you were going to say to you. So I rarely went on the closed board by myself.

The movies have always fuelled our fascination and fears about places like ticks. Actually I think it's because the majority of the the people haven't been in a mental hospital. It's just the unknown that amazes them and wonders what's going on why the patients are here. That curiosity has given Dick's mom to cult appeal. Thousands of Pittsburghers drive 65 every day without noticing. But people interested in the occult mysterious places actually search it out on websites. Some of them are even drawn to see the real thing. You know it's creepy because it's abandoned and there's nobody here and you're you know you're thinking ghosts in the room. Just that whole thing of old abandoned buildings. They say that it's haunted by some of the patients that used to reside here. And that's what they say those bangs are

that you're hearing in the background is the ghosts walking around bang in the we all know it's the wind. But you know people say it's haunted from the residence that used to live here. You know there's like I want to say a presence but that my song a little crazy itself. But you do you just have that feeling that there is something or something you know something here. Say. Among

the mysteries of Dick's mom towards tunnels snaking their way under the buildings luring the trespassers who dare spend the night Fany the rotting old insane asylum Strone snuck into the tunnels of Dick's mine when he was a boy. Put your head he now owns the place. The question of the title legend has it that inmates use these tunnels to escape stealing off in the dead of night just showed only would get into the tunnels and we were always hearing stories about colds and unusual things. Some say the most violent patients were chained here. The reality though is far less sinister. It is clear these were laundry tunnel but this is the the tunnel with a railroad track in it. You can see the railroad track through here it is

I believe what happened was the patients would push carts along this railroad track with laundry in it and other other service items. The tunnels have become a gallery for graffiti artists. Look at this. This is something else. Somebody spent a lot of time look at this look at these little things glued on here. Oh this is major records. See this these are actually records like long playing records. These things down here see them. That's some place and even before we had it I've never been in this part of the tunnel. I was born and raised in Emsworth right down a road bordering the Dix one property up in 1909 round Strone put in the successful bid of seven hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars and bought from the state of Pennsylvania for him the place has meant a lifetime of stories and adventures. I mean when we came up here on a bicycle our bicycles would see patients looking out the windows.

This was the men's section and over there was a ladies section there were two women here that were twins but they had black beards. They were bearded women and that was an exciting thing to see the bearded women. Whenever they lost a patient they'd blow the horn to be realigned and it would generate a different places on the property all at the same time and when you heard at horn you knew they were looking for a patient. You know way back over the hill there's a cemetery that has around thirteen hundred graves in it and that was the place to be in hell when we were kids. You go up there and you hear strange things or houses or whatever you'd hear up there in that cemetery will be preserved in memory of the people who lived and died to Dick's mine. The patients would dig a hole in it that point to the wood casket in the hole and cover it up and put in a little concrete headstone on it with a number. Nothing but numbers due to the smoke and flames from miles away.

Getting firefighters close to about five years before we bought the place. It was a major fire here and they're not sure how it started but they think it was started by a vagrant in the building and it burned the top couple floors off here and it destroyed basically the center section of the building. The chapel was here the library a lot of very beautiful things so that the historical stuff burned it was destroyed. Just about everything else of value addict's mom has been shattered. Stolen or sold until the buildings come down. A security staff monitors the property chasing off trespassers. I was walking through the back of the hospital about two years ago at night for exercise around eight or eight thirty just start to get dark. As I was walking between those two buildings I looked over and I saw a girl standing with nothing on but a negligible and a black negligee and I tried to hide but she saw me and she said can I help you and I said Yeah I own the place what are you doing here. And she said while making a movie as it oh here she was the actress in one of the movies had her

running up and down the hall in his black see through negligee being chased by some monster. And we have a copy of the movie nobody believed me until they saw the movie is it that's the girl right there you know which is very sad that it has come to this. Helen Wolfe wants to see her old office at Dick's Monteith's one more time before the wrecking ball arrives. And on a pier in NE and the lobby was where everybody met sort of like early in the morning to greet each other and it sounds good. It's really it's really sad to see it the shape that it's in. And I wondered if that was still on the floor. I wondered if that that star was still there because it was shined every morning and cleaned and I was just curious if that was there. Right here is where my office mice.

Oh dear Oh heaven help us if the swinging doors like I mean this and this is we're going to be yeah okay. Let me see. Oh dear. That was my boss's office. That was a volunteer director's office. Miss Walsh was the volunteer director. This was my office across here. I look so little and it looks so little now it doesn't look like it would hold a desk and a couple filing cabinets and a couple chairs and a typewriting desk. How sad. But I had a lot of good years here. You're the best.

The decline of Dick's Mont is blamed on state budget cuts and new philosophies on how to treat the mentally ill. The last patients left in 1984 you're. When the place closed to the patients you can remember how well you loved him and how much you cared for them. It was their temporary home away from home till they got better. These days Helen organizes reunions gathering together former coworkers. They talk about friends and patients and how Dick's mom touched so many lives. It's a way of holding on to a time and place in her life. And in Pittsburgh history. No no I don't think I I don't think I'll be back time marches on and if we can keep the memories that we have and they do tear the building down and something better comes comes up here now that

that's progress. Well the a Wal-Mart deal is going forward and the owner of Dick's my property expects the last buildings will be gone by the end of the year. And in these weeks leading up to the demolition the number of trespassers adik smog has increased dramatically and so as the number of arrests there is private property also it is a demolition site so the owner has increased security to keep people outs and keep them from getting hurt. Coming up next a block of glass becomes a thing of beauty. You'll meet a local artist whose work is getting national attention and whose creative vision is crystal clear. Stay connected. You're watching on Q magazine because these foundations care enough about local programming to help pay for it. Our times in down at the Richard Mellon Foundation the cume foundation of the Pittsburgh foundation

the Henry L. human foundation and we couldn't do it without you. The members didn't. Some say that creativity knows no boundaries. And if you were to look at say a chunk of crystal would you see a future work of art. Well Steve Eisenhower does at his curly Espy reports it is a long way from creative vision to finished product design. And I think I did you did you. And if you have you been a victim in this in the past did you think that

you know Steve Eisenhower is an artist with a very unusual can tickle Crystal. Well there's a really wonderful quality to this type of. Generates a phenomenal base You bet. That really changes as one moves around the world and in my work I actually work with the interior by adding in within laminations or within different pieces that I put together transparent to the seemingly fluid pieces come being by way of a long and very tedious process. Most of the work takes anywhere between three to six weeks to get a piece and that it starts with my drawing and

sketching. To flesh out a concept or an idea or you know a piece. So I actually purchased large blanks of glass that have been melted and cast in and properly and healed which I then work much like a stone worker would work with. I cut it. Right to get shapes and forms that are of interest which I utilize put together struct then the painting begins. Other labor intensive process. What I'm doing is working with a painting process that I've developed that utilize the

rock pickers and those are especially the rock they are from all around the world. Some facts or some are simply by working washes or delicate business of density and evaporation which gives them an almost ghostly transparency in the crystal which is really essential for a lot of the work of the tour because I don't want to completely obliterate and just get reflection off of the hill painting. Like to go through the color and be reflected around the tree. Through her own steam sculptures have an added uniqueness in the way that they marry art with cats.

So the song last really is a huge technical challenge and always will. So it's not something that you can just do when you have to have a notion of how machinery works you have to be able to keep up your machinery in fact I don't necessarily reason I've been able to do what I've done is that I've actually produced the tools to do the work. By thinking about the process three feet OK. Looking at the actual war it seems like so much need for so many layers of evolution there has to be something powerful to drive an artist to create something through such a temperamental process. For me right now especially i. My feeling is that human life is really out at a cusp so to speak. I

mean we've never had the kind of power that we have now. Far as we know and so it seems as though all things are possible. And as an artist I think that is a very serious challenge to look at. The greatest breath I can and bring all of that is to the work. And Steve is in the process of an interactive outdoor installation for the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh and this is for the museum's grand reopening in August of 2004 it's called animated earth and it won a citywide competition for placement at the museum. You know Steve works with glasses this installation to be made of glass. Well funny you should say that Stacy because it's not all glass is going to have some clay in it and some

other pieces that some multimedia installations and the kids can actually interact with it. It's quite complicated as I understand but we're going to update you and see it as it's being built. Oh good look forward to it. Thanks Carol. And now here's a look at what you're going to see tomorrow on cue. This weekend marks the National Coming Out Day a time when gays and lesbians are encouraged to reveal their sexuality. What's it like to come out to your family. What's it like to be gay in Pittsburgh. Local people tell you tomorrow. Also tomorrow join Chris Moore for Chris fire the topic of The Hotline the Mayors report on Pittsburgh public schools then the biggest collection of beer cans you have ever see. Dave and Dave found it at the beer cans invention. All tomorrow on cue. And thank you for joining us songs us back live at 7:30 tomorrow evening.