Look up at the building in front of you. That enormous brick castle with the spires — nearly a quarter of a mile long, one continuous building — is the reason I told you to come here. Today it's called the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, and it's full of bakeries and wine bars and shops. But for a hundred years it was the Northern Michigan Asylum. This is where they sent people to lose their minds, and it might be the most beautiful building in the state.
It opened in the eighteen eighties, and yes — Perry Hannah is why it's here. He used his political muscle to land the state's new asylum in his own town, because a giant permanent state institution is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a lumber town alive after the lumber's gone. The man thought of everything.
But the reason to care about this place is the doctrine it was built on. The first superintendent was a doctor named James Decker Munson, and Munson ran this asylum on two ideas that sound insane for the eighteen eighties
and turned out to be a century ahead of their time. The first was: beauty is therapy. He genuinely believed that surrounding a suffering mind with loveliness — grand architecture, gardens, enormous trees, light, air — could help heal it. So he built a palace and he planted the grounds with a staggering variety of trees, on purpose, as medicine.
The second idea was: work is therapy. Munson though
