The state-of-the-art Arnold Home helped ease generations of retired Detroiters off this mortal coil before changing demographics dulled its once-cutting edge.

Hasta la Vista, Granny

The Arnold Home on Detroit’s Seven Mile Road opened in 1931, and was the final iteration of a succession of “Arnold” elder care homes dating back to 1899. Reverend Charles Arnold conceived the idea of a live-in care home after noting that the soon-to-be-Motor-City’s industrial boom was a bust for the old, the ill, and others in need of a social safety net.

The Big House

The penultimate Arnold Home was designed and built by Weston and Ellington, a Detroit-based architectural firm whose portfolio included the Metropolitan Building, The Wardell hotel (now the Park Shelton condominiums), and the New Light Baptist Church. The two-story tall Arnold Home featured four wings housing up to 115 residents, a dining hall, and hospital facilities. 1938 saw the addition of two more stories, increasing patient capacity to 235 beds.

No Motown

Detroit’s demographics began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however. Middle-class retirees were moving to the suburbs and new residents tended to rely more heavily on Medicare and other government assistance programs. As this trend progressed, the Arnold Home began experiencing funding and budgeting issues that resulted in a steadily declining standard of care.

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Tired Retired Detroits Abandoned Arnold Home

You take a stroll down a sunny street, wave to the smiling vendor at the flower stall on the corner, chat with a friend by the fountain at the center of the town square and head back to your picturesque cottage with a baguette tucked under your arm. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that all the streets hit a dead end. You don’t know that the clerks in all the stores are actually nurses. As far as you’re concerned, it’s 1959, the year you graduated from college, and your high school sweetheart could be coming by at any moment. You’re content in that thought – even though it’s actually 2018, and your village is really a care facility. You’re allowed to live in the mental and physical space that makes you the most comfortable.

To some, this kind of trickery might seem cruel, recalling the plots of movies like The Truman Show (in which the protagonist, unbeknownst to him, lives in an artificially constructed environment and life.) But advocates of these ‘dementia villages’ say they grant patients a lifestyle that has a lot more in common with their pasts in the real world than a potentially cold and unfriendly nursing home ward.

The idea is to give elders suffering from a decline in mental faculties a “happy place” to enhance their quality of life. After all, Alzheimer’s Disease and other forms of dementia can’t be cured, but thoughtful care and treatment can make the diagnosis much less stressful to patients and their loved ones. People with dementia often experience memory distortions, impulsivity, wandering and restlessness, and in the late stages of the disease, they usually need 24-hour supervision to ensure their personal safety.

Most residential care homes for people with dementia accomplish this in the institutional manner of a hospital, providing housing, meals, health care and supportive services if not a place that feels like home. But facilities that aim to recreate the feeling of patients’ pre-dementia lives allow patients to safely relive the memories of people, places and experiences that were once important to them, supporting them in the process and granting them a crucial measure of autonomy.

In Ohio, a series of facilities called The Lantern has replaced the impersonal atmosphere of a care home with something a little warmer and more pleasant. Instead of wandering brightly lit hallways lined with small bedrooms, patients meander through what looks like a small town complete with faux grass, street lamps and rocking chairs on front porches. Hidden speakers fill the air with the sounds of birds chirping. Patients can gather together at cafe tables to chat and enjoy a cup of tea, or stroll down Main Street past the facades of ‘restaurants’ and ‘stores.’ It’s a little bit Disneyland, a little bit Las Vegas and a lot more fun for residents than a sterile nursing home.

The Lantern currently has three locations, each with a slightly different look. The interiors are all styled to resemble the United States in the 1940s and ‘50s for a sense of comforting familiarity. These homey environments are designed to stimulate creativity while encouraging socializing, walking and partaking in physical activities like ping pong. While it’s probably not going to fool most people into believing they’re really outdoors despite those LED sky ceilings, the atmosphere provides a much gentler transition into full-time care than more standard institutions.

But how about allowing seniors with dementia to experience something a little more lifelike? In the Netherlands, there’s an entire village dedicated to dementia care. With a setup based on those of real towns, including open streets and public squares, Hogewey Dementia Village allows its residents to experience the weather and the seasons, shop for their own groceries, enjoy movies in a theater, tend plants in a garden and drop by the post office. They live in real homes, individually styled to match the time period in which the residents’ short-term memories stopped functioning normally.

But there are no busy roads bustling with cars, no ways to wander off into dangerous areas, no contact with the public at large. The smiling cashiers in the grocery store, the servers in the cafes and everyone else they meet in the village are actually caretakers keeping an eye on residents’ well-being.

As The Atlantic points out, a private room at a nursing home in the U.S. costs more than $90,500 annually, and the number of people suffering from dementia is expected to rise sharply in the coming decades. At Hogewey, the cost of care runs around $8,000 per patient per month, but it’s subsidized by the Dutch government, and families pay an amount that varies according to their income but never exceeds $3,600 per month.

This model is catching on. In Canada, ‘The Village’ provides “single-story, cottage-like homes” that open up to five acres of park-like grounds with accessible walking paths, gardens, a barn with animals and a community center so residents can “live their life, their way, every day.” Ireland’s CareBright Center in Limerick will function similarly, with 18 homes, a cafe, a beauty salon, a gym and other features of real small towns.

In Japan, where one in three citizens will be 65 or older by 2035, caring for dementia sufferers is shaping up to be more of a community-wide effort that plays out within the real streets of its real villages. Knowing that Alzheimer’s and other conditions will soon become more widespread, the government is instituting a multi-pronged approach to monitor and support its rapidly aging population.

The plan includes setting aside increased funding for better early detection methods, clinical trials for better drugs and enhanced training for caretakers as well as awareness campaigns. One program even brings people with dementia into schools to familiarize young people with the condition. In the meantime, they’ve come up with an easy way to keep track of wandering elders: waterproof QR code stickers that affix to a person’s fingernails or toenails. Sure, this one definitely sounds dystopian – but nursing homes and private caretakers already use GPS devices like bracelets to track patients’ whereabouts, so it’s not a new development. Could measures like these make the real world safer for people with dementia in the future?

Many people say ending up in a nursing home is one of their greatest fears. But we all age, and most of us need some level of care in the process. Environments that center all the vitality of life and its joys provide a dramatically different framework for that process than facilities that feel more like a long white hallway leading to inevitable death. If you were in need of round-the-clock care, where would you rather spend your twilight years?

These abandoned nursing homes illustrate the contrast between the rising need for senior care facilities and the costs of keeping older nursing homes open.

The Horner Memorial Nurses’ Home sits cheek-by-jowl to the similarly abandoned Brownsville General Hospital in tiny Brownsville, PA, located 40 miles south of Pittsburgh. The Nurses’ Home opened in 1928 and housed – you guessed it – nurses who worked in the hospital next door.

Brownsville’s population declined from over 8,000 in 1940 to just over 2,000 in 2016 as a consequence of steel industry restructuring. The hospital closed in 1965 but the Nurses’ Home lived on after morphing into the Golden Age Nursing Home. This second incarnation lasted until 1985 when both buildings were completely abandoned; any remaining residents were relocated to the nearest regional facility. Flickr member Forsaken Fotos snapped the images above and more in June of 2014. To view a wealth of interior photos and learn additional info about these facilities, please visit the Architectural Afterlife website.

European Elegance

We’re not sure when the above abandoned nursing home closed but it must have been relatively recently judging from its well-preserved state… well, peeling paint aside. The photographer (Flickr member Gentleman of Decay) uploaded the images above in March of 2017 but neglected to state the facility’s name and location – just as well, since there’s nothing like a swarm of squatters, vandals and druggies to trash a building that’s given up the ghost with the greatest of dignity.

Scot Free

Templedean Hall in Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland, was built in 1911 and initially served as a Children’s Home. One wonders if any of those children returned to the Templedean Hall Nursing Home as senior citizens before the facility closed in 2003. It’s the circle of life.

Designated a Category B Listed Building in 1977, the facility was visited by Flickr member Stuart Cale (kyz) in May of 2009. Cale uploaded 17 photos (16 of which show the interior) that illustrate just how “preserved” the facility is.

Rising From The Ashes

Not all abandoned nursing homes are doomed to deterioration and eventual demolition. Take the Hot Lake Sanitorium near La Grande, Oregon. Originally built in 1864 as the Hot Lake Hotel, the facility was a popular vacation destination in the early years of the twentieth century. A devastating fire in 1934 put an end to all that, not to mention much of the hotel.

Subsequently, the repaired facility took on new life as a retirement home, an asylum, and a nurse’s training school during the Second World War. The building was closed and abandoned in 1991 but lately, thanks to the thermal springs in the area, a revival is underway with current owners planning to reopen the site as a hotel, art gallery and restaurant. A tip of the hat to Flickr member Roadsidepictures for the above photos and images.

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Health Careless 12 Decrepit Abandoned Nursing Homes