Beauty is Therapy: Memories of the Traverse City State Hospital

From horse-drawn wagon rides to school through five decades of tending majestic trees at the gothic Traverse City State Hospital, Earle Steele colorfully and compassionately shares tales of life and how it was lived at The Asylum, a city-within-a-city that once housed 5,000 mentally ill patients. In a series of letters to his granddaughter, this groundskeeper’s son recounts a childhood of befriending patients and his years as gardener, grounds superintendent, and museum curator at an institution where the dictum was “Beauty is Therapy."