Spiral Staircase in Brick Tower Room, Fergus Falls Kirkbride Building

The Fergus Falls Kirkbride Building, designed by Warren B. Dunnell and opened in 1890, once housed the Fergus Falls State Hospital under the Kirkbride Plan for treating mental illness through architecture and light. Its cream-colored brick construction, sourced locally, gives the complex its distinctive coloring across more than 800,000 square feet of connected wards and towers. Spiral metal staircases like this one provided access between floors in the building's tower sections, linking upper wards to the mechanical and storage spaces below. The hospital closed in the 1990s, and the building has sat vacant since, with preservationists and developers proposing various reuse plans over the following decades.

Photo taken in June 2014.