A Long Way from THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

(1950)

Because his father was a criminologist, the blogger grew up in the environs of several Florida state prisons. At the time the blogger’s family moved to Lantana (1977), the sanatorium pictured above–re-named the A. G. Holley State Hospital in 1969–had so few tuberculosis patients that the greater part of the facility had been taken over by the Florida prison system. How well, though, the blogger remembers the non-contagious patients of the sanatorium milling around the grounds in their blue bathrobes. One of them sometimes knocked on the blogger’s family’s door to ask for a Dixie cup of vinegar, which he found was the only thing that would quiet his cough.

The last patient left A. G. Holley State Hospital on 2 July 2012. The building, which has the distinction of being the largest Art Deco (or, more accurately, Streamline Moderne) structure in Palm Beach County, is likely to be demolished.

Postcard from the Collection of the Blogger