The Molkerei

Colorado · United States · Castle

A tuberculosis clinic in east Denver in the late 1880s, then an asylum from 1902 to 1906.

The Molkerei in east Denver was built in the late 1880s as a tuberculosis clinic, in the decades when Colorado's dry air was prescribed as the treatment and the sick came west by the trainload.

When it closed as a clinic it reopened as an asylum, and it ran as one between 1902 and 1906.

Those four years are what the building is remembered for. The practices of early psychiatric medicine in that period are widely documented and were frequently harmful, and local account holds that they cost residents here their lives.

A range of things has been reported at the site since.

The word Molkerei is German for dairy, which points to what the property was before any of it. Denver's early sanatoria were built by immigrant communities for their own sick, and the German and Jewish institutions here treated people nobody else would take.

FAQ

Where is The Molkerei located?

The Molkerei is in Colorado, United States.