Rabbit Hole Revisited

This trip to Wonderland started with a recent Facebook post by a friend.  It took me back to the start of my three decades plus career with local government.  The Arab oil embargo was but a footnote in the career of Richard Nixon in the early 70s as he was dealing with Watergate.  For me, my job with General Motors in Miami was abolished and I was offered a position in Detroit.  If there was one thing I knew about Detroit, it was that I didn’t want to know anything else about Detroit.

I applied for jobs with local government, aka “the County.”  One of the things the oil embargo didn’t hurt was drug and alcohol addiction.  I landed a job with the newly formed Addiction Treatment Agency, ATA, with offices in an apartment building near the Jackson Hospital complex.  One of my assignments was as a contracts manager overseeing the various agreements with service providers and the rental lease agreements for our offices.

The old Center House with rooftop pool
Original offices of the Addiction Treatment Agency

The rental agreements covered individual leases for apartments on three different floors of a high-rise.  Each apartment was designed for residential use and came with bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens that were being used as office space.  The nightmare was that each lease had to be approved by resolution before the County Commission and screened for legal sufficiency by an attorney.  With perhaps a dozen individual leases expiring at various times, I spent much of my time with processing these contracts.

I worked with our assigned attorney, Debbie Wasserman who, after her marriage to Shultz, would later go on to become a Florida state representative and leader of the DNC.  My nightmare became hers and we decided to renegotiate and consolidate the leases.  With agreement from the landlord, the leases were allowed to be extended on a month-to-month tenancy until a new and all-inclusive lease could be processed.  When that time came, the landlord thought he could extort an increase in our rent.  The word increase is not exactly accurate, he wanted to double our rent because he thought it would be too inconvenient for us to move.

He was wrong.  I went to our General Services Department, which managed county assets, and found that the County owned a facility that had been sitting abandoned for some time.  It was informally called Reed Hospital and it had been a private psychiatric and alcoholic treatment facility in its glory days, assuming a loony bin had glory days.  It had been the only such holding facility in the south of Florida for those awaiting a trip to the state facility in Chattahoochee. 

The building needed some work.  The original facility was a large rectangular three-story wood frame structure to which had been added a new concrete two-story north wing.  I met with the caretaker who had been hired by the County to maintain the building to await its future use.  I managed to commandeer a work crew from a County nursing home and contracted with the local jail to have inmates work getting our new home ready.

I won’t bore you with the details, assuming you aren’t bored already, but we managed to move in just as our leases and extensions on leases were expiring.  Needless to say, our former landlord was surprised by our departure and wanted another chance to negotiate.  He was to learn a lesson that trying to double someone’s rent during an economic downturn was probably not the best idea he had ever had.

The ATA moved into the first two floors of the former sanitorium as the third floor was not habitable.  It had been used for storage and was never renovated.  We opened the first floor of the new north wing as a “central intake” for both alcoholics and drug addicts.  Since these were all built as hospital patient rooms we utilized them for overnight patient stays where new clients could await assignment to inpatient detox centers elsewhere. 

Most of the old wood frame building was designated as office space and counseling offices.  I converted the old kitchen into a “pharmacy” where we could prepare methadone doses for distribution to the various dispensaries around the County.  I had a large walk-in vault built to federal standards and used a surplus vault door that had been used by the old police property room.

After the dust had settled and we began full operation, I had time to explore the abandoned third floor.  The old section was built back in the 20s and was of wood lathe and stucco construction.  At some point the walls, to meet fire codes, were covered with asbestos sheeting and then finished with woodgrain Formica.  The heavy doors were solid and three inches thick.  The rooms were soundproof which might come in handy with screaming mental patients or loud County office meetings.

Electroshock Therapy aka Electroconvulsive Therapy

On the third floor, there were file cabinets, old furniture, old hospital equipment and implements, and an old electroshock machine (ESD).  That last piece of equipment, the ESD, had been used back in the 30s and beyond before falling out of favor as inhumane.  ESD use was revisited for a while as a proper treatment before being eventually banned in the US in March 2020.  Also of interest were the file cabinets that contained old records.  One file was of particular interest.

I found that this facility had a history.  The most interesting file was a report by a private investigator hired by Mrs. Reed during her divorce negotiations in 1949.  This investigator had posed as an alcoholic seeking treatment.  In his undercover work, he described how alcoholic patient care involved the regular delivery of alcohol shots to the patients.  I’m guessing that this was state-of-the-art treatment at the time, especially considering that all the alcoholic patients seen here were affluent enough to pay their own way.  The investigator described what he could observe as a patient.  I later learned from our medical staff that alcohol withdrawal is considered more life-threatening than drug withdrawal.

I filed that bit of trivia away for half a century.  A recent post by a friend included pictures of a similar asylum facility in West Virginia.  It was the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum which housed "epileptics, alcoholics, drug addicts, and non-educable mental defectives."  That facility was of gothic construction and had been reopened as a museum with revenue destined for its survival.  My Reed facility had all of its old sections torn down when its asbestos walls and asbestos-lined return air plenum made continued operation no longer viable.  The remaining two-story building remains as a women’s victims' shelter.  Considering that it’s located in the heart of Miami’s redlight district on northeast 79^th street, perhaps that is a better use.

Arial view of the old "Reed facility" as it is today.
The current  "L" shaped configuration (upper right) had the old section
that extended to the left of the existing horizontal wing into what is
now a parking lot.

The West Virginia asylum picture posting triggered my dive into the rabbit hole.  Google searches for “Reed Hospital” did not yield positive results.  I later learned in my research that the official name of the facility was the Miami Retreat Foundation.  It seems that Charles A. Reed was ahead of his time and would fit right into the corporate grift that is popular today.  The acrimonious divorce proceeding would prompt several court cases that would eventually be heard in Florida’s Supreme Court.

Much of the following was found in legal documents online.  Those documents dealt with court proceedings that attempted to dissolve the foundation's exempt status.

Charles A. Reed and Ruth H. Reed moved from Indiana in 1926 to Miami where they founded and operated, “a private sanitarium for alcoholics, drug addicts, and mentally disturbed persons.”  The first two such operations failed but the third time was the charm.  Their “for-profit” operation, Miami Retreat, Inc., was reorganized as a non-profit operation in 1939, known as Miami Retreat Foundation.  This information was gained from the Florida Supreme Court filing of December 19, 1952, titled Miami Retreat Foundation v. Ervin.  The plaintiff in this case was Richard W. Ervin, the Attorney General for Florida.

It seems that, in the beginning, the switch to non-profit operation was legitimate but, the charter amendment that made it a “charitable, educational, scientific and non-sectarian operation" was no more than a tax dodge.  Where in the name of Donald J. Trump would he have ever gotten such an idea to use a charity for profit?  This facility was the only place in Southeastern Florida to send a mentally disturbed person.  In fact, there was a waiting list to get into the Florida Hospital for the Insane at Chattahoochee.  The Florida Hospital at Chattahoochee had been built as a military arsenal that served in that capacity during the Seminole Wars (1858) and the American Civil War.  Later in 1876 it was refurbished as the Florida State Hospital for the Insane, referred to by locals by just its location, Chattahoochee.

Charles and Ruth Reed thus provided community service (for profit).  It was only during the divorce proceedings that the true nature of their operation was brought to light.  In Ruth’s counter-complaint she stated that the nonprofit designation was used, “as a cloak to permit her former husband to amass a large fortune without paying taxes on the profits derived from the business.”  In her settlement, Ruth got $5,000 in cash, alimony, and an annuity of $150 per month should her husband predecease her.  She also had an apartment in the facility that she could use until June 1, 1947, without paying rent.  If she elected not to reside at that apartment, she would be paid $40 per month toward rent elsewhere.  Their divorce agreement was executed in September of 1946, I was one year old at the time.

In another court filing in November of 1950, the property was valued at $300,000 and Charles Reed had $200,000 in cash.  That would be around $6M today.  This filing was titled Miami Retreat Foundation v. Holt.  The Holt here was the circuit judge presiding in the Foundation case who Reed sought to disqualify as biased as he had previously presided over other husband and wife issues.  The judge had stated that he considered Charles Reed, the Miami Retreat Foundation, Miami Retreat, Inc., and the Charles Reed Corporation to be one and the same.  He further stated that Charles Reed continued to operate the Foundation, after fleeing the jurisdiction of the court, from his new Nevada home.

It would seem that defrauding charities, using their tax-exempt status as a tax dodge, trying to replace a judge you don’t like, and fleeing the jurisdiction of a court were not new moves invented by Donald Trump.  These moves were grifting tools of the trade long ago.

So, we have arrived at the bottom of this tour of my rabbit hole that began as a posting on an asylum in West Virginia.  Just as I was finalizing this exercise, I spotted a summary of an article from the Wall Street Journal that posited a “case for bringing back asylums.”  It talked of their humane goal of keeping the insane housed, fed, and under treatment which peaked in the 1950s.  It talked of the shuttering of asylums in the 60s which brought the numbers of such patients down from 600,000 then, to around 45,000 today.  Yes, today we “humanely” allow the mentally ill to roam homeless on our streets, and some of the more violent of them commit crimes against us.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The case for reopening asylums will probably get solved sometime after global warming has made “outdoor living” impossible.  To see the need for treatment for the mentally ill we need look no further than our elected leaders.  If DJT, MTG, and their cohorts don’t qualify for the loving care of nurse Mildred Ratched, who would?

The rabbit hole is closed for the day.  It’s time for my version of electroshock, a cocktail, and the evening news.

Postscript:  The beginning of this tale took place in an apartment complex, Center House.  It was built for apartment use but, due to changes in demand, the management couldn't rent enough apartments so decided on a mixed-use plan with both apartments and offices.  The roof of the structure had a pool and deck surrounded by a waist-high wall.  Over time, with its location in the medical center of Miami with Jackson Hospital and the University of Miami, and its easy elevator access to the roof, the building got a reputation for suicides.  In the less than 12 months that I was there, we had 3 suicide jumpers.  Two were from the roof and one was the lady who lived across the hall on the 16th floor from my offices.  She jumped from her own balcony at 8 a.m. on a Monday.  The previous Friday she had asked several workers on the floor when they were scheduled to arrive on the following Monday.  Ironically, we learned that she was an alcoholic.