From a post at Failed Architecture by Margaret McCormick about the complicated past and present tense of a former mental institution in Washington D.C.:

“In 2007, the announcement came that a long abandoned former mental institution was to be renovated in order to create a headquarters for the DHS (the agency which oversees immigration, customs, border control and the secret service, along with several other federal functions). Aside from sounding like the plot to a bad action/horror movie, the site was a bit of an odd-duck: an enormous campus, fifteen minutes drive from the White House and full of old buildings barely anyone had ever heard of. For its own part, St. Elizabeths Hospital was founded in the 1850s as ‘The Government Hospital for the Insane,’ hosting generations of doctors, nurses and patients. Some of which having been infamously linked to the powerful of DC, including: Ezra Pound, brought there on charges of treason in 1945; John Hinckley Jr., for shooting President Reagan in bizarre attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster in 1981; Richard Lawrence, who attempted to shoot President Andrew Jackson in 1835, failed, and was then beaten mercilessly by the President himself and Charles Guiteau, after killing President Garfield in 1881.

Unsurprisingly most of the campus was shut-down in the mid 1980s due to a Reaganite distaste of government dependence and dilapidating facilities. The staff argued, perhaps correctly, that the campus was simply not fit to successfully treat patients in a post-industrial society. Perceptions of mental health had changed and the enormous facility had become obsolete. For years afterwards, the campus served as a kind of spooky albatross with old, now homeless, patients still lingering around the grounds. Indeed the cost to maintain it was so great that in 1987, the federal government transferred responsibility of the eastern portion to the District of Columbia, hoping the city would make something of the land. They didn’t.

A foreboding shadow in an already violent part of the city, St. Elizabeths seemed to haunt governments both national and local: too big to be ignored and too old to be torn down, it was a comatose behemoth. That is until its need arose almost twenty five years after its abandonment.”