# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdolOL7G7PF
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70864482-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/761d14cd97.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-23T15:00:07.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

In 1885 the biggest prize in the Arizona Territorial Legislature was not the university. It was the asylum, and Phoenix and Tucson fought over it.

The 13th Territorial Legislature met that year and divided up the territory’s institutions. It got nicknamed the Thieving Thirteenth for all the backroom dealing that came out of it.

The asylum carried a $100,000 appropriation. The university carried $25,000 and went to Tucson. The teachers college carried $5,000 and went to Tempe. Yuma kept its prison. Prescott kept the capital.

Tucson wanted the asylum badly. One Arizona historian called it the plum of the legislature’s pie. But Pima County’s legislators got held up by flooding on the way to the capital, deals were cut while they were late, and Phoenix walked away with it.

Before 1887, Arizona had no facility at all. From 1873 on, the territory paid a hospital in Stockton, California to take its patients. When the Phoenix building opened that January, the first 61 patients were sent back from Stockton.

The land was 160 acres with water rights, bought for $3,500, about two and a half miles east of town. The original seal of the place even had Arizona Falls on it.

Here’s the part that matters most. It was the only publicly owned hospital in the whole territory, so it became the place everyone went who had nowhere else. People with mental illness, people with intellectual disabilities, alcoholics, the elderly, people with tuberculosis. Look at the diagnoses in the 1912 annual report and some of them are just the prejudices of the era written down as medicine.

The main building burned in 1911. Everybody got out. They rebuilt by 1913.

At its peak it held around 2,000 people. Then in 1970 the legislature passed a law saying a patient had to be a danger to themselves or others to be held there, and the population dropped to about 300 within a few months.

It’s still open. Arizona State Hospital, 24th Street and Van Buren. The Mahoney Building from the 1913 rebuild is still standing, vacant, inside the grounds.

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#PhoenixHistory #ArizonaHistory #ArizonaStateHospital #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Tags

arizonahistory, phoenixhistory, arizonanews, arizonastatehospital, downinnadesert

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