Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park: Honoring the Past, Healing the Present, Imagining the Future

Abstract

This capstone thesis focuses on the efforts of Maryland’s Anne Arundel County to transform the former Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland, a former psychiatric hospital with a history of racial segregation and maltreatment of patients, into the Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park, a place of healing, education, and reparative justice, while honoring the lives of the people who lived and worked there. The County now owns the 565-acre site of the abandoned psychiatric hospital and its grounds. The County government undertook a civic planning process to develop a master plan for the site. This transition project is expected to be a multi-generational undertaking. Following several rounds of workshops, town halls and opportunities for the citizenry to comment, the County Executive released the Final Master Plan for Crownsville Hospital Memorial Plan on February 12, 2025.

I live in Anne Arundel County. I am witnessing and participating in the process of planning for the transformation of this site. Through qualitative research using scholarly literature and other sources, as well as ethnographic techniques, including participant observation and interviews, I will document this community’s place-making process, compare it with the work of other communities with historically controversial properties, and describe a path toward reconciliation that can be a model for other communities addressing similar challenges.