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represented a radical break with the “lunatic hospital” look. After Olmsted landscaped the Hartford Retreat in 1863, director John Butler erected a small horticultural museum on the property and threw open the asylum gates to the public, boasting that
    the drive which gives the public an opportunity of observing these pleasant changes without exposing ourselves to interruption or intrusion, is exerting a happy influence abroad, in making it evident that the externals of a lunatic asylum need not be repulsive, and may lead to the reflection that its inner life is not without its cheerful, homelike aspects.
    Butler summarized the new landscaping program: “Kill out the Lunatic Hospital and develop the home!”
    The Olmsted-Vaux design, as implemented by McLean’s deeppocketed trustees, created some very comfortable living quarters. The Belmont plan called for 160 private patient rooms, a slight decrease from the Somerville census. Twenty of those rooms were private apartments, with parlors, bedchambers, and bathrooms. The first two houses built, Appleton and Upham, sported large, oak-paneled reception rooms with views over the surrounding countryside, intimate dining rooms with large windows, and deep, open fireplaces. The kitchens, the laundries, the heating, and the plumbing and sanitary facilities were the most modern available. The weekly cost of a McLean stay quadrupled, from $5 to $20. Among other comforts, that fee financed a 2:1 patient-to-staff ratio; publicly supported asylums had a 10:1 ratio or worse.
    Indeed, as historian Silvia Sutton notes, for patients who hailed from a certain stratum of Boston society, McLean looked a lot like home:
    If, in the fall of 1895, an innocent wayfarer had trespassed on McLean’s territory in Belmont, he might have believed himself to have strayed into some curious residential development for very affluent people with excessively large families. He would have been astonished to discover that what he was looking at was, in fact, a hospital for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. ... The initial impression, to quote one observer, was of “gentlemen’s country residences irregularly dispersed in a pastoral landscape.”
    How did the patients fare in the move? The brusque change of environment could have been severely destabilizing, but the McLean administration had planned ahead. The Somerville patient count had been drawn down to about 120, partly by freezing admissions and also by discharging chronic cases deemed too unsteady for the change. Closer to the actual date, many of the remaining patients began to worry that they would be paraded through the streets of Somerville and Cambridge, subject to taunts and jeers from onlookers. But the transition was handled with aplomb. During the month of October 1895, small groups of patients were invited to go for carriage rides, a common group recreation. But these carriage rides ended up inside the elegant new grounds in Belmont. “Then, one day,” writes medical historian Grace Whiting Myers, “much to their surprise, they found that they were all in the new McLean; and as for the public, they read about it in the newspapers after it was all over.”

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    The Mayflower Screwballs
    The insane asylum seems to be the goal of every good and conscious Bostonian, babies and insanity the two leading topics. So and so has a baby. She becomes insane and goes to Somerville, baby grows up and promptly retires to Somerville.
    Clover Adams, writing to her father in 1879
     
     
     
    I n modern times, McLean would become famous not only as a therapeutic locus but also as a literary and artistic landscape. Even in increasingly grubby Charlestown, which was starting to attract unsavory factories and slaughterhouses, McLean had its share of what we might now call celebrity patients. Two of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brothers lodged in Charlestown. Robert Bulkeley Emerson was retarded from birth and spent many years in and out of the hospital,