The Fernald Center
A public archive, interactive campus map and custom content management system for the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts: the first school in the United States for disabled children, now vacant across its hundred-plus buildings.
The City of Waltham awarded the recordation contract and gave the team access to the entire campus to document the buildings. The website grew out of that work as a personal project, built to bring a place long closed to the public into public view. I designed and developed the whole site, photographed the campus, and researched each building's history from the institution's own annual reports and from state and local archives.
Visit current site ↗- Role
- Design, development, photography and archival research
- Commission
- City of Waltham, building recordation
- Skills
- Core Dev + Photography + Research
- Status
- In development, redesign in progress; previous version live
- Tech stack
- PHP, CodeIgniter, MySQL, Vite, Sass, GSAP, Google Maps
The site
The home page opens full-screen on the campus cupola at dusk, then steps down through history, buildings, collections and a timeline that runs from the school's founding in 1848. A full-screen menu carries a one-line description under every destination, beside a portrait of Dr. Walter E. Fernald from 1885.
Each of the hundred-plus buildings has its own page, pairing history, architecture and metadata with a photo gallery, and an interactive map replays the campus year by year, outlines drawing in as buildings are built and turning red when they are demolished. The public pages are hand-written rather than built on a framework; the site opens dark and keeps a light mode, remembered between visits.
Features
The campus is drawn as SVG over a full-screen aerial map: every building footprint and structural addition is a vector shape layered on the imagery, so they stay sharp at any zoom and can be styled, highlighted and linked to their own pages. An interactive timeline drives the map. Pick a year and the campus redraws to that moment, outlines appearing as buildings are built and additions go up, and disappearing when they are demolished, so you can scrub through the institution's growth and decline in one view.
The interface opens in dark mode and keeps a light mode, each remembered between visits. Because this is a history of disabled people, accessibility is built in rather than bolted on: semantic structure, keyboard navigation and strong contrast in both themes, so the record is usable by the people at its center.
Before and after
For the then-and-now work I started from the historic photographs, found the vantage point each one was taken from, lined up on whatever landmark still stood, a roofline, a window, a chimney, and composited the two together so the old view and the present one share a frame. Each tile below fades between the archival photograph and the same view today.
A short history
Founded in South Boston in 1848 as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, it was the first school of its kind in the United States. In 1890 it opened a campus in Waltham under the direction of Dr. Walter E. Fernald, and over the following decades grew into a self-contained institution where thousands of disabled people lived, worked and died.
Its record runs two ways at once. The school produced genuine advances in education, therapy and medicine that spread well beyond Massachusetts; the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center, based on the Waltham campus, grew into a major hub for research into intellectual and developmental disability, and its Greene Blind Unit taught residents who were also blind to travel independently by white cane. In its later years the place became a central site in the fight for deinstitutionalization, disability civil rights and the self-advocacy movement.
That same ground carries deep harm: eugenics-era practices, documented abuse and neglect, and the Cold War radiation experiments in which boys were fed radioactive isotopes in their breakfast cereal for nutrition studies run with MIT and Harvard, without anything resembling informed consent. It was here, too, that Fred Kaplan made some of the photographs for Christmas in Purgatory (1966), the Blatt and Kaplan exposé that helped turn the country against the whole system. Monsters worked here. So did people who gave their whole lives to residents the rest of the world had written off. The place holds both at once. The campus closed in stages and now stands empty, its buildings left to the weather while the city decides what comes next.
Walked end to end, the campus reads as a record in brick and stone. More than a century of changing ideas about how to house disabled people, laid out building by building. The earliest cottages were built on a domestic scale, meant to resemble a home and a family. Later wards grew into long, repetitive blocks, built for custody and efficiency, scaled to the population rather than the person. The final additions went up in an era already turning toward community care. Each shift in plan, scale and material marks a shift in what the people running it believed the residents were, and what they thought those residents were owed.
The Fernald campus consists of over a hundred buildings spread across its wooded grounds in Waltham, from 1840s cottages to additions raised in the 1980s. The map above labels each one with its name and year of construction; open it full-size to read the labels and take in the scale of the place.
The photographs
The contemporary photographs on the site were made during the recordation of the campus: an exhaustive effort to document every building, from collapsing upper floors to the nightmarish tunnels and basements running beneath them, and the dark secrets left behind in their rooms. As the recordation went on we kept turning up what the institution had abandoned: forgotten campus maps, intimate patient records, evidence discarded by the Massachusetts State Police, brain-slice slides from the morgue. We crossed paths with ghost-hunting trespassers, and stood witness to devastating fires, vandalism and, in the end, demolition. The photographs below are a selection of my own, taken over various years.
