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The historic Williams Building façade, a remnant of the South Carolina State Hospital campus, stands between apartments and an office building at Columbia’s BullStreet District. Restored and new buildings for apartments, retail and offices have brought a bright future to BullStreet.
Photo by Robb McCarter, courtesy of BullStreet District
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Spartan patient dorms at the South Carolina State Hospital, pictured in 1957, have given way to luxury apartments on the historic campus.
Photo from The State Media Co. archives, courtesy of Richland Library
“We’ll send you to Bull Street.”
Any South Carolinian in the 20th century probably knew what that statement meant. A friend makes an unbelievable claim? Tell her where she belongs. A 10-year-old throws a tantrum? Warn him about Bull Street.
It was a colloquialism for years, a threat that acting out of line might result in a stay at the South Carolina State Hospital on Columbia’s Bull Street, one of the capital city’s main thoroughfares. But the joking statement belied the seriousness—even cruelty, in many cases—of the true experiences at Bull Street, where, for decades, people with mental illnesses and disabilities were housed and treated.
Today, going to Bull Street holds a vastly different meaning. The former mental hospital campus has transformed into a bustling downtown city district where residents live in high-end apartments and townhomes, a minor league baseball team draws crowds and revelry, and locals enjoy strolling, shopping, eating and drinking.
How does a place take such a drastic turn? It’s a long story—about 200 years long, in fact.
The campus first opened in 1828 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, one of the first state-run mental hospitals in the United States. Throughout the 19th century, people who were considered mentally unwell for a wide range of reasons were sent there for care, often unwillingly. The campus even briefly served as a Civil War prisoner-of-war camp. At its peak, the hospital was nearly a city within itself, with doctors and staff living on campus with their families. Over time, many of the staples of any town, including a chapel and a library, were added.
As mental health care shifted away from the archaic practices of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with many of those practices now recognized as abusive and inhumane, the hospital began to decline, expedited by the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and ’70s. By the 1990s, few patients were being treated at the campus. And in 2003, the state officially closed the hospital.
A new kind of Bull Street
The old hospital village sat largely dormant until 2013, when Columbia officials inked an agreement with Hughes Development Corp.—respected as the architect of Greenville’s bustling Main Street area—to revitalize the 181-acre campus into a vibrant downtown neighborhood. More than a decade later, the BullStreet District, as it’s now known, is unrecognizable compared to when the project began.
Today, crowds swarm a new outdoor food hall, residents walk their dogs, shoppers peruse outdoor gear at a massive REI store, a drive-thru line snakes around a Starbucks, and beers are flowing at a brewery next door.
At the center of it all, BullStreet is anchored by a notable juxtaposition of new and old: The award-winning Segra Park baseball stadium, home of the Columbia Fireflies, sits beside the historic Babcock Building, once home to patients and now boasting more than 200 luxury apartments that rent for up to $1,900 a month.
Several historic buildings have been preserved and repurposed. For instance, the old bakery now houses a coworking space; the former power plant is an event venue; and the striking facade of the Williams Building, a former dorm for drug and alcohol patients, stands between a new office building and an apartment building. But many historic structures and trees were sacrificed in the name of redevelopment. Even the Babcock Building’s historic cupola was lost to a fire in 2020, but a replica was constructed and now towers above the district’s tree line.
Nearly 200 years after it first opened, Bull Street still holds memories of its complicated past while focusing on its bright future. On the horizon, perhaps the most fitting addition to the campus is under construction today: A new medical school for the University of South Carolina, expected to open in 2027.
If you’d like to know or share the backstory of some part of our state, submit your idea online at SCLiving.coop/sc-backstory.