The developer will raze all 14 buildings on the 77-acre Danvers State Insane Asylum site. (John Gray)

Despite years of petitions and protests, a 77-acre hillside Massachusetts state hospital that was abandoned in 1992 is being demolished for a new housing development.

In December, Virginia-based AvalonBay paid $18 million for the state-owned Danvers State Insane Asylum in the Boston suburb of Danvers, Mass., and in January workers started demolishing its 14 historic buildings to make way for 497 condos and apartments.

"We're terribly depressed," says John Archer, a board member of Preservation Danvers, which led the fight to save the hospital. "Generations will look back and say, 'How could that have happened?' It's a disgrace."

Last month, bulldozers and backhoes began demolishing parts of the hospital's signature building: the Kirkbride, a massive Gothic structure completed in 1878.

"We are, as we speak, tearing down one of the greatest buildings in this country," says Archer, who paid $3,200 for the Kirkbride's front doors. "The only thing that I can compare to it is the Hermitage or Buckingham Palace or Versailles."

Part of the Kirkbride will remain, says Allan Jordan, spokesman for AvalonBay. "They're not tearing the whole thing down. It's going to be a centerpiece of the new community." AvalonBay plans to renovate a portion of the Kirkbride Building as a rental office, basketball court, café with wireless Internet access, and 61 loft apartments, Jordan says. "It will be a magnificent builldig when it's done [in 2008]."

So far, AvalonBay has razed a 1906 Male Tuberculosis building, a 1907 Female Tuberculosis building, a 1955 chapel, a 1964 chapel, the 1955 Bonner Medical Building, and a 1927 garage.

In addition to tax revenue from the new condos, the town of Danvers will get $2 million from the sale, to be set aside for education, affordable housing, and historic preservation.

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