I think it was used to store the ingredients for the beer. Like hops and yeast
A quick translation.
"Naar" means to.
Open & dicht means open & close. "Omschakeling silo", switch between silo's.
At least if my English is any good.
This building was actually built in 1904. It is one of the original buildings, along with the Administration building and Awl, which is a carbon copy of this one to the right of Administration. Awl was for females, although there were no bars on the windows like there were here.
I'll say this about Utopia...they do want to preserve the oldest buildings (this one, the main administration, Awl (which is a mirror image of salmon) and a couple more. While the thought of an amusment park seems unbelievable - especially since there is a separate jewish cemetary that runs onto the camps - i hope something does happen so these buildings won't decay any further.
There is a very good chance that this is some kind of bakery piece, because they did bake their own bread at the hospital (which from what I hear was better than any other bakery in town) and they did have a farm, up until the 1950s.
Indeed, that is the Conn. State seal and the three-word motto is the state saying (is that the word?)
Something else, which NSH employees may remember...the two oak trees are also symbolic in that there is a gigantic oak tree on the campus...kind of hidden, it's not on the main campus...that was well-known on the campus. The former superintendent, Garrell Mullaney (now CEO of Conn. Valley Hospital in Middletown) would give ceramic tiles of this tree to employees when they reached like 10-, 20- or 30-year milestones with the hospital.
as i posted on another page, my relative was a nursing supervisor and worked for a time in this building. She said there were guards at almost every entrance, and she carried about 75 keys with her...one for every mesh door. You had to open one, lock it behind you, walk to the next, open it, lock it, continue. When she dispensed meds, a security guard had to be with her at all times.
If there were visitors, they had to speak through the mesh. No physical contact whatsoever.
I had an relative who was a nursing supervisor at norwich for 30 years years.
Salmon was for the criminally insane. Every window on the outside has cast iron bars in front of them. This building was used until 1972, when patients were transferred to Whiting Forensic at Connecticut Valley Hospital (which is still open today). Like most, it was just emptied after the patients moved and left in the same condition it is today.
She said heavy, four-inch thick oak doors were in this building. One time, she was walking past a room and heard a "zzzzzzip" go past her. One of the patients had made a makeshift shooter and fired some kind of metal that went through the door!