When Faye Allen Belt steps onto the grounds of Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park outside Annapolis, Maryland, she is home. In 1961, when she was a child, her family moved within walking distance of this once-segregated state hospital - originally known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. Many in the local community had viewed it suspiciously, threatening misbehaving kids with "You'll end up in Crownsville." But for her, the tight-knit community, which at its peak housed 5,000 patients and staff, and the hundreds of wooded acres of the hospital campus were an idyll. Her mother worked as a nursing aide there, and her family maintained a large garden and a welcoming home. Her mother would bring homemade food to the wards, and Belt would often return from school to patients hanging out in in her living room. "Because of my mother, I was never afraid to be around a person with mental illness," Belt says. In 1972, when she was 18, she, too, started working at Crownsville and stayed for decades.
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