Historic Babcock Building cupola rises above Columbia skyline
One of the first things travelers see as they enter Columbia is the bright red cupola atop a building on Elmwood Avenue, like an exclamation point. The cupola and the surrounding BullStreet District have a long history in Columbia, dating to 1885, when the final and grandest of three buildings was built as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, later known as the South Carolina State Hospital. In 1969, the asylum building was named for James Woods Babcock, who served as the hospital’s superintendent from 1891 to 1914, according to The State’s history of the structure. The Babcock Building and the surrounding 178 acres grew into a self-contained mental health facility where hundreds of people lived and worked, walled off from the rest of the city. The building housed offices and patients for more than 100 years, until it was vacated in 2003. Though dilapidated, the central, cupola-capped portion of the Babcock was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981 and could not be demolished. The building sat vacant and deteriorating until 2015, when redevelopment of the historic campus into the mixed-use BullStreet District began. Workers had just begun clearing out the Babcock for construction of luxury apartments
