Sublunar Photography

Depaul Hospital was constructed in 1928 and opened in 1930. It was run by the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent DePaul until 1977 at which point it became North St. Louis General Hospital. The new hospital only operated out of the first and second floor and only until 1978 when it closed down. It remained vacant until 1984 when Tower Village, Inc. began running a nursing home here. Eventually, Tower Village became Northview Village and it had been a nursing home for the past several decades until it was abruptly shut down permanently on December 15, 2023.

Click here for the video.

This (re)visit was a long time coming. I first learned of this site back in the early days. In fact, my profile photo was a candid photo my comrade had taken of me at the entrance to the basement of this facility back in 2008. I was lurking at the doorway carefully listening to the sounds of the basement as we searched for any remnants of a morgue beneath this former hospital/active nursing home. In the last photos in the above linked blog post, there's a door covered in spiderwebs and dust in what is an obviously abandoned room. The next photo is a view through the window of a clean hallway inside an active medical facility. It would seem perfectly normal if we weren't observing it through the decades of dust and spiderwebs which had accumulated inside of a long abandoned wing of the same facility. I imagine anyone on the active side of this door would have felt rather uneasy about the view this window offered them since for them it was a haunting portal of darkness and decay staring back at them from the end of a long and lonely hallway and who knows what weirdos might be lurking on the other side of it at any given time..

Having been aware of this hospital's status as a nursing home for the past couple decades, I assumed that if I ever did get to explore it, it was going to be fairly boring inside because there would likely be no operating rooms or morgue, etc. But even back in 2008 you could tell the upper floors were obviously disused and I always wanted to see what was up there. So the time finally came and after 17 years, we returned to the site and made it happen.

For the most part it was exactly what I expected it to be. The chapel, however, is incredible and features ornate tile and stained glass among other details which I wasn't expecting. But the entire rest of the place is, well, a bombed out shithole/death trap (hence why I'm not concealing the site's real name). Each floor is the same repetitive series of hallways and filthy bedrooms most of which have been gutted and trashed.

Multiple fires have been started directly on the floor throughout the building. I'm not sure if they were put out intentionally or if they simply burned out harmlessly but either way this place is quite fucked and I doubt it's going to get any better under the current circumstances. Not only is the structure itself a truly unfortunate waste of good architecture and medical infrastructure, but there seems to have been a lot of equipment (hospital beds, mostly) which could have been donated to other similar institutions which are instead just being destroyed. Among the waste, we found a room nearly full of boxes of sealed N95 masks.

I've been exploring abandoned locations for a long time now and it still amazes me how selfish, careless and wasteful the 'ruling class' are. This is a massive structure which had previously won awards and various acclaim for its incredible architecture and modern/efficient design, yet the persons who were last responsible for it appear to have simply discarded it, walked away and let it become the city's problem. On top of that, these assholes (allegedly) shut the place down suddenly without warning, didn't pay out wages and caused their sick/elderly residents to be immediately re-housed elsewhere without prior notice and without proper medical records. The former residents and employees as well as the historic DePaul Hospital, not to mention the community and the city itself deserved a better outcome than this.

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