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This old hospital building is part of a complex in north city that now houses a nursing home. Sitting behind and connected to the main building, this building is well-sealed and fairly visible. Yet one warm November day the intrepid Angela and I set out to see what lay inside its commonplace façade. Entering the building proves to be fairly difficult and involves a window on the second floor about seven or eight feet from a step on an odd outdoor staircase (not a fire escape) that runs up to a blocked door on the second floor. We first look at the possibilities of other entrances, like the unlocked damp garden closet under the stairs that turns out to be a dead end. The south wall’s windows and doors are all boarded. Thus the difficult entrance -- in plain sight of several windows from the active buildings of the complex -- is necessary. The reward is a chilly, damp series of mostly bare rooms. The building is much colder than the weather outside, and the visit at first seems uninteresting and inconvenient. There are a few highlights, notably an interior fireproof stairwell -- clean and solid -- that runs between the first floor and the door to the outdoor staircase. There is no way that these two staircases could help anyone in case of fire, unless the first floor exits were blocked necessitating a run upstairs to get out of the building. I suppose that the third and fourth floors are out of luck. Another odd design feature is that the basement corridor connects directly to the active chapel wing of the complex (see image below). The door between the two building opens from the abandoned building’s side; perhaps it is wisely locked from the other? We don’t find out, as entering a nursing home through the abandoned wing seems inadvisable. There aren’t many signs of past use save some dental x-ray machines on the first floor, a few bed remains and wardrobes, and some Catholic Church missals in the mostly-clean attic. The building seems to be a hospital ward given its in-patient rooms with wardrobes and beds. But the building’s small size and the rooms’ fairly large size implies that it may have been a dormitory of some sort for hospital employees. I will have to find out. The use of the building is the only intriguing thing about it until I do some research. Indeed it was a dormitory building built in 1928 for a hospital that has long since moved out of the city.
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