by Michael R. Allen

[See photos of the infirmary]

I first noticed the Saint Mary’s Infirmary Building on Papin Street in 1995 when I was in the midst of frequent trips to photograph the nearby City Hospital. When I saw the intriguing, if somewhat boring, six-story red-brick building, I had no idea what it was. I barely noticed the newer addition, and never would have guessed what the buildings used to be. Given that it sat in the middle of Union Electric’s flat parking lots and one-story maintenance buildings, I assumed that the building was some former institutional building that the power company neglectfully used for storage, or simply held onto for future demolition. Like many buildings on the near south side of downtown, Saint Mary’s is isolated from buildings of comparable age.

Amid the housing projects, industrial yards, and corporate campuses of this area, the City Hospital, Saint Mary’s and the former Eden Publishing Company buildings all stood out as antiquated survivors that were almost gone save to the few historians and scavengers who paid attention to them. In 1995, a downtown housing boom seemed a far-fetched idea. These buildings were surely going to stand crumbling until demolition, I assumed. Demolition didn’t seem far-fetched or far off; I thought that all three buildings would be gone in ten years.

Sensing a particular urgency for documenting City Hospital, I ignored the other two complexes except for curious glances when I would pass by on my way to and from the hospital buildings. Then, gradually, a plan to renovate City Hospital became reality and by late 2002 I had turned my documentary attention elsewhere. Not surprising, Saint Mary’s is one place that now occupies much of my attention.

My first visit inside

My friend and I first arrive at the buildings in late afternoon on June 27, 2003, when the streets around Saint Mary’s (about which I know almost nothing at this point) are almost empty save downtown commuters cutting through to their drives home via I-55 and I-44. I had been here earlier, looking for a way inside that would be easy and escape attention. This time, success: We enter through a ground floor window, which I notice soon after the moment we begin seeking a way inside. Without knowing much history, I am already exploring the interior of the place -- a strange inversion of my City Hospital experiences, but seeming natural these days. The building is chillingly silent, but also more shabby than abandoned in appearance. Conceivably, this place could still be partly in use for something that no one cares about.

What an odd thought, that something still might happen here. More on that later.

I had heard that this was a school, St. Mary's by name, of course. After we dart into the window, hidden slightly by a bush and a strip of barbed wire that tops a missing fence section, we see that this is an unlikely possibility. The rooms are small, the furnishings suggest housing for some group of people removed from normal society -- just like this building today, almost a specter itself.

But what exactly was Saint Mary's? A hospital, a nursing home, something else? Today, I guess a nursing home, but Angela thinks that it was a hospital. Later, we see that we both are right. Evidently no record remains inside, not even a scrap of paper under a pile of old wheelchairs. I’m not really looking for any on this first visit, but am instead trying to experience the space of the building as living space while, like Angela, taking photographs. What does it feel like to be inside this building for a few hours?

Sometimes, I feel a breeze on my bare arm. Occasionally, I smell dust, old paper, and the unmistakable scent of decaying plaster and paint mixing with smells of pigeons, sweat & a far-off damp odor that must come from the lowest level. There are old beds, rusting away in the building's air (which is remarkably cool). I think about laying in one. What was once here? Certainly, gloomy lives. I cannot imagine Saint Mary’s being anything other than old and dusty. The City Hospital seemed to be similarly aged from birth. with endless corridors of exposed pipes and dirty windows. Institutions resemble each other through repetition of details rather than particulars. During an institutional building’s life, neglect is often the repeated detail that completes the pattern that one sees. Abandonment only directly reveals that pattern which is a sad contradiction during the normal use of a place. Here are dozens of small crumbling rooms, each with one bed and a dresser. There are "x-ray" rooms, marked as such by an old plastic sign; there's a security desk on the ground floor with a television on its counter. Nothing moves, no one is around, except us. When this place was in use, it probably was not much different.

Unlike other places where there is a single entrance, and hence a single exit, I don't get apprehensive here. I can't imagine anyone coming inside here while we are here. For one thing, entry is difficult to locate. For another, there is a ghost light on the first floor, glowing constantly although no other electrical fixtures in the building work. And the graffiti is sparse, as is human-inflicted damage. Perhaps our window has only been broken for a short time; but, wait, there are heavy cobwebs covering the broken pieces of glass in the sill. Perhaps no one wants to visit this building. Perhaps there’s a good reason not to.

The various floors with the repeated main hall / side hall floorplan add up to an oddly compelling building, one which seems to ask habitation rather than casual exploration. St. Mary's seems to ask for one's constant presence, perhaps because the place is so quiet and so unexplored. Given that Angela and I return less than a week later, perhaps there is some demand the place makes on all who enter -- a demand that many sense and do not accept, going elsewhere instead. The building is indeed intriguing in a low-key way. Almost all of the fixtures remain, so there is a dull repetition as one sees room after room of a standard bed and dresser. But some details change: occasional personal effects, strange furniture, medical tools, the old hospital-like rooms, decay that increases as one gets to the upper two stories under the porous old roof.

We go bottom to top, room by room, a methodical approach that suits St. Mary's well. The whole building makes the details significant, and thus total exploration and intimacy through repeated visits makes sense. The only place we don't explore is that old roof, which one begins seeing on the fifth floor in piles of black tarry dirt that have fallen through the splintery remains of the sixth floor, which is wooden in the main section of the old building and concrete in the small east wing.

We also don't explore a large, five-story addition to the building's west, which is obviously part of the complex but newer and usable in appearance. The addition is marked “MO Drug and Alcohol Rehab Center” with sticker letters. But is it used? We cannot find a way over to the building. We look in vain for basement stairs, and then realize that the ground level is the basement due to the lot's slope. We find a dusky passage to an addition housing a kitchen and, up a set of steps we first think go to the addition, a small apartment that contains some papers relating to a prison inmate. One letter asks for another prisoner's address upon release from prison. Odd, these being here. Wasn't there a halfway house near downtown? I begin to remember some details, but am sure of nothing.

When we leave, we walk around the building and see an open door into the newer building next door. We don’t go in right then, but we think about it. We also notice that the building across the alley, a two-story building with a smokestack, seems to be part of the complex. Crude, marker-scrawled lettering on the whitewashed, sealed doors of the two-story building as well as on the half-open door that warns that a man with a gun lives inside.

The front door of the large addition also carries warnings: a light that’s on, a “beware of dog” sign, a not-overgrown lawn with a blooming rose bush, and the appearance of a place that is used but unkempt. But what goes on there?

[Dream, Saturday, June 28, 2003]

I enter Saint Mary’s with my friend Angela. Everything is right where it should be; the floorplan corresponds to the place in real life. We hear voices upstairs. I get nervous and want to leave. We leave. Once outside, we see through the window a group of young people on the fourth floor breaking things, yelling and drinking.

The life of this small hospital (nursing home, detox center, halfway house, etc.)

Saint Mary's has had an institutional history that is decidedly varied. The Sisters of Saint Mary -- known as the Franciscan Sisters of Mary since 1987 -- began seeking locations for a small hospital in 1872. In 1877, they purchased a former mansion at 1536 Papin Street for $16,000.000 to house their new operation, named Saint Mary's Infirmary. The mansion was the home of Felix Coste, although its most famous former owner was Carl Schurz, at times US Senator from Missouri and Secretary of the Interior. In 1889, the Sisters built a five-story red-brick hospital building, designed in the Italianate style, next to the mansion to house the growing hospital. This building is the center portion of the existing complex. Expansion plans that called for two "L"-shaped wing additions to the center building were only partially realized. An 1896 addition to the west was in keeping with the plan, but an eventual eastern addition in 1906 deviated from the plan by adding a square Georgian Revival style wing that bore little resemblance to the center building. All three structures are connected and have functioned as one building.

The appearance of these buildings suggests proportional symmetry with the center building’s entrance and large arched stairway windows falling in the center of the combined unit. Yet careful inspection shows that the 1906 addition jars architecturally with the older buildings. The two older buildings have tall, narrow windows and their combined facade is articulated in brick through raised divisions and courses between bays and storeys. Their design is simple and lacks an abundance of limestone or terra cotta ornamentation; some decorative courses, sills and the like appear. The 1906 addition has a smooth main facade with large two-over-two windows and a decorative terra cotta cornice that is far too ornate to match the rest of the combined unit. To the west of the combined unit sits a one-story kitchen building that sits in front of a small two-story building; both were likely built in the 1890's. Internal hallways connect these to the rest of the complex. While the 1889 and 1896 buildings are of timber and masonry construction, the 1906 wing was completed with steel girders and reinforced concrete floorplates. All have maintained structural integrity over the years.

The Infirmary operated on Papin Street successfully for several years, admitting largely indigent people for care. In 1924, the Sisters moved their hospital to a new building on Clayton Road and loaned the Saint Mary’s Infirmary over to Saint Louis University for a teaching hospital that stayed open until 1933. In 1933, the Sisters either opened the buildings to a "hospital for negroes" that operated until 1966. During this period, the large modern addition was built in 1954 as a nurses’ school and dormitory. On October 1966, this incarnation of the hospital discharged its last patient. The Sisters of Saint Mary, however, would continue to reside in the dormitory building until 1974. The building was out of use for only a few days, though: From November 1966 until November 1968, the Saint Louis Police Department operated a detoxification center for prisoners on one floor of the oldest building.

On January 15, 1974, Samuel J. and Lela Scauzzo purchased all of the St. Mary's Infirmary buildings from the Sisters of St. Mary for $150,000. In the buildings, the Scauzzos opened a home for the aged called “Saint Mary’s Retirement Home” or "Saint Mary’s Manor."

The history becomes sketchy at this point, and not simply because the new owners of the buildings, Samuel J. and Lela Scauzzo, resorted to a strange, unsuccessful property tax arrangement involving a Ugandan bishop and accepted elderly people who required nursing care without a state nursing home license. Records are unclear as to which buildings were actually used during this period, although I am almost certain that both the older building and wing and the newer addition were both in use at least for awhile as the home for the elderly. When the home was forced to shut down by the state in 1979, the state also decided to lease the building for a “correctional honor center” or halfway house. Thus, the state basically handed a guaranteed income to the tax-evading owners.

The problem is dating the use of the buildings after 1979. Clearly, the newer addition and cafeteria remained in use until the Saint Mary’s Honor Center moved to a new building on the north riverfront in 1994. But what about the older building? Most articles, the State Department of Corrections and the Southwestern Bell phone directory use the address of the newer building as the address of the Honor Center between 1979-1994. Almost every clue indicates that the state never used the older building; a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article from 1990 states that the owners tried to donate the older building to the state, but it was not interested in using it for housing the honorable inmates it kept at the newer building.

Another question emerges, one that has a troubling implication for exploration: did the state completely cease use of the addition? No article mentions a full closure, just the move of inmates to the new facility. One thing is certain, though: the neighborhood around the hospital changed forever in the 1960's and 1970's. Widespread demolition on behalf of the Union Electric Company took down most surrounding businesses and homes, including a village-style 19th-century group of small Greek Revival homes, and left the areas looking desolate and, finally, suburban. Now St. Mary's is surrounded by various parking lots and low, one-story storage and repair shop buildings belonging to AmerenUE, the successor to Union Electric. The gleaming headquarters of AmerenUE is visible across a gravel parking lot between 18th and Grattan Streets, putting the vacant building and the new low-rise in close visual proximity. Fifty years ago, scores of shops and houses would have separated the two locations. Now, all that is left between is a lone surviving neighborhood leather company and the temporary parking lots of a utility giant. South of Choteau, behind the hospital, is the Clinton-Peabody housing project, currently receiving a vinyl-sided facelift.

Even stranger, the new Truman Parkway runs directly to the Infirmary, further decontextualizing the buildings. Starting at Lafayette and running north on what was once Grattan Street, the ethereal four-lane controlled-access parkway ends abruptly at Choteau; straight ahead is the hospital’s 1940’s-era service building and the hospital building itself behind it. Yet this strange disruption of neighborhood does nothing to accentuate the presence of the building. Somehow, the infirmary still seems imbedded in its place and the lack of context clues only further obscures its history.

Another visit

Immediately after leaving the library where we do our research later in June, we plan a brief return trip this time. There really seems to be no point to a return visit except a growing curiosity, which for my part stems from the dream. First, though, we try to enter that 1954 addition. The door is wide open and opens onto a small room containing a few electrical meters, some old office furniture. There is a door at the back of the room. I try it. It’s sealed shut. There is no knob, no way to open it without a crowbar. There are limits to my exploration of any place: no forced entries being foremost. A strange detail emerges in this room: the electrical meters are the newer digital kind, and they are working, recording the building’s electricity us in progress! We leave and walk around to the front of the old building. Our entrance is still safe and we enter again. This time, we spend some time looking around the first few floors; I don’t know how far we get. It’s very hot inside this time. We notice a lit, circular halogen light in a third-floor window of the addition. Another security light, or a light used by someone who is in that room right at this moment?

When we leave, we notice that the front door of the addition is open. Furthermore, a man is sitting in a chair on the front step, staring at us as we drive away. We drive back in a half-hour, and the door is closed.

[Dream, July 3, 2003]

I am walking away from Saint Mary's, probably alone, crossing Papin Street, after having just been inside. A rock hits me in the shoulder. I turn around and instantly look at an open window from which I know the rock has been thrown. I can’t see anyone standing near that window, but I am convinced that someone was in the building, hiding while I explored, and then threw the rock at me. I wake up scared.

The man on the dock

I embark upon another trip to Saint Mary's on July 6, 2003, despite the good sense of being watched that my dream brings. We first walk down the alley and peak at the back of the addition. As we talk of the buildings, Angela notices a man sitting on the rear dock of the two-story service building. I don’t look at him, but note that we pass within five feet of him. He doesn’t say anything, and only later do his eyes meet mine when I look out from a fourth-floor south window and notice that he's still sitting there. He’s not the man who was sitting on the chair the other day, though. He’s likely just a homeless person seeking the shade of a covered, abandoned dock on this awfully hot day.

We thoroughly explore the old building again, but do not attempt to find any passages to the addition. I would not even want to try at this point, or so I tell myself. Actually, thinking about finding such a passage gives me a thrilling pain -- one too powerful to face, though. I don’t even want to go to the kitchen this time. Nonetheless, I enjoy this visit especially as the sun sets and the building’s windows let in a lovely orange-yellow light that fades to pink. This time, I do go scrambling around the unstable sixth floor alone, while Angela works with her camera sitting on the large, iron staircase that dominates the building. I find nothing terribly interesting, except that in some places there really is no roof at all, and in others, not much wall left, either. I get a bit lost, but feel no anxiety even though this is the most remote, most dangerous part of the building to be in. We don't go on the roof because it is too light out. We take photographs and notice new things about the building. I find a few pieces of mail in an old trash can, including a Socialist Party presidential pamphlet, all dating from 1988. Odd.

I notice that the second and third floor halls of the addition appear to be lit by electric light. Looking in the addition from the western windows of the old building -- the two are maybe 150 feet apart, with the kitchen building in between -- I see that the open doors of the dark rooms on those floors of the addition frame a bright hallway. No figures are apparent, though, and we don’t hear any noises definitely coming from that building. Once, when we go into a second-floor closet to photograph a pristine old-style wheelchair, I hear a strange slamming sound and get nervous. But I don’t hear any other sounds after it except the constant fluttering of pigeons, which no longer even startle me in old buildings. I just think back to my second dream, but quickly dispel the thought; such a fear is counterproductive and actually might cause more trouble for me than it causes me to avoid once inside.

When we leave out the first-floor window, a man soon emerges from the east side of the building. I briefly notice him standing and staring at us, and do not think he is the same man we saw in the alley. We walk away from him, turn the corner and continue walking. I don't see whether he turns the corner with us. As we walk past the gate in front of the addition, we notice that it’s open, but the door is closed and no interior lights other than the halogen light are on.

The old infirmary viewed from the lofts

Late in July 2003 I stand on the rooftop of the ArtLoft Building on Washington Avenue in the hot summer sun. My friend Joe, who lives in the building, and I talk about an article that he read about the supposed earnestness of young people today. We are all eager to do things, get work started but, unfortunately, we often are so eager that we make promises that we cannot keep. We are supposed to be unstable, preferring the flash of quick success to the quiet effort required for a long-term project. Our architectural equivalent may be the brick-veneer condo lofts that are being built all over Chicago and just creeping into Saint Louis. Few young people would thus be likely to see their embodiment in a building like Saint Mary’s Infirmary, although I confess to aspire to such purposeful elegance.

To the south, between downtown and the remaining buildings of the City Hospital, stands the old Saint Mary's Infirmary, looking something other than abandoned today. To the stranger, it seems like a shabby, underused building awaiting the generous renovations that developers have given buildings on Washington. Joe says that he has not ever noticed the building at all. Saint Mary's brick is the right color for escaping detection in Saint Louis -- a solid, wall-like red featuring no different-colored details. The windows are trimmed in a sturdy white. Amid the new downtown splendor of viridian green and tangerine trim and lights embedded in the street, few people glance at Saint Mary’s and fewer still remember what they see.